As soon as I saw the first trailer for Zero Company, or ZCOM as I'm sure it will come to be called affectionately, I knew I would love it. I'm a big XCOM fan going all the way back to the original 1994 version where I first got hooked on turn based strategy games. Over the years it has quietly become one of my favorite genres and I've played everything from Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea to Valkyria Chronicles and Jagged Alliance and everything in between.
The bones of Zero Company are immediately apparent. It certainly looks just like one of the latest entries in the XCOM series with a Star Wars paint job, and if that's all it was it would probably still be a pretty decent game. There is more too it though, the team over at Bit Reactor appear to be fans of Marvel's Midnight Suns and the way that game introduced a hub world, an X-Men style mansion, where the heroes could interact between missions. They don't lean into it as much, but Zero Company's HQ back at the Ring of Kafrene does the exact same job of pulling you into the world and letting you see how the team spends their off time.
Similarly, in longer missions where there may be two ore more battles strung together, the player gets to guide the squad between the encounters. Now, these are just glorified hallways to be sure, but the alternative would be a simple instant transition where your squad runs off of one screen and into the next battle. Being able to skulk through the beautifully rendered back alleys and space docks does a lot to pull players into the game, and they didn't have to do it so I appreciate it.
You can see this level of polish throughout the game, after you've created your main character, Tesh Hawks, using a decent but not extensive customizer you'll find that when the game loads up to one of a few random idle animations of you chilling in your office. Usually the kind of thing reserved for a loading screen, so I often find myself waiting for the game to load in before remembering that it's actually waiting for me to make Hawks stop scrolling through his financial reports and get to work.
The voice acting is all top tier as well, I genuinely look forward to walking through the base after each mission to touch base with everyone on the squad. The game includes a handful of named squaddies, or operators as they are referred to in this universe, that have interesting backstories and side quests that you can complete. But I was surprised to find that even the operators that I customized and hired to fill out the team have interesting, albeit slightly more generic, things to say as the story continues to progress.
Another element that Bit Reactor has added is called Bond which represents team cohesion, the more operators team up the higher their bond, and having a high bond will unlock "cross training" opportunities where you can select a single stat boost that will affect both bonding characters. Effectively this is one of the two ways that characters level up in this game, the other is by using focus points where you distribute points through a standard tech tree, so it's easy to sleep on Bond and not realize it's there.
The last feature I want to talk about is the Call for Backup ability. Each round a random operator on your team will get this ability and they can use it to target another friendly operator so that when the original operator takes a shot, the second one will follow up. Pro Tip: The second shot is always guaranteed to hit as long as the second operator has any line of sight on the target. This is wildly powerful when used correctly. On top of that, every time operators back each other up it boosts their Bond, even if they don't end up firing a shot.
For Star Wars Zero Company polish is the name of the game. Bit Reactor could have easily slapped a coat of Star Wars paint on a bunch of menus and called it a day. In fact, if you hate walking around the base and talking to people you can skip all of that and open up the base map to directly access anything you need without ever leaving Hawks' office. When you look at it that way the entire hub zone is just a flex 💪🏽
Now for the bad news, because I can't in good conscience end this glowing review and not mention the fact that nearly the entire team that worked on this amazing game got furloughed a few weeks before it came out. You would think that when you're making a game like this, working with Disney IP, that you'd have some kind of job security, but no one is safe in these strange days. It can't be good for the industry, I grew up wanting to make video games for a living but I saw the writing on the wall 20 years ago when EA started the trend of releasing a game and then laid off a chunk of Tiburon Studios, their main development house, and it seems things have gotten even worse.
So on that note, go buy this game and hope those folks get rehired to make some DLC, and have a great labor day weekend.