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Imagine Mass Effect's deep storytelling and character development combined with XCOM's intense, strategic combat, all set during the Clone Wars. That's the promise of Star Wars Zero Company. We go hands-on to see if this ambitious new title delivers.
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00:01I want to change the way we tell stories in the genre and I want to make
00:04choice even more meaningful. You should have better frame rates, which means
00:08better graphics, better stories, because we can take a moment, have an immersive
00:12moment. This one's actually doing it, and it looks really good, and it played
00:18really good. Star Wars Zero Company has been shrouded in mystery since its
00:22reveal last year, but the simple sell of Star Wars XCOM is tough to beat,
00:26especially since Studio Bit Reactor boasts a ton of X4AXIS XCOM devs led by
00:29the series' former art director Greg Furch. I came in with high expectations and
00:34they were easily cleared. This is gonna be a great game, not just for tactics fans
00:37but anyone who digs Star Wars or cinematic RPGs like Mass Effect. In addition to
00:42four and a half hours of hands-on time with the game, I interviewed many of the
00:44devs behind it and dug into what you can expect from Zero Company when it
00:47releases later this year. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to capture footage of my
00:52play session, but EA has provided screenshots and artwork to help illustrate
00:55the game's current state.
01:01Zero Company is a Clone Wars story. You'll play through a deep single-player
01:05campaign that pitches your squad against Separatist droids, criminal gangs, and a
01:09new faction, the Separatist-aligned cult the Infinite Coil, who are bent on
01:13releasing a deadly plague across the galaxy which imbues unusual and superhuman
01:17abilities on the host. Star Wars and the Clone Wars era were presented with a very
01:22specific Republic-centered perspective, but we know as the audience that the
01:27Republic becomes an Empire eventually and that maybe the perspective we're
01:31getting during the Clone Wars is sort of biased from a certain point of view.
01:34Having these conflicting ideologies was really interesting because we know the
01:40way that these ideologies will shake out, the dust will settle into an era of
01:44rebels and Empire of very light and dark, good and evil, but things aren't so
01:49clear during the Clone Wars era and that makes for an interesting opportunity to
01:52you know, present a player perspective. You play as Hawks, a former Republic
01:57officer now leading an elite squad of professionals for hire. They're both your
02:01point of view character and a strong battlefield unit. Think Commander Shepard
02:05by way of one of those tactician characters from Fire Emblem. You're not a
02:08lone hero kind of like standing up against the world, felling enemies but with a
02:12swing of your blade. You're a relatively ordinary person. You're leading a
02:16tactical squad. You're leading an organization. But you have to make them
02:19work together in order to achieve a goal. It's a fantasy of leading a squad
02:23and a management and organization. You experience the story directly. You're not
02:27a removed figure. You're there. I felt when I came on board the project that was
02:32intrinsic to making this a satisfying Star Wars story. That's who we empathize
02:35with. The people who kind of like get dirty and have our boots on the ground with
02:39it. So that's why Hawks has that role. I think the thing that surprised me the most
02:42was like how RPG it is. You know, you're talking to people, you're making choices.
02:46It feels like you're Commander Shepard on the Normandy in between missions. We have
02:50these author heroes who are Jedi Padawans or Mandalorian gunslingers or an
02:56Umbaran sniper, you know, a clone soldier. These really iconic, you know, archetypes from
03:01from the Clone Wars era. And so what is really fun about this game is having
03:06different perspectives, having the Republic perspective from Benic, having the
03:10Separatist perspective from Runa, having someone like me, she's from the Underworld,
03:14who's just here to make a quick credit, you know, having them be introduced into
03:19the story of Zero Company and recruited in the squad one by one provides us a lot of
03:23momentum to kind of like carry you through the game. And, and there's, you know, they,
03:26as they come into the squad, they bring their own personal conflicts and
03:30traumas with them. Even just like these snippets of these characters, like it was not
03:35hammy, you know, superhero stuff. It was genuinely funny moments. The characters
03:39really worst kind of coming off the screen a little bit. It was exciting.
03:44We also have our bond system. Zero Company squad, you know, grows and becomes
03:48actually more capable, like two heroes can actually cross-train and learn each
03:52other's abilities as they, as their bond and their affinity for each other's grow.
03:56It rewards you for the squad that you put together, and it rewards the way that
04:00you play. Yeah, we hope you care about these characters. And I know I do, especially as I'm
04:05building bonds with them, and they start to become more and more powerful in my play session.
04:09So when I walk by, I want to see what they're decorating their desk with, or who they're
04:14hanging out with between missions.
04:16It was really critical that we allowed for bonds to decay and fracture as well, due to
04:20your actions, because that's part of the fantasy of being a leader.
04:25There's sort of like this spy detective element to Zero Company. It's the war between the war.
04:31It's sort of like, it's not the massive battles of clone troopers and battle droids. It's, you know,
04:35these small theaters of war and low intensity conflict that kind of brings with it a little
04:40bit of that sort of like spy thriller angle.
04:42And the really shocking thing is like, you know, the main story missions, you'll go in there and you'll
04:49have like a third person action camera, like it looks like Jedi survivor or something. And you'll
04:54be, you know, walking around as if it were an action game. And it's like amazing, you know,
05:00AAA production values, really that immersion into these different planets that you get to go down was
05:05what, you know, drove that desire to have those kind of free roam moments. And we often sometimes
05:10call them on team like our deep breath moments, it's kind of that chance for someone who just had
05:15their tactical combat experience. And then they get a minute to kind of collect themselves,
05:20take in the environment, take in the world, take in the visuals, and kind of prep for kind of that
05:24next tactical engagement where then your kind of heart gets gets pumping again.
05:28And then you reach a fight and it zooms all the way out to it to like the XCOM strategic
05:32view.
05:33This one's actually doing it and it looks really good. And it played really good.
05:38This innovative combination of third person exploration, RPG storytelling,
05:42and turn-based tactics is less surprising when you learn more about who's making this game.
05:47While developer Bit Reactor is a brand new studio, the team features alumni from Respawn's Jedi series,
05:52as well as strategy game veterans from Firaxis. Founder Greg Furch spent two decades at Firaxis
05:58refining the turn-based tactics experience with games like XCOM, Civilization, and Marvel's Midnight Suns.
06:04You know, I had left Firaxis after 22 years, and I was kind of working on what I wanted to
06:09do next.
06:09Anyway, I wanted to stay in tactics, and I definitely had an axe to grind with the genre.
06:13There's so much more we can do.
06:16It was a Friday night and I got a call out of nowhere. I'm sitting in my office with the
06:20lights
06:20out and my computer on and my wife's asleep, my kids are asleep, and the phone rings,
06:25and it's this number that I don't recognize. And I'm like, hmm. And for some reason I answered it.
06:31And the voice on the other end said,
06:33Hey Greg, this is Vince Zampella. I heard you have a game you want to make. Can you tell me
06:37about it?
06:39And we talked for a long time, and he eventually said, you know, like,
06:43do you think you can make a Star Wars game with this? And I said, sure, absolutely.
06:49Meanwhile, I'm thinking, this is insane, right? Like, this is crazy. It's Star Wars. And Vince was just like, pitch
06:55me.
06:57We work with Respawn for a long time. We've worked with Electronic Arts for a long time. And we've been
07:02wanting to make a game in this genre. We know that the turn-based tactics genre just rewards meaningful
07:08choice. And when you take that genre and you add it to a brand like ours that drives some meaningful
07:14choice, you know, we knew that that would be something that would make fans happy. And that's
07:19where Greg starts talking about, I want to change the way we tell stories in the genre. And I want
07:24to make
07:24choice even more meaningful. And we want to present things in a more cinematic fashion.
07:29It's so easy for genre fans to kind of wear it as a badge of like, oh, the art doesn't
07:36matter.
07:36The graphics don't matter. The story doesn't matter. It's all about the gameplay. It is. The
07:40gameplay is what it is about. But depth doesn't cost you elegance. You can absolutely have all those
07:46other things. It's a single player game. There's not latency issues. You should have better frame rates,
07:52which means better graphics than other games. You should have better stories because we can take
07:58the camera and tell you a story. We take a moment, have an immersive moment without it really changing
08:04your flow. Because it's part, it's expected. Genre fans got conditioned to believe that they
08:09shouldn't have these things. But we're here to tell you, you have both.
08:13When he was building the studio, it was really important to him that he had experienced
08:18devs making turn-based strategy games. And then another percentage that were experienced devs
08:24that have not made strategy games that come from other genres. You know, here we are, we're a brand
08:28new studio. We have a strong pedigree in a space and there's almost 20 of us that have worked together
08:34before. So we're not really a garage shop. We're a new studio. You know, you've got these two giants
08:40taking a chance on someone like us, having the vision and the courage and the conviction
08:44and the faith in us, right? Like to do something new, to do something outside of their norms. I think
08:51that's worth mentioning. It's just not, not common anymore. It's been amazing.
09:00Once you get into combat, Zero Company should be immediately familiar if you've played XCOM before.
09:05It feels deep. It felt like I could have played a lot cleaner and was, you know, I had fights
09:11where I
09:12barely scraped by. I really enjoy the puzzles that I get to solve in those spaces. It's like,
09:19oh, wait a minute. Okay. I need to get enough advantage to do this. How am I going to make
09:23that
09:23happen right now? This unit might be able to take a couple of shots over here. Then I'm going to
09:28be
09:28able to go and use my rocky jump over to here. Now, after I do that and knock those units
09:32back,
09:32maybe they'll go into overwatch. It's that plotting and planning and then execution of my plan
09:38that's rewarding. And then having the challenges that the game presents me to give me novel, unique
09:45situations so that I can't fall into a predictable pattern or strategy all the time. Those moments just
09:52feel good. They're the moments you tell your friends about when you're playing a game. As with XCOM,
09:58your squad consists of four operators. This stops the action from getting too overwhelming,
10:03according to its developers. Most of the games in this particular genotype of tactics games
10:09have landed in the four to six units range. If you start to go below four units, you walk this
10:15razor's edge where losing a unit becomes potentially catastrophic. Similarly, if you go much above six
10:20units, the camera needs to pull out higher. You need to see more of the battle space. There need to
10:24be
10:24more enemy units on the field for you to deal with. And that often results in simplifying the action
10:29space of each individual unit so that the player can parse everything that they're dealing with.
10:33So for this particular type of tactics game where you move your whole team at one time and then you
10:38rotate to the enemy team and they take their whole turn at one time, four to six tends to be
10:42a pretty
10:42playable place for that game to be. It all feels super tense in a very similar way to XCOM. Even
10:48with
10:49RPG elements, there's never that sense of snowballing and invincibility you get with an overpowered build
10:54in like Baldur's Gate 3. And there's the ever present threat that any of your guys, including
10:58the named hero operators, can be killed permanently. A character as beloved as Cab Uppercut, our one-armed
11:05felshi boxer, he can just catch a blaster bolt and be gone very, very, very early in the game. And
11:11the
11:11story has to go on with him. It really heightens the emotions you feel because now that soldier going
11:16down has a lot higher stinks. And you're like, do I let them die or do I get them? What's
11:24my opportunity
11:25cost here? How am I going to sort this out? Star Wars is about loss. I mean, four years old
11:30watching
11:30Obi-Wan Kenobi die, right? Also, as a developer, wanting people to not save SCOME, but to push through
11:37the loss. What's on the other side? Experience. Feel it. When you save SCOME, it's like hiding your
11:42feelings. It's like, I'm just not going to let it die. It's part of with the genre
11:46I can do so well because it's about a group of characters. I can lose one and it's not game
11:52over.
11:53If you want to have a Star Wars story-driven experience with a cast of really like well-realized
11:57authored characters that we poured a lot of love into, it's there for you. But if you want to roll
12:02with your own team, you can absolutely do that as well. And we spared no expense to try and make
12:05that,
12:06you know, just a satisfying experience for the player. This degree of customization and squad makeup
12:10allows for some unusual builds. The astromech droids in the game are support units with extra utility
12:15slots for grenades and the like. And designer James Brawley is very passionate about squads
12:19consisting solely of R2's D2.
12:21I always wanted astromechs to be a playable unit in the squad. I always wanted to give them a special
12:27place as the king of support units, basically. One of my fondest gaming memories was going back
12:34to the original Final Fantasy and playing through the entire game with four white mages,
12:39which made the game phenomenally difficult in the first like four to five hours of gameplay.
12:44But then eventually it turns out that that's actually an incredibly powerful solution to almost
12:48every problem in the later games. So always in the back of my head, I was like,
12:52what if you played through the game with four astromechs? I wanted that to be possible. It's
12:57going to be pretty interesting because a lot of your combat capabilities, if you do that, are going to
13:01be defined by your ownership of the utility items in the game and which ones you can bring on the
13:05squad.
13:06That's where all of your offensive capability is going to come from in that case.
13:09Zero Company is a great tactics game. And if you've been craving something to hit that
13:13XCOM 2 sweet spot, your wait will soon be over. But what really surprised me was Bitreactor's
13:18emphasis on storytelling and presentation, all without sacrificing any of that tactical depth.
13:23I think that combination is going to really push this game over the top and make it one to watch
13:27later this year. For all things Star Wars Zero Company, head over to pcgamer.com and for more
13:32previews of the latest upcoming games, subscribe to pcgamer here. I'm told Scott put something for you to
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