Star Wars Zero Company review: the squad is the game

The night before launch we said we were watching three things: whether permadeath had teeth, whether mission variety survived past hour ten, and how it performed. Thirty-plus hours later, here are the answers, and none of them is quite the one we expected.

Buy it. If you are a Star Wars fan, buy it almost regardless of how you feel about turn-based tactics, because the squad you build is the best Clone Wars toy anyone has shipped in years. Just know going in that this is a thinking game, not a shooting one.

What Zero Company actually is

You run a deniable outfit of specialists during the Clone Wars. Missions play out in turn-based tactical combat, and between them you sit in the Den, your base, spending what you earned. That loop is the game.

The part nobody warned us about is how much of the pull comes from the Den rather than the battlefield. You are choosing which contracts to take before they expire, which upgrades to buy in what order, and what to grab off the black market while it has stock worth having. Those decisions compound. Take the wrong contract and the other one is gone.

And then there is the customization, which is the actual answer to why this game is a nine for us and an eight for most other people.

The clone customization is the whole Star Wars fantasy

Every Star Wars fan who has ever looked at the 501st and thought "I would do mine differently" gets to do exactly that here. You build the operators, you name them, you paint them, and then they develop personalities you did not plan for.

The single moment from thirty hours that stuck hardest was not a clutch shot or a mission going sideways. It was an operator being sassy back in the Den. One of ours, in a squad we made.

That is not a small thing. That is the fantasy the license exists to deliver, and Bit Reactor delivered it.

The three questions we asked, answered

Does permadeath have teeth? Not on Normal. We finished a full playthrough without losing a single operator. We are not alone in that: PCGamesN reports the same experience in almost the same words, "I didn't suffer a single death in my playthrough," and argues replacements arrive fast enough that a loss would not have stung much anyway. Their review is titled XCOM on easy mode, and on the default setting that is fair.

The fix is in your hands, which is why our difficulty guide exists. Play Normal for the story. Then go again on Beskar with saving disabled, and the game you were promised turns up.

Does mission variety hold past hour ten? Mostly, with visible seams. Hostage rescues and safe-cracking come around often, and environments get reused from new angles. This is the one criticism nearly every review lands on, and we saw it too.

How does it perform? This is the weak point. We had two crashes in our first hour on launch day. Changing graphics settings fixed it for us and we have been stable since, but "the player fixed it themselves" is not the same as "the game works." Five days after launch, EA has shipped no patch.

Other players report the same: stuttering, frame drops and crashes on hardware that should not be struggling. The useful thing to know is that Zero Company is CPU-limited rather than GPU-limited, so a better graphics card will not save you. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, and if you are stuttering in combat the settings to drop first are Effect Quality and Shadow Quality, both of which lean on the processor.

A proper settings guide is coming, because this deserves more room than a review paragraph.

Do not come here for Battlefront

This is the warning that belongs highest. If what you want from a Clone Wars game is Battlefront, running around shooting things, this is the wrong purchase. Zero Company is turn-based. You will spend more time considering angles than pulling triggers, and no amount of good will about the setting changes that.

Plenty of people will bounce off it for exactly that reason, and they deserve to know before they spend $49.99 rather than after.

Where we land against everyone else

The critical consensus sits around 86 on Metacritic, with PC Gamer at 90 and PCGamesN at 8. We are going higher than most, so it is worth saying why.

We saw the same weaknesses the eights saw: repetitive objectives, and a default difficulty that never threatened us. We weight them differently because the thing this game does better than anything else in its genre is make you care about six specific soldiers you invented, and the Den economy gives those soldiers decisions worth arguing over. Scored purely as a tactics game, measured against XCOM, it comes out easier and thinner. Scored as a Star Wars game, it is the best use of the license in years.

We have not played XCOM ourselves, so we are not going to pretend to adjudicate that comparison. The outlets that have played both are linked above and worth reading next to this.

Who should buy it

Star Wars fans of any genre background, and Clone Wars fans especially, at full price today. Tactics veterans will find it approachable rather than demanding, so start above Normal. Battlefront fans looking for action should skip it.

The details

• Reviewed on PC across a full campaign of 30-plus hours, on a copy we bought.
• Star Wars Zero Company is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at $49.99.
• Our launch coverage: first-hour impressions, the starter guide, and the difficulty guide.
• Player-count context through the first weekend is in Monday's brief.
• Performance findings cross-checked against community testing and PCGamesN's review.