Star Wars Zero Company Is More Than an XCOM Clone

It’s been a few days since Star Wars: Zero Company launched, and now that the dust has started to settle, it’s time to take a closer look at how the game is actually faring. Despite plenty of reports about technical problems and performance issues, Zero Company is proving to be much more than just another XCOM clone.

Aim Twice, Fire Once

Star Wars: Zero Company is already resonating pretty well with Star Wars, XCOM, and turn-based strategy fans. Sure, there’s plenty of Star Wars flair across the environments, weapons, characters, and story, but there’s also a lot that separates Zero Company from XCOM.

At the end of the day, both games still revolve around taking turns, positioning your squad, and shooting enemies. However, XCOM puts a huge emphasis on positioning, maneuvering, and flanking to maximize your firepower.

Zero Company takes a different approach. Here, your damage output largely comes from combining unit abilities and taking advantage of squad synergies. Cover is still important, but it’s nowhere near as crucial as it is in XCOM. That’s partly because almost everything around you is highly destructible, meaning regular weapons can chip away at or completely destroy your cover.

The massive, fight-changing critical hits that are so important in XCOM also aren’t quite as dominant here. Crits can certainly help, but they feel more like a bonus than something that completely decides an encounter.

Because of this shift in gameplay, understanding your squad and capitalizing on their abilities becomes much more important.

For example, Squad Member D can activate an ability that lets Squad Member B fire for free at the same target. D can then use another ability that targets the enemy being attacked before taking their own shot. Suddenly, you’ve only manually fired twice, but those abilities have effectively turned those two actions into four shots.

Enemy health is balanced around this kind of ability synergy, too.

In XCOM, you can usually take down an average enemy in four or three shots. In Zero Company, some enemies can take maybe five to seven shots. At first, that can feel like a problem, but once you start combining abilities, the damage adds up incredibly quickly. If you try to play Zero Company exactly like XCOM by simply outflanking enemies and shooting them normally, you’re going to struggle to put out enough damage.

That’s really the biggest adjustment you’ll have to make. Once you understand that the game wants you to build around your squad’s abilities rather than simply relying on positioning and gunfire, the combat starts to click.

The Good & The Bad

Fans are also praising the game’s art direction, characters, story, and the surrounding Star Wars lore. There’s a lot to like about Star Wars: Zero Company beyond its unique approach to tactical combat.

Unfortunately, there are still some glaring problems.

At the time of writing, plenty of players are still running into performance issues and various bugs. These problems ultimately pushed the game into a Mixed review score on Steam during its opening days. Thankfully, that score has since climbed to Mostly Positive, suggesting things are already starting to improve.

That said, there are still plenty of rough edges on what is otherwise a really enjoyable game.

The Overwatch mechanic can sometimes be buggy, with units occasionally trying to target enemies through walls. Customization options can also fail to save after loading into a new area or starting another mission, and there are still occasional FPS drops that can hurt the experience.

None of these issues completely ruin the game, but they can definitely become annoying when they keep popping up.

Ultimately, Star Wars: Zero Company is a good game that just needs a little more post-launch polish. There are plenty of character interactions, a ton of customization options, and plenty of squad abilities to experiment with. More importantly, the story has already managed to hook us.

There are just a lot of small, frustrating problems holding the experience back right now.

If you’re a huge fan of tactical turn-based games or Star Wars, you’re probably going to have a great time with Zero Company. However, it might be worth giving the game a little more time before jumping in, especially if you’re hoping to avoid some of the technical problems that are still being worked out.