Plan on 30 to 40 hours for the story on Normal, closer to 40 if you play the side missions, and a second full campaign if you want every achievement. There is no New Game Plus, the story is linear, and a finished save has nothing left to do except start again. That is the whole answer; the rest of this page is where the hours go and how to make the number bigger or smaller on purpose.

The official number

Bit Reactor's lead producer, Caydence Funk, gave the figure in the studio's community Q&A in July: "Depending on your difficulty level and experience with the strategy genre, we estimate about 30-40 hours for the average player to complete the main story campaign."

The reviewers who finished it agree with the top of that range rather than the bottom. GamesRadar+ put 40 hours into its review copy. TechRadar's review is headlined "over 40 hours later." Our own review came in at thirty-plus with a squad that never lost anyone, which is the fastest way through: a dead operator costs you a replacement to level, and a failed mission costs you the mission again.

Where the hours go

The campaign runs on cycles. Each cycle you spend intel on Operations at the galaxy map, which are quick, text-driven decisions with rewards and consequences, then pick one Tactical Mission that deploys the squad. Operations and missions both expire if you leave them, and story-critical missions become mandatory after a while, so the game drags you forward whether or not you have finished everything on the board.

That structure sets the length more than anything else. You cannot grind. You cannot replay a finished mission. The number of cycles between story beats is the number of side missions you get, and Bit Reactor's Q&A says outright that not everything on the board can be done in one run. A thread on the subreddit with nearly 200 comments complains that there are not enough missions for the number of operators you can recruit, and that is the same design seen from the other side: the roster cap is 20, a squad is four, and the mission count does not scale to fill the bench.

Three things reliably add time:

  • Difficulty. Hard and Expert do not add missions, they add retries and longer fights. Our difficulty guide covers what each setting changes.
  • Losing operators. With permadeath on, a third injury is permanent. A replacement starts behind the squad and has to be carried through missions to catch up, which is hours you did not plan on.
  • Reading. The Den is full of conversations, and the Bonds system rewards talking to people between missions. Skipping all of it is possible and saves a surprising amount of time; we do not recommend it, because the squad is the game.

Two things reliably cut it: Story difficulty, which the settings screen offers for people who want the plot without the puzzle, and turning permadeath off, which removes the rebuild-and-relevel cost of a bad mission.

No New Game Plus, and what that means

Funk was direct about this in the same Q&A: "We won't have New Game+, but players will unlock certain customization options on subsequent playthroughs." So a second campaign starts from zero on levels, gear and roster, with a few more cosmetic choices in the character creator.

There is also no post-game. When the credits roll, the campaign is over; the Den does not stay open for a free-play mode, and the subreddit's request for one is one of its most upvoted threads. A finished save is a finished save.

Getting to 100 percent

The achievement list includes a completed campaign in Beskar Mode, the game's ironman setting with one persistent save and no manual reloads, which a first run on normal settings will not give you. That is a second campaign of 30 to 40 hours in the least forgiving configuration the game offers, which is why the guides that have mapped the full list put 100 percent past 60 hours. A subreddit thread this week titled "Do not play Beskar unless you're after the achievement" is the community's version of the same advice.

Our advice from the difficulty guide stands: do not make Beskar your first run. Learn the game on a save you can reload, then decide whether you want the achievement badly enough to play it again without one.

When you are done

If 40 hours went by too fast, the honest news is that there is no second Star Wars XCOM. The nearest things in the franchise get part of the way there from different directions, and that guide sorts them by which part you missed most. Outside Star Wars, the studio's own lineage points the way: most of Bit Reactor came from Firaxis, and XCOM 2 with the War of the Chosen expansion remains the long-form version of what Zero Company does in 40 hours.