Watch On
When Bit Reactor’s game director Greg Foertsch confirms to me that Star Wars Zero Company has permadeath, I can’t help but grin. In retrospect, it might be a bit odd for me to get so psyched about the shadow of mortality, but this one choice says so much about what kind of game—and what kind of Star Wars—Zero Company is going to be.
We’ve been calling this game “Star Wars XCOM” for a long time now, thanks to the studio’s deep bench of former Firaxis developers. But at this point we’ve been bitten by an awful lot of supposed spiritual successors that really are just turn-based tactics games. XCOM is that, but it’s more as well.
XCOM isn’t just about directing your soldiers around a battlefield, but being invested in their emergent little stories. Caring who succeeds and who fails, and risking something when you send them out into the firing line.
If anything, Zero Company seems ready to take that idea even further. Soldiers you create can be customised to the class and appearance you want, but appropriately for Star Wars you can also choose their species. Then the game also has authored characters—the crew seen in the trailer and art—who turn up already armed with personalities, backstories, and roles in the story. But not only will they have a degree of customisation too, they’re not exempt from permadeath, and if they are lost in some Outer Rim skirmish, that will actually affect how elements of the story play out.
I should say, there’s optional permadeath—the difficulty settings will allow you to turn it off if the idea of watching your favourite Jedi fall to blaster fire doesn’t float your boat. A key goal of Zero Company is to bring new players to the genre. One part of that equation is accessibility—providing those difficulty options and not overwhelming players with abilities and unlocks early on, so that “if you want to play it just for the story, great… but if you want to play it for the pain, then you’re welcome to play it for that too,” as Foertsch puts it.
The thing he’s keen to hammer home—as he was when I spoke to him last year—is that appealing to new players doesn’t mean sacrificing depth for the hardcore strategy fans. “I don’t think it’s a choice in that sense,” says Foertsch. “You can absolutely do both.”
That’s backed up this time by Orion Kellogg, executive producer at LucasFilm Games—one of the people linking Bit Reactor to the wider Star Wars ecosystem.
“For Lucasfilm Games, this is our strategy game,” says Kellogg. “So we’re not saying, like, ‘Oh, can you make it less strategy-y?’ We want this to be a strategy game first and foremost, and it is, and that’s why we’re working with Bit Reactor.”
Last month’s leaks
So no, it turns out those leaks we saw in March seemingly depicting screens of the game did not give an accurate sense of things. “The leaked images do not represent the game today, nor what it will be at launch,” says a representative for Bit Reactor. Basically they were just very early concepts, from before the premise of the game had even been finalised.
The other part of the equation is the story. Foertsch promises something more “immersive” and “cinematic” than we’re used to for the genre, and the inclusion of a fully customisable main protagonist—called Hawks—suggests an RPG-like sheen to the adventure.
Set during the Clone Wars, Zero Company follows essentially the Star Wars equivalent of a black ops team, making surgical strikes into enemy territory. It’s definitely a darker, more serious tone than you might expect from a Star Wars game—more Rogue One than A New Hope, and certainly not a million miles away from XCOM’s grim sci-fi narrative.
For Star Wars fans, there are deep cuts right out of the gate. The crew of premade characters includes a Tognath Jedi (remember that guy with the tubes from Rogue One? One of them), and there’s an Umbaran in full battle armour, as last seen in one of The Clone Wars’ most beloved story arcs. You can even recruit astromechs to your team.
The trailer’s brief combat footage shows off battle droid enemies, including B1s and B2s—that part’s certainly not surprising, though I continue to think that those are the perfect choice of bad guy for any Star Wars videogame.
It’s a strong hook to tempt everyone who played Jedi Survivor or Outlaws to try a genre they might not be used to. But the goal is also that if you are here for the strategy first and foremost you’ll feel just as welcomed in.
“It could be your first Star Wars,” says Kelsey Sharpe, creative executive at Lucasfilm. “I would love to find out that there is some hardcore strategy player out there who’s like ‘a Star Wars game? All right, fine, I simply must play this turn-based tactics game’ and then Star Wars: Zero Company is their introduction to the Star Wars universe. Because if we’ve done our jobs, it should be a great introduction to Star Wars.”
Much like last year, when Bit Reactor was sharing its ambitious goals with me before it had even announced a title, I am a little skeptical. Completely accessible to newcomers yet rich and deep for genre veterans, and both a treat for Star Wars fans and those who’ve barely touched the franchise alike… setting out to please everyone is ambitious, and it’s a lot easier to promise you can do it all than it is to deliver.
But I’m also optimistic, because I’ve come out of this chat and this brief look at the game feeling like Bit Reactor is making all the right choices. The XCOM-lover in me hears about permadeath and customisation, and sees that clean combat UI and polished action, and feels like a proper successor could be looming. And the Star Wars nerd in me sees a genuinely fresh take on an iconic point in the timeline, with the kind of pulls that point to an interest in the wider texture of the setting, not just snagging people’s attention with obvious and overused touchstones.
After years of build up to this reveal, I do wish they’d showed and discussed more of the substance of what we’ll be playing—and with a release date currently set for 2026, we’ve still got a while to go before we can actually sit down and try it. But this is an exciting first step into the spotlight for Star Wars: Zero Company, and while my hope may not be very new at this point, I’m still pinning it on this being one of the most promising XCOM successors we’ve seen in years.
