We played the first 50 minutes of Star Wars Zero Company today, live on Twitch, starting shortly after the game unlocked to 53,000 Steam players. The session covered the opening and the full tutorial. It also included two crashes. We relaunched both times without a second thought, and that instinct, crash then immediately back in, is the most honest early review we can give you.

The full first 45 minutes, captured on launch day. Crashes cut, cut points marked in the chapters.

The stability report

Two crashes inside 50 minutes on our PC is not great for a single-player tactics game, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we can't tell you yet is whether that's the game, our hardware, or ordinary launch-day wobble, and we won't guess in either direction. We'll be playing a lot more of this over the next few days; if the crash rate holds, you'll read about it here, and if a patch fixes it, you'll read that too. Playing on launch day and hitting the same thing? Tell us in the Discord. Knowing whether this is widespread is the difference between a footnote and a story.

If crashes on day one are a dealbreaker for you, there is no shame in giving it a week and a patch. The game will still be there.

The part where we couldn't stop

What the crash count doesn't capture: the tutorial ended and we did not want to put it down. First impressions after less than an hour are worth exactly what they cost you, so we're not calling anything yet, but "annoyed at the crash because it interrupted the fun" is a very different signal from "grateful for the excuse to quit." This was the first one.

Impressions with actual substance, the systems, the squad, how missions flow, need more hours, and those hours are already scheduled. The review comes when we've finished the campaign and not before.

The details

  • Session: 50 minutes on PC, launch day, streamed live on our Twitch. It was also our first stream ever, so the crashes had an audience. Baptism by fire.
  • The full session is embedded above, and more videos land on our YouTube channel.
  • Deciding whether to buy? Our advice from this morning stands: watch twenty minutes of mission play from any of the hundreds of live streams before spending $70.