Star Wars Zero Company
Star Wars: Zero Company came out August 27, 2026, from Bit Reactor and Respawn. Access media is glazing this Clone Wars turn-based tactics game as the best Star Wars game in twenty-two years: 86 on Metacritic, a 9 from IGN, PC Gamer calling it one of the games of the year. I put in real hours, straight through a night I do not get back, to prepare for this. My verdict: not a 9 or 10. Not bad either, and against what Disney-era Star Wars has produced, “not bad” is basically an 11 out of 10. The biggest problem with Star Wars: Zero Company is the Star Wars.
The Clone Wars are winding down. You play Hawks, a disgraced Republic officer blamed for a botched mission, now running mercenaries out of a docked freighter called The Den. A job goes sideways, a Hutt debt comes due, and Republic Intelligence hands Hawks a contract to dig into something moving under the Clone Wars. Build a squad of four, take the job, keep your people alive, repeat for a hundred hours. Solid premise, and a smart place to tell a story that needs to exist inside controversial Star Wars canon without touching anything that could cause an uproar.
Even inside that risk-aversion, the first problem shows up. Disney-era Star Wars is boring now, and that hurts this game specifically. Most of what happens here does not need to happen inside the Clone Wars, or Star Wars at all. Meeting the cast, I kept wishing this were its own original world. After getting burned so badly by Disney Star Wars, I see clone helmets, blasters, Rodians, battle droids, droidekas, name-dropped glup shittos, and I feel nothing. I do not care. I want it gone.
A tactics game like this draws Fire Emblem comparisons, and I love Fire Emblem. I am also burnt out on Star Wars. Three Houses teaches you more world, character, conflict, and politics with every mission; every level deepens the immersion. Zero Company cannot do that, because Star Wars has been mined so thoroughly there is nothing new to learn mission to mission. The story is barebones, clearly built to avoid controversy, and barebones leaves little to explore. Every mission drips a sliver of a mystery that is itself bland, so why should I care? Trapping this in Star Wars locks it in a lore box and blocks the immersion a tactics game like this wants. An original space-fantasy setting could take real risks and give you a reason to care beyond “another clone trooper, probably still has the inhibitor chip” or “oh look, another Mandalorian, wheee.” Mandalorians used to be great when they were mysterious. Disney made them boring.
On gameplay: marketing wants you thinking XCOM or Marvel’s Midnight Suns, because the same studio made both. Zero Company takes some of the better pieces from each, misses some of the best, and thankfully dumps the worst. Midnight Suns, which I sank hundreds of hours into, tied tactics to deck-building, and that XCOM-plus-Marvel-plus-cards combo was addictive and genuinely unique. Zero Company skips that. What you get instead plays closer to tabletop RPG: classed characters with backstories moving across a big battle map. Midnight Suns‘ tactics-plus-deck-building made that game endlessly replayable. Its dating-slash-best-friend sim with the Marvel roster was absolute cringe, a friendship system to boost hero stats that was rough to sit through. Zero Company skips that too, and its leveling systems might be the best this dev has built for licensed gaming. Characters earn Bond XP from fighting together, and leveling up gives you specific upgrade choices back at base. Much better than needing to go swimming with Doctor Strange to talk feelings.
You start with the base weapon set and can build Hawks and the whole squad into any class with any loadout, generate custom Operators with whatever specs you want, or lean on the default story characters for their unique perks. A black market refreshes daily for weapon upgrades and utility gear. Want a squad of four grenade-strapped R2 units? Probably possible. Do not recommend it. Bad time guaranteed.
I have not finished the story yet, which is normal for the genre; a single battle can eat an hour, and a loss can cost you that hour on a reset. Or, in my case, crashes. This runs rough on PC. Reports of poor Steam Deck performance are everywhere, and on my own PC I needed mods just to stabilize it after losing thirty and forty-five minutes to crashes. Glad I hit record: mid-cutscene with Anakin, the game glitched Hawks out entirely, leaving Anakin talking to empty mist like he lost his mind. Midnight Suns runs great and is around sixty gigabytes. Zero Company is thirty-nine gigs and looks and plays worse.
Back to story: each mission drips a little more mystery, and the messengers carrying it are mixed. Jae, Kapp, and Trick are fine, genuinely good. Then the Mandalorian shows up a few missions in, and she reads like a millennial-written girlboss checklist: shows up at base, announces she is a Mandalorian and a bounty hunter now working for you, will not answer questions about herself, will not sign an official contract, wants full access to the whole company, and will walk if you push back, conveniently because marketing wants her on the box. Yikes, big dawg. Very yikes.
Summary so far: gameplay and loop are very good. Plot is hollow because it is trapped inside Star Wars. Some character banter is straight Dragon Age: Veilguard energy, battlefield quips that trigger Taash-flavored flashbacks. Yawn.
This does not beat Jedi: Fallen Order or Jedi Survivor on story or character work, and I liked both of those a lot. Good gameplay, trapped in a world that has stopped being interesting. Star Wars is not interesting anymore. Seven out of 10, specifically because this is so gameplay-forward: minus two for the Star Wars of it all, minus one for the PC optimization. No rush to play this now. Wait for a sale, and hope the modding scene grows by then. If you want tactics right now, grab Marvel’s Midnight Suns when it discounts, which it does often, complete edition with all DLC for around seventeen bucks. Addicting, problems and all, and its story was not great either. Next up: Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave in a few weeks. We will cover that too.
