I'm late, but I finished it. My analysis of the title

I had intended to play The Blood of Dawnwalker, which was among the games I had scheduled for the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, mainly because the people behind its development have worked on The Witcher, and that, for me, is reason enough on its own to want to see what they have prepared. In the end, though, STAR WARS Zero Company got in the way since it was released first and completely changed the order of things, as an isometric tactical game set in the Star Wars universe, made moreover by people directly connected to XCOM, was a combination I could hardly ignore.

XCOM is one of those games that I don't just consider a favorite, but a part of my personal history with gaming, as over the years I have returned many times to that specific logic and feeling that a good tactical game creates, where every decision carries weight and a seemingly small wrong move can force you to change your entire plan. Cover, positioning, character management, choosing when to take risks and when to play more conservatively are elements that always win me over, so when I saw that Bit Reactor, a studio formed by people with significant experience at Firaxis and on XCOM, was attempting to bring this philosophy to Star Wars, I knew that sooner or later I would have to check it out.

The interesting thing is that, while I started playing believing I would take a brief detour before finally starting Dawnwalker, Zero Company ultimately took me almost a month to reach the end credits—something that is not due so much to the game's length as to the way I was forced to play it, since my available time is now quite limited between work, family, and the time required to build playview.eu, while at the same time the game's technical issues forced me in several instances to replay missions I had already completed.

STAR WARS Zero Company was released on August 27, 2026, and sets its story during the final days of the Clone Wars, a period when the Star Wars universe is essentially on the cusp between the Republic and what will very soon become the Galactic Empire. At the center is Hawks, a former Republic officer who leads Zero Company, a team featuring Clones, Mandalorians, Jedi, and other characters, each with different abilities and backgrounds—giving the game the opportunity to create a team that doesn't resemble just another Republic military unit, but rather a special operations squad gathered from different parts of the galaxy.

And this is the first thing that works really well in Zero Company, because the game manages to use Star Wars in a way that organically fits the tactical genre, rather than simply slapping the well-known logo onto a system that could be in any other game. The characters have different roles, their cover and positioning on the battlefield truly matter, and every turn requires you to think a bit beyond the simple question "who can I kill now", since a good move is one that will allow you to be in a better position for the next turn as well—something that XCOM fans will recognize almost immediately.

And there is a very specific reason why the game feels this way, since Bit Reactor has people in its ranks who know the genre firsthand. Greg Foertsch, one of the studio's co-founders, had worked as Art Director on XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, while other team members have significant experience from Firaxis and the Civilization series, with Bit Reactor subsequently collaborating with Respawn and Lucasfilm Games to create Zero Company. Therefore, when you see elements that strongly resemble XCOM, it is not a superficial copy of a successful formula, but rather people who participated in creating that formula and are now adapting it to a completely different universe.

And this is perhaps the point at which Zero Company won me over the most, because Star Wars fits surprisingly well into a tactical game of this type. The different races and units, the Clones, the droids, the Mandalorians, the Jedi, and the rest of the forces you encounter can create different tactical situations, while the Clone Wars era itself gives the developers a huge playground in which to maneuver without needing to explain the world to the player from scratch every time.

The major problem is that all of this is accompanied by a technical state that, especially in my playthrough, gave me much more trouble than I would have liked from a game of this scale.

Zero Company's bugs were not just minor graphical glitches that you can overlook and carry on as normal. There were instances where the game froze during an attack, a move, or even during camera rotation, resulting in an entire tactical battle coming to a halt with virtually no other choice than to load a previous save and redo what you had already completed.

For a game in which a mission can require a lot of time and careful planning, this quickly becomes very tiresome, because you don't just lose five minutes of your life; you might lose the entire strategy you had set up, have to move your characters again, make the same attacks again, and replay a section you had already completed correctly, just because the game decided at that moment that it wouldn't continue.

After a certain point, I started saving much more often than I should have, not because I was afraid of a difficult battle or because I wasn't sure about my choices, but because I didn't know if the next move would be the one to make the game freeze, and this feeling affected my experience more than any difficult encounter the game could have.

Around that point, in fact, I started wondering if I should put it aside for a while and return later, once more patches had been released, because I had developed the exact same mindset I had when playing MindsEye. That was a different case—a game with very high ambitions, an interesting story, and a good deal of investment behind it, but the technical issues were so severe that at some point I decided it wasn't worth continuing right then and preferred to leave it for later (to which, of course, I never actually returned).
With Zero Company, I reached the same point, with the difference that this time I had already gotten about halfway through and really wanted to see how the story would end, so I decided to keep going.

And in the end, it was the right decision, because from about the halfway mark onward, the game starts to get more interesting and justifies the patience it demands from the player.

At first, the story didn't grab me as much as I expected. There are several missions that felt more like fillers—missions that exist to fill the time between major events, give you credits and resources, and stretch the campaign out a bit longer, without necessarily adding anything substantial to the story. This is a logic we often see in TV series, where a season might have ten episodes and some of them exist mainly to connect the key events, and in Zero Company, this feeling is quite strong in the first part.

The problem becomes even more apparent when similar enemies and similar tactical situations are repeated, because then the game starts to feel a bit repetitive, especially when you have already encountered bugs and been forced to replay missions.

But somewhere in the middle, things start to change, as the story of Infinite Coil, Kundri Fathom, and Shadow Plague gains more weight and the game starts giving you a real reason to want to continue. The characters become more important, their relationships begin to work better, and the quests gradually stop feeling like mere stops on the road to the next chapter and start becoming part of a story that you genuinely want to see completed.

This was also the point where I personally stopped thinking about whether I should continue and started thinking about when I would find the time to continue, which for me is perhaps the most important sign that a game has finally managed to win me over.

The overall critical reception of Zero Company was actually quite a bit better than my own score, with aggregate scores hovering around the 85-87 range and several major outlets highlighting its tactical combat, presentation, and the way the game combines the mechanics of XCOM with Star Wars. And the reception from players themselves is also quite positive, as on Steam the majority of reviews fall into the Very Positive category, showing that the issues I encountered failed to ruin the experience for most of the audience.

Sales are also interesting, although here we need to be careful with the numbers. In an analysis published a few weeks after release, Alinea Analytics estimated that Zero Company had surpassed one million copies by September 22, within about a month of its launch, with approximately 69.9% of sales coming from Steam, 19.9% from PlayStation, and 10.2% from Xbox. The same analysis puts the estimated gross revenue at around 50 million dollars, which sounds impressive, but should not be presented as an official revenue figure for EA, since it is an independent estimate by Alinea Analytics.

Even more interesting is the audience profile, as according to the same analysis, a significant percentage of Zero Company's players had already played XCOM 2, with the percentage standing at around 28% on Steam and reaching approximately 32% on consoles. In other words, the game seems to have managed to bring together precisely the two groups one would expect: people who love Star Wars and those who love XCOM and wanted to see a different take on the same tactical philosophy.

And somewhere here lies a rather strange part of the game's story, because around the same time Zero Company began proving it could find an audience, the situation inside Bit Reactor was far from ideal.

Shortly before the release, it became known that approximately 80% of Bit Reactor's staff had been placed on furlough, something that isn't quite the same as layoffs, as employees remained with the company, but temporarily without pay. Bit Reactor itself confirmed the furlough and stated that the decision was made internally due to uncertainty regarding the game's performance at launch, while according to the company, neither Electronic Arts nor Disney were involved in this specific decision.

We obviously cannot say that the game's bugs are due to this, because there is no evidence proving such a connection, but the timing is hard to ignore: a new studio releases its first major project, the game receives good reviews and, according to an independent estimate, surpasses one million sales in about a month, all while a huge portion of the people who created it are on furlough.

And finally comes the ending, which for me works better than I expected when I started the game.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON.

The final mission, The Infinite Coil, leads Zero Company into the final showdown with Kundri Fathom, as the story of the Shadow Plague reaches its climax and everything that has happened up to that moment converges into one last battle. Fathom is the final opponent and, when the team finally manages to neutralize her, the parasite inside her body detaches and dies, bringing an end to the Shadow Plague's influence as well.

Hawks survives and his infection disappears, while the people who were under Fathom's control are freed from her influence. Bennic also gets his own resolution, as he leaves his previous position behind and joins Zero Company, with the team returning to The Den, followed by a brief epilogue where you can talk to the team members and see where they are after the events of the final battle.

The game does not have different endings that dramatically change the final outcome of the story, as your choices can affect relationships and specific parts of the journey, but the main outcome remains the same, which I personally feel fits quite well with the story it wants to tell.

Because Zero Company ultimately isn't the story of a team saving the galaxy. It is the story of a team caught in the middle of the end of an entire era, with the Republic collapsing, the Clone Wars coming to an end, and the Galactic Empire taking the place of a world they had taken for granted until that moment. Zero Company simply survives through this transition and, when the game ends, what remains is not so much a sense of triumph as the feeling that this team now has a new path ahead of it.

And ultimately, what stays with me from STAR WARS Zero Company is more the sense of the game it could have been rather than the game it actually became.

It has almost all the right ingredients. It features people who know the tactical genre, a universe that fits this formula extremely well, beautiful isometric design, good combat, characters that become more interesting as the story progresses, and a story that ultimately made me want to reach the end, even though at first it hadn't won me over as much as I expected.

At the same time, however, it has technical issues that I cannot overlook, several filler missions that could have carried more weight, and an opening section that requires more patience than I would have liked. If the game had launched in a more stable state and had found a better rhythm at the start of the campaign, my own final verdict could have been quite different.

I finished it about two days before writing this article and, despite the fact that it took me almost a month, I don't feel like I wasted my time. A large part of this duration is due to the free time I now have for gaming, but also due to the bugs that forced me to redo missions several times, so someone who engages with it more intently and plays it without my breaks will probably need noticeably less.

I am not a big fan of review scores, because a number often does a game more injustice than it describes it, but here if I were to give one it would be a 7, and by that I mean to say that I clearly see the quality behind it, without being able to ignore everything that prevented me from enjoying the experience as much as I would have liked. Zero Company is not a failure and by no means is it a game I would say is not worth playing. It is a good Star Wars game, a good tactical game, and a very interesting first attempt by a studio that has people with real knowledge of the genre.

It is also simply a game that, when you finally reach the credits, you cannot help but think how much better it could have been if it had been released a bit more technically polished and with a slightly tighter pacing in the first half of the campaign.

And perhaps that is ultimately the most defining thing about Zero Company.

I didn't walk away from the game thinking it was bad. I walked away thinking I wanted it to be just a bit better.

And when a game manages to leave you with that feeling, it at least means it had something worth loving.