Star Wars Zero Company Review: The Best Star Wars Story Since Andor

Every member of Zero Company is disposable. The Clone Trooper who saved your life, the old fella you affectionately refer to as ‘pops’, even the young padawan who tags along. Or, at least, the galaxy sees them as disposable. Much like you, they have nowhere else to go. Whether it’s the Republic, the Jedi Order, the Separatists, or any of the other Star Wars factions, everyone has been used and spat back out. You’re all still standing. Until you’re not. This is to say, the cast of Star Wars Zero Company are as disposable as you allow them to be. This roleplaying XCOM-like is the closest a Star Wars game has come to making me truly feel like a down-on-their-luck merc with their back against the wall, and it was beautiful. It moves effortlessly between moreish combat and narrative beats so affecting that, at times, I wanted to put the controller down in the hope that everyone would be safe when I picked it back up. Star Wars Zero Company is the breath of life the series desperately needs. Star Wars Zero Company kicks off at the tail end of The Clone Wars between the Republic and the Separatists. We are Hawks, a former Republic soldier turned mercenary who runs their own outfit and believes in very little aside from being able to pay rent. Hawks is semi-customisable. You can choose from a range of origins, looks, and their first name. However, these are largely aesthetic; Hawks is otherwise a pre-written character. Your motley crew joined Zero Company for their own reasons. Trick, the former Clone Trooper, wants to keep serving the Republic in his own way, after a head injury saw him reassigned to a non-combat role in the army - he is technically a defector, but don’t tell him that. Kabb is a grizzled old fighter who speaks in a Cockney rhyming slang-like language and, at first, just seems to be with you to pass the time. Runa is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire who acts like she’s rich enough to get screwed over by Republic taxes - but couldn’t cut it with the Separatists either. This is where Star Wars Zero Company shines. Every major character is so well realised and it explores all aspects of The Clone Wars in more detail. They ooze charisma in even their throwaway banter on the ship, and have more chemistry with one another than a lot of party-based RPG squads - and that’s with the ability to lose any one of them to permadeath. I didn’t want to break this squad up. The idea of losing any of these operators made me feel like I was in a 30-hour Mass Effect 2 suicide mission. That is far from the only Mass Effectism at play here. All of the major characters have their own story arcs, playing out through a series of side missions and conversations between deployments. There’s none of the choice-based divergences that you’d get in Mass Effect, but the rich writing is there, as well as the catharsis of seeing your friends confront their past. In fact, one of the few problems I have with Zero Company is that I only wish it took these inspirations further. These companions are fantastic, and not allowing us to have deeper conversations with them, with more branching dialogue options, just feels like leaving money on the table. Dare I say that even a very basic romance system wouldn’t have gone amiss, and would have made the permadeath even more terrifying. At the very least, I would have liked to see the ‘bonds’ mechanic have a non-gameplay impact on companions, letting us truly bond with them. Combat Is Solid, If A Little On The Easier Side I played through Zero Company on medium with permadeath on to get a feel for the baseline experience, and if you’ve played XCOM before, I can very confidently say you’ll want to bump the difficulty up. The mechanics will all be familiar. You have a gang of up to four operators, each with three action points per turn, and all with different strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. The main gang are your best operators, as they all get an ability unique to them; Trick can revive himself without an injury if he’s downed, Cly the Mandolorian can jetpack around the map, Jae can swoop in and finish someone off if they’re one hit away from death, and so on. But of course, any of them can die in combat. If they get three injuries (which you pick up after losing health, or struggling with a holotable operation), they’re gone. To remedy that, you can fill up your crew with more generic operators that you purchase from a terminal, which can be premade or created yourself. Their different voice types all have a different personality attributed to them, and this means they can interact with the rest of the crew rather than just being a dull grunt you use as a human (or alien, or droid) shield. Admittedly, I did find myself putting them on the line more than the main characters, but they had enough characterisation that I at least felt a little bad about it. The different abilities and specialisations also help you feel connected to your operators. I already mentioned the unique abilities, but everyone pulls their weight regardless. Droids and Jedi in particular are well implemented into the combat, and open up entirely new paths than you’d have with a different team. Force pushing enemies off the map will never not be fun. However, that does bring me back to the topic of difficulty; I found permadeath to be mostly bark, with a little bit of bite. Throughout my run, I lost one operator, and not even to injuries. It was an extraction mission, and I had three operators in the evac zone. My droid buddy was out of range, and if I waited one more turn, I would likely have lost Jae, who had two injuries stacked up. So, heartless monster that I am, I abandoned BR-1 to his fate. A reset probably could have prevented this, but I told myself to roll with the punches. Turns out, it was just one punch, albeit with many close calls. Thankfully, there are two difficulty options above medium, which I am hoping will inject some fear into me on re-runs. There’s even an ironman mode, which stops you from save-scumming your way to victory. This is all to say that the baseline Zero Company experience is casting a wide net to bring in Star Wars fans, more so than XCOM experts. It does this well for the most part except for a couple of missions in the second half, which drag on with repetitive attack cycles and gameplay mechanics, the threat artificially inflated by throwing the same enemies at you rather than giving you something unique to work around. The worst mission design in the game tasks you with rushing back to your ship while two enemy armies duke it out with one another around you. Sounds neat, but it loses its charm when you’re on round 20 of NPCs slowly chipping away at each other as you inch closer to the evac zone. When Zero Company is at its best, this take on the XCOM system lulls you into a false sense of security, only to rip the band-aid off and leave you floundering. The game pulls that off more often than it doesn’t, most notably at a big story moment which I am prevented from getting into here. But it’s killer. You’ll know it when it happens. The Main Problem Holding Zero Company Back Is Its Performance Unfortunately, my experience on PC was considerably rough. While it looks beautiful from a distance, the cracks quickly show. Battles can be painfully slow, as animations can sometimes take a few seconds to load up, and it gets worse the more units are on screen. More than a few times, I found myself begging for a way to fast forward through enemy turns I would be curious to see how Zero Company fares on console because PC was so inconsistent. I am well above the minimum requirements, but admittedly a tad below the recommended. I do have the recommended RAM - a rather demanding 32GB - but that wasn’t enough. Most of my graphics settings were left on medium, and still resulted in screen tearing, framerate drops, and graphical glitches. It is also not a pretty game up close either, with Hawks’ model and animations looking conspicuously janky. What was even harder to ignore was how, on a few occasions, the game got stuck. Usually when it was trying to load my turn, it would get stuck in an animation loop, or just fail to register that I should be able to move around, forcing a reset. Zero Company Understands That Star Wars Is A Fight Against Fascism Technical grievances aside, Zero Company is slick and satisfying. Everything I adore about the game can be summed up in that moment that I cannot spoil, so I will just say this: Zero Company is the game we need right now. It shows societal outcasts living under a government that doesn’t want them to exist. It shows people who can survive under bigotry choosing to stand by their friends who can’t. It shows solidarity during a time when that has never been more important. Zero Company is not as explicitly political as Andor, but like the show, it very much feels influenced by the time in which it was created. It is a story about the dangers of apathy, and how fascism fosters when you’re too beaten down to care. It’s about how good people get swayed into doing terrible things, and the only antidote is to take a long look and see what is being done to your friends and neighbours. After Star Wars Zero Company wraps up, there are still several films and TV shows to go until the big bads have been defeated, so we already know that this ragtag bunch of mercs aren’t going to save the galaxy. But they are their own form of rebellion, and it being fleeting doesn’t make it any less beautiful. Released August 27, 2026 Developer(s) Bit Reactor Publisher(s) EA Franchise Star Wars PC Release Date August 27, 2026 Genre(s) Turn-Based Strategy, Tactical, Sci-Fi Pros & Cons Superb cast of characters with sharp, witty writing Fleshes out The Clone Wars era wonderfully Satisfying combat, hard to put down Star Wars-specific classes are well implemented into the XCOM gameplay More than a few performance issues on PC, and some demanding specs I wish the social elements went even further