Star Wars Zero Company review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

To some extent, you just need to look at the genesis of the studio behind Star Wars Zero Company to know everything there is to know about the game. It was made by Bit Reactor, which was co-founded by a former art director at Firaxis Games – Firaxis known, among other things, for being the company behind XCOM. Bit Reactor’s goal is to create more turn-based strategy games.

You’ll be unsurprised to know, then, that Star Wars Zero Company is basically XCOM but with a Star Wars skin. There’s a straight line from one to the other, and you don’t need to look very hard to see it. Even if you didn’t have any of that backstory, in fact, you would know that Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM just by playing it.

But it feels wrong to write Star Wars Zero Company off as just an XCOM clone. It’s a lot more than that.

For starters, obviously, you have to factor in the whole Star Wars aspect of the game. Zero Company takes place on the periphery of the Clone Wars, and while I’d be lying if I said I knew enough Star Wars lore to get what that meant, there’s still enough story here that you can get drawn into what’s going on. There’s a huge cast of characters, and the game does a good job of giving many of them enough time to make their personalities shine through and make you care what’s happening to them. The game also allows you to personalize your main character quite a bit – not just in terms of their outfits and weaponry, but even in terms of their character class.

There’s also the gameplay to consider. While, yes, Star Wars Zero Company is built off the bones of XCOM, it’s clear that it’s attempting to go a lot deeper. The game encourages you to play much more aggressively, whether you’re sharing move points between your combatants to give them extra time to pull something off, giving you enough time and space to manoeuvre yourself behind enemies so you can wallop them with your bare hands, or pushing enemies back into the same area so you can try to kill them en masse.

At its core, obviously, Star Wars Zero Company is very firmly in the lineage of XCOM, so if you like that, you’re pretty much guaranteed to like this too. But by giving so much attention to the story and giving you a lot more freedom in how you approach its missions, Zero Company shows that even if it’s built on a formula, it’s not beholden to it, and that flexibility makes the game all the more enjoyable.

Electronic Arts provided us with a Star Wars Zero Company PC code for review purposes.