Star Wars Zero Company hands-on preview – XCOM fights the Clone Wars

A strategy far, far away (EA)

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.

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 own money to the Hutts.

A turn-based galaxy (EA)

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.

Zero Company is clearly doing everything it can to appeal to a mainstream audience, with excellent presentation and a genuinely fun script, by one of the writers of the Star Wars Jedi series. It is a tactics game though and that can be off-putting to some people, especially as it’s not something that naturally looks exciting in trailers or screenshots.

It’s far less daunting than newcomers may think though as at a basic level the controls are no more complicated than pointing where you want a character to go and who you want them to shoot. Each has a limited number of action points that generally only allow them to move a short distance each turn and shoot once, although different characters vary greatly depending on their own innate abilities and the weapons they’re using.

So if you’ve got a blaster pistol you can often get off three rounds in one turn, while if you’ve got a heavier weapon using it automatically ends the turn once you fire it. Each character class (you can recruit scripted characters or randomly generated nobodies) also has unique abilities, ranging from a rocket launcher to the ability to give someone else an extra action point.

Clone warfare (EA)

Everyone can also set their character to *overwatch* mode too, which is a familiar concept in tactics games (even Mario + Rabbids has it) but handled differently here, as you’re able to set a vision cone that depending on its size and shape makes the chance of hitting an enemy, that moves in front of you during their turn, 100% or much lower.

That’s as complex as the game gets though, as there’s no fog of war effect – you can see everyone at all times – and you don’t have to worry about what way your character is facing. Permadeath is a thing but they have to be injured twice first, so you have to be doing very badly for anyone to actually die – at which point you’d probably just restart that mission anyway.

What you do have to worry about though is the very competent AI and the fact that the Coil’s magic abilities means that when you kill one it makes the one nearest to them more powerful.

In story terms we have no idea what’s going on but their ‘resonance’ effect sees remaining enemies getting boosted with extra power or even being able to turn invisible, so when you’re deciding what to do you not only have to worry about genre basics like staying in cover but also what happens if you take out a Coil enemy and make the one next to you even more powerful as a result.

Ensuring characters are covering each other is therefore vital, with several mechanics allowing teammates to automatically fire at the same target. Working together also earns points which can improve their stats, so lone wolves never get far.

As well as an ex-clone trooper and a new alien invented just for the game, your team can also include astromechs (the same type of droid as R2-D2) which don’t carry guns but can shoot grenades and are excellent support units with smoke grenades, scanners, and the ability to hand out extra action points like sweeties.

And then there’s also the Jedi. Although there were plenty around during the Clone Wars your status as a mercenary group mean you don’t run into many. However, you do recruit one who is also investigating the Coil and it’s impressive how different she is to the other characters, as you select different Force powers to use, via her loadout, instead of the usual gunsights or special ammo.

She’s far from all powerful though and while she’s an endearing character we were at first disappointed that her lightsaber moves aren’t an instant kill, even against lowly grunts. However, that is contrasted with the last level we were able to play in our preview, which involved Anakin Skywalker temporarily joining your team and cutting through enemies like butter, flinging out his lightsaber to take down multiple opponents at once.

The difference between the two is clearly deliberate and the whole end sequence, involving the Coil setting bombs to blow up a Bespin gas facility, while a HMP droid gunship hovers about, raining down missiles on you, is an impressive spectacle and extremely tense.

Every aspect of the game seemed to work perfectly and while it doesn’t seem to have quite the same level of freeform, sandbox gameplay as XCOM the greater focus on storytelling and more cinematic presentation is a useful new avenue to explore, with positive and negative lessons learned from Midnight Suns.

While the current state of the cinematic and TV output of Star Wars seems to offer little hope, the franchise is clearly flourishing in terms of video games. The experience of the developers involved always made this one to watch but now that we’ve played it, Zero Company seems destined to be yet another 2026 title heading for game of the year consideration.

Formats: PC (previewed), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S
Price: £49.99
Publisher: EA 
Developer: Bit Reactor and Respawn Entertainment
Release Date: 27th August 2026 
Age Rating: 16

The best kind of XCOM clone (EA)

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