The Force is with veterans of the XCOM franchise and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, who’ve created a very impressive new Star Wars strategy game.
It’s not an easy life being a fan of either XCOM or Star Wars. The latter is such a vexed issue that there’s not nearly enough space to get into it here. Suffice to say that, following the end of Andor, the series is in a severe creative and commercial slump that has lead to The Mandalorian and Grogu – the first new movie in seven years – not even making the list of the top 10 highest grossing films of the year.
The only part of the franchise that is in anyway healthy is Lucasfilm Gaming, which has done a remarkably good job since its resurrection in 2021. Initially EA had exclusive use of the Star Wars licence but it’s since been broadening out with games such as Ubisoft’s underrated Outlaws and the upcoming, and very promising, Galactic Racer.
In most cases, Lucasfilm has sought out studios that are renowned for specific genres and while we’ll have an interview for you at a later date, explaining in detail how developer Bit Developer became involved, the short answer is that they’re primarily formed by ex-Firaxis staff that worked on the peerless XCOM series.
The problem with XCOM is not one of quality – we regard the sequel as one of the best video games ever made – but it’s never been a massive seller and after the failure of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Firaxis suffered layoffs and the chances of an XCOM 3 happening quickly melted away.
That’s very unfortunate but while Zero Company is by no means an unofficial sequel it does appear to be an almost equally good turn-based strategy game, and the best chance the genre has ever had of going mainstream. We’ve played around 15 hours of the final version of the game and it’s been some of the most fun we’ve had with a title all year – and although we can’t speak from personal experience we’re pretty sure that’s true even if you’re not a Star Wars fan.
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The set-up here is fairly straightforward in principle, although not necessarily what you’d expect if you imagine a tactics-based strategy game based in the galaxy far, far away. It’s set during the tail end of the Clone Wars (so sometime between Episode II and III) and puts you in command of a mercenary group whose finances are less than healthy, since apart from anything they owe money to the Hutts.
You play as the fully customisable boss of the outfit who lucks into a government contract with the Republic, to run clandestine missions and latterly to investigate a mysterious cult called the Coil, who are an entirely new faction with strange abilities that we assume are in some way connected to the Force.
The Coil is trying to simultaneously infect people with a virus, spread by some nasty scorpion-like insects, and invade planets using the droid army of the Separatists. Or at least we think that’s going on, since we haven’t finished the game yet, but it presents you with three very different enemy factions: the droids, the Coil, and whatever random mercenaries you upset when doing more minor missions to pay the bills.
Although the tactical level combat is reminiscent of XCOM the meta level strategy back at your base has more in common with Midnight Suns, in that you’re able to wander around in a third person view, chatting to your employees and organising things like weapon loadouts, skill tree customisation, recruitment, medical care, and base upgrades.
The latter involves simply choosing from a list of possibilities, limited by your current level, but while there’s not technically any R&D, as there was in XCOM, you can also upgrade weapons and other abilities, and have to choose between that and things like expanding the number of beds in your medbay.
All this works well and thankfully the chatting with teammates doesn’t give in to the bloat of Midnight Suns, where you could spend longer making small talk than fighting. Here it’s more reminiscent of Mass Effect, with shorter, better written, conversations that can sometimes lead to optional side quests. It also helps that the characters are a generally likeable lot and we particularly enjoyed the sassy medical droid, your deeply sarcastic Separatist-leaning CFO, and the Rodian engineer that was raised by droids.
Although there’s no ticking clock, as in XCOM, some story missions do have to be completed at a certain time but otherwise you’re free to take any contract you want, including one category that doesn’t involve combat but does often require you to assign operatives and make moral decisions, which affect your rewards.
Once you get into battle you’re confronted with a familiar isometric viewpoint, although the graphics are far better than XCOM or any similar game. In fact, for the story missions there’s often a third person prelude where you get to explore the environment and interact with people and look for secrets, which sets the scene for various dingy looking backwater planets very well.
