The two biggest complaints about Zero Company after a week are opposites: the game is too easy at the top end because of one operator, and its main enemy faction is a slog. Both are true at once, and both come from the same place, a damage-and-healing economy that a few abilities break wide open. We read the r/ZeroCompany front page for the nine days since launch and sorted the gripes by how many people agreed. Here they are, with the developers' response where there is one.
For balance: the game is at 80 percent positive on Steam across more than 14,000 reviews and we gave it a 9. These are the complaints of people who like it. The ones who do not are mostly in the crash megathread, which we get to at the end.
1. Cly, and the rest of the action economy
The single most upvoted balance thread of the week, at 1,700 upvotes and 430 comments, is titled "Ok Cly is extremely fun but broken right?" The answers are mostly yes. Cly Kullervo is the Mandalorian, one of the four exotic specializations you cannot give anyone else, and the jetpack and the kit around it let her do things in a turn that the rest of the squad cannot.
The wider version of the complaint came from r/Xcom rather than the game's own subreddit, in a thread that 1,100 people upvoted: Zero Company "has given me a newfound respect for XCOM's balancing." The poster's point is that in XCOM you have to know what you are doing to break the game, while in Zero Company "you will stumble into ways to destroy the action economy without even meaning to," on Expert with Beskar Mode on. A 570-upvote thread titled "This combo makes Expert way too easy" shows one such stumble, and the Gunslinger's Quick Draw, which refunds an action point on a kill, is at the centre of most of them. We described how that works in our classes guide.
A smaller thread makes a related case about permadeath: three injuries is too high a bar. The poster finished a Hard, Beskar, permadeath campaign with one name on the memorial wall and argued it should have been two.
2. The Infinite Coil are a chore
The counterweight. Two threads, one of them provocatively titled "Coil enemies are unfun to play against," describe the game's main enemy faction the same way: more health than anything else, a heal that undoes a turn's work, retaliation on every hit, and a resonance mechanic that plays a cutscene and hands them their health back if you do not kill them fast enough. "A single grunt can take an entire coordinated turn to bring down," one says. The other poster, on Expert at cycle 21, calls everything "chunky/spongy."
Read together with the Cly thread, the picture is clear enough: the game wants you to chain abilities to delete a Coil unit in one turn, the operators who can do that make the rest of the game trivial, and the ones who cannot make the Coil miserable. That is a tuning problem, and the sort that patches fix.
3. Not enough missions for the roster, and nothing after the credits
"Call me crazy, but there aren't enough missions for the number of operators" drew 180 comments agreeing with it. You can hold 20 operators and field four, and the poster found they got about one optional mission between story events, so the B team never left the Den. A 537-upvote thread asking for a dedicated fifth support slot is the same complaint from a different angle: the Jedi and the Mandalorian take two of the four seats every time, so the astromech never gets a game.
Then the campaign ends and there is nothing to do with them. "We need a 'freeplay' mode" is one of the most upvoted requests on the subreddit at 937, and "No Post Game Content?" came from someone who finished and wanted to keep levelling bonds. Bit Reactor said before launch that there would be no New Game Plus and nothing to announce on post-launch content, so none of this is a surprise, but it is the thing players most want added. Our how-long-to-beat guide covers what you actually get.
4. The economy is tight
"Am I missing something or is the economy really rough in this game?" is at 350 upvotes and 210 comments. Twenty cycles in, the poster could rarely afford both a Den upgrade and a Black Market purchase, found mission rewards "almost never break 1,000 Credits," and called the Bacta Tank "way too pricy." The replies split between people who agree and people explaining which Operations pay. Our read: it is deliberate, the scarcity is what makes the Den choices matter, but the Bacta Tank in particular gets called out often enough that we expect its price to move.
5. Timers on everything
An image titled "Timers everywhere..." drew 1,100 upvotes and 266 comments for showing a holotable where every Operation and Mission is counting down at once. Bit Reactor's Q&A said before launch that Operations and Missions expire and story missions become mandatory after a set time. Knowing that does not make it feel less like a to-do list with a fuse on it.
6. Crashes and the pinned bug list
The technical-issues megathread has more than 1,100 comments. EA's pinned known-issues post names three problems: crashes when using DLSS on NVIDIA driver 610.88 or older (update the driver), Intel 13th and 14th generation processor crashes (a BIOS update or the Extreme Tuning Utility), and a chance-to-hit bug at 100 percent that has no workaround. We have a full settings and crash-fix guide that covers the first two.
One more warning that is not EA's fault: a popular thread reports that the "Full Customization Mod" breaks Tel-Rea if you change her voice, locking you out of talking to her and therefore out of her missions. There is no official mod support, so nobody is going to fix that but the mod's author.
What the patch is supposed to do about it
On September 3 Bit Reactor posted in its official Discord that the first post-launch patch is coming next week, for "bugs and performance issues." That is the whole announcement: no version number, no date, no fix list. The subreddit thread about it has 2,000 upvotes and 300 comments, most of them asking for the balance changes above rather than the bug fixes it promises.
Expect the patch to hit the pinned bug list and the crash reports, because that is what it says it will do and because a studio operating on a reduced team, as we covered on Thursday, fixes crashes before it retunes a Mandalorian. Balance passes, a free-play mode and anything that looks like new content are a different conversation, and it depends on the people who would build them coming back to work. We will write up the patch notes when they exist.
Sources
Thread titles, upvote and comment counts are from r/ZeroCompany and r/Xcom as of September 4. Every embedded post stays on Reddit under its author's name; if they delete it, it leaves this page too. Known issues are from EA's pinned support post; the patch announcement is from the Zero Company Discord, via the community wiki's update log.
