The honest answer first: there is one, and it is Zero Company. Turn-based squad tactics, cover, permadeath, a strategy layer between missions, soldiers you name and then get attached to and then lose. Nothing else in forty years of Star Wars games does that. If you came here hoping for a hidden second one, we do not have good news.
What we do have is a short list of games that get part of the way there, and they get there in different directions. Pick by which part of XCOM you actually want.
If you want the campaign map more than the turn-based combat
Empire at War (2006)
This is the one to play. Petroglyph, founded by Command & Conquer people, built a game in two halves: a galactic conquest map where you move fleets, build up planets and pick your fights, then a tactical battle when two forces meet. That is XCOM's structure exactly, with one substitution. The battles are real-time, not turn-based.
If the strategic layer is what hooked you, this is the closest thing in Star Wars, and it is not close between it and whatever is second.
It is also genuinely alive. In our own player tracking it has been running between 759 and 2,031 players on Steam over the last ten days, which makes a twenty-year-old strategy game the third busiest Star Wars title on the platform right now, behind Zero Company and SWTOR. The reason is the mod scene, which is one of the best in PC gaming. Thrawn's Revenge alone has kept this game current for over a decade. We wrote up where to start with the mods, sorted by era.
Buy the Gold Pack. It bundles the Forces of Corruption expansion and it is the version every mod expects.
If you want the 4X grand strategy layer specifically
Star Wars: Rebellion (1998)
Galaxy-scale 4X: recruit characters, move fleets, flip planets one loyalty point at a time, run either the Rebellion or the Empire. On paper it is the deepest strategy game in the franchise.
Two warnings, and they are real ones. The interface is openly hostile, in the way late-90s strategy interfaces were, and it will cost you an evening to learn. And it has left digital storefronts, so there is no legal way to buy it new. We are not going to pretend otherwise or point you somewhere shady.
Worth knowing about. Hard to act on. If you find a legitimate physical copy and you like difficult old strategy games, the people who love this one really love it.
If you just want to command Star Wars armies and spend six dollars
Galactic Battlegrounds: Saga (2001)
Age of Empires II with Star Wars units, built by Ensemble on the actual Genie engine, so it plays exactly as well as that sounds. Six civilisations, two more in the Clone Campaigns expansion, air power added to the AoE formula.
It is not XCOM in any respect. It is real-time, base-building, macro-focused. But the Saga edition bundles everything for about six dollars on Steam and GOG, and if what you actually miss is directing Star Wars forces around a map, it is the cheapest way to do it and it holds up better than most 2001 RTS games.
What to skip
Force Commander (2000). LucasArts' first RTS, and a genuinely bad one: a 3D camera that fights you, a thin economy, and a John Williams score remixed into rock guitar. GameSpot gave it Most Disappointing Game of the Year. It exists for completionists.
The mobile strategy games are gone, not just old. Star Wars: Commander was a competent Clash of Clans clone and its servers closed in June 2020. Force Arena was a better-than-it-sounds Clash Royale lane battler and Netmarble shut it down in January 2019, two years after launch. LEGO Star Wars Battles survives on Apple Arcade in maintenance mode. There is nothing to recommend here because there is mostly nothing left to play.
The short version
| You want | Play |
|---|---|
| Actual XCOM, turn-based, permadeath | Zero Company (2026) |
| The campaign map, tactical battles, a long war | Empire at War Gold Pack (2006) |
| Deep 4X, and you tolerate old interfaces | Rebellion (1998), if you can find it legally |
| Cheap RTS, big armies, no learning curve | Galactic Battlegrounds: Saga (2001) |
| Anything else | There is not much else |
That thin bottom half of the table is the actual finding. Star Wars has produced one turn-based tactics game and a handful of real-time strategy games, most of them a long time ago. Zero Company's launch numbers, which are running more than three times the rest of the franchise on Steam combined, suggest there was rather more appetite for this than the release history implies.
If you finish Zero Company and want more of exactly that, the useful move is not another Star Wars game. It is XCOM 2 with the War of the Chosen expansion, which is the game Zero Company is openly built in the shape of, by some of the same people.