Star Wars Zero Company Review: A Tactics Game Of Galactic Proportions

First Released August 27, 2026 Systems Leave a Review Overview Score Published Aug 26, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Bit Reactor's first game stumbles in some areas, but delivers a new, ambitiously high bar for the turn-based tactics genre, and nails Star Wars' vibe. While Star Wars Zero Company isn't quite as powerful a text as Andor, its tactical pastiche succeeds in filling a similar, unexplored niche in the Clone Wars, the setting of George Lucas's second and third prequel films. Your customizable hero is Hawks, leader of the eponymous mercenary outfit, which is drawn into a lucrative contract with Republic Intelligence to hunt down the Infinite Coil, a Separatist-aligned cult that is spreading a plague which kills half of all who are infected, brainwashing the others to serve cult leader Kundri Fathom. Star Wars Zero Company Offers A New Perspective On The Clone Wars Zero Company must be commended for distancing itself from the Skywalker Saga while still presenting stakes of galactic importance, even with a few very notable cameos (and some relative deep cuts). The game is set over a large swath of the war, and with the passage of time not clearly delineated, Hawks's story feels a bit disjointed. They're a character defined by their work, and heartfelt allusions to their past don't always land. Intrigue is luckily maintained throughout by the supporting cast, whose slice-of-galactic-life vignettes are woven throughout the campaign. A medically discharged clone trooper, a Jedi Padawan who lost her master to the Shadow Plague, an oil baroness, and more make up the motley crew that is Zero Company. They provide the clashing personalities and classically Star Wars facetiousness that's expected of such ensemble affairs where banter is bountiful. Despite the large personas, Star Wars Zero Company's narrative feels mostly like a vehicle for its gameplay. This is not necessarily to its detriment, but expect some clever dialogue writing, not an enthralling space opera. Existing Star Wars fans will have a lot of tidbits to chew on, but knowing the trajectory of the Clone Wars does make some of Zero Company's big turns predictable. A similar sentiment is easily directed at the main antagonistic faction, the Infinite Coil. While the variety of enemies their plague-granted powers allow is a boon to gameplay, the cult doesn't make a particularly strong impression, in spite of a few cutscenes that play up how sinister it is. The Infinite Coil feels like a less compelling riff on the Cult of the Absolute from Baldur's Gate 3. Zero Company Is A New Bar For Turn-Based Tactics Games Production value is an immediately striking part of Star Wars Zero Company. The game goes to great lengths adopting the storytelling devices of narrative-heavy, third-person games. With Hawks's routine structured into cycles, you begin each one by walking around your home base, the Den, and chatting with your employees, both the notable named characters, and those that were effectively random generations of the recruitment pool. From the Den, you can tinker with loadouts and assign skill points, but the meat of Zero Company's gameplay begins at the Holotable. Each cycle you spend a currency that represents Zero Company's quantified intel on completing Operations for various rewards to build out your characters. Some are tied to the main story, others are required to advance side quests, and most provide miniature narratives delivered through text. Choices often need to be made that affect the outcome and alter the relationships of squad members. Once you've spent your intel (or not; it can be saved, up to a point), you select a mission which will complete the cycle. Missions are where the main, tactical gameplay of Zero Company is, though some are interspersed with mild exploration segments. These are essentially window dressing, letting Hawks walk around, look at meticulously crafted environments, and maybe gather some extra intel, but they are nevertheless a major contribution to Zero Company feeling like a game attempting to push the tactics genre forward. It has the always amusing Gears of War problem, where you know combat is imminent when you start walking among numerous waist-high barriers, but the rapid zoom out from third-person to an isometric view, showing arenas to be part of the larger, contiguous levels, is a consistent delight. In fact, Star Wars Zero Company most closely reminded me of Gears Tactics, another game in XCOM's lineage. But with director Greg Foertsch's experience working on XCOM at Firaxis, the parallels are clear, and gameplay is honed to a sharp edge. Every character except Hawks can be killed by suffering three injuries, a status that can only be removed by some time in the medbay, so fights have tangible stakes—lose a major character, and you'll be locked out of their quest line. Zero Company is so tightly designed, though, that this threat rarely materializes on its default difficulty. Zero Company's default balance is such that careful consideration of how to maximize your squad's limited actions per turn will often result in all four operators surviving unscathed. This feels very deliberate, in the interest of making a first-time playthrough challenging, but forgiving enough so that the important quest lines aren't excised by a character's unfortunate death. The occasional brush with non-scripted death kept me on my toes, but I began filling my squad exclusively with the main cast fairly early on out of a lack of concern, and my medbay has gone without upgrades due to a lack of necessity. This may sound antithetical to Zero Company's features, but it actually plays quite well into its larger vision, where replayability is clearly a pillar in Bit Reactor's design. Character customization—for all characters, not just Hawks—is so thorough that you can role-play to a great degree. Put your whole team in clone trooper armor if you want; some of their voices won't be quite right, but they'll at least look the part. Experienced tactics game players can see the whole story if they want, or just spin up a higher-difficulty campaign to really turn Zero Company into cannon fodder. Star Wars Zero Company Is Great, But A Little Rough Around The Edges Star Wars Zero Company starts off a little sluggish, but does begin to snowball quite early on. The intricacies of its combat are clear from the outset, but Zero Company doesn't start feeling like a particularly deadly mercenary band until a second specialization (class) is unlocked for every character. Once this option opens up, though, the command granted over the battlefield is enthralling. As Zero Company works through contracts, its relationships grow deeper, providing mutual stat bonuses when two characters reach a bond milestone together. Once these start to accumulate, squad members start dishing out serious damage and can rapidly control large portions of each stage's playable territory. Swapping between the four active squad members to chain their abilities in the optimum sequence, each turn becomes an exceptionally satisfying dance. But the game is not without minor frustrations. Every once in a while, Zero Company seems to get stuck "thinking" at the start of the enemy's turn; the camera focuses, immobile, on a character as they just stand there while it loads. I thought my game had frozen multiple times. There are also a handful of visual bugs that threaten Zero Company's presentation: the camera whipping to a random location before tracking back, characters facing the wrong way when attacking, lots of rapid pop-in when cutscenes or levels first load. These aren't enough to dampen the experience, and are ironically a reminder of the game's ambitious nature. Zero Company tries to make its tactical combat as flashy as possible. Despite the excellence of the combat itself, Zero Company can't extricate itself from the genre's often tedious micromanagement—a necessity for its robust roster building. Star Wars Zero Company's only misstep is a narrative that has its cake and wants to eat it too. The Infinite Coil plot feels like a misguided attempt at focusing on something that is trying to be more interesting than more standard covert ops orchestrated by an intelligence agency during a galaxy-wide war against secessionists. To give the game gravitas, its story feels compelled to make Zero Company consequential to the Clone Wars, but the main cultist conflict is clearly only attached as a pretense from the beginning. Despite this ambling narrative, Zero Company nails the Star Wars atmosphere, and admirably takes a peek into every corner of the iconic galaxy. Star Wars fans will find a lot to like in Zero Company's subtle nods and overt references, but its tactical gameplay is the clear star. Bit Reactor's debut is a resounding achievement, not just delivering a new entrant to the often quiet turn-based tactics genre, but also setting an ambitious precedent for future games of its ilk.