Star Wars Zero Company: An experience like no other

First off, I absolutely love turn-based tactical strategy games like XCOM, Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (the best FF game, period), Fire Emblem, WH40K: Chaos Gate (both the original and the remake), and many others. Even though I have a somewhat complicated relationship with the Star Wars series and gave up on it long ago (The Force Awakens is 11 years old, for God's sake…), the previews and trailers made this look like exactly my kind of game.

It features unit progression, base management, turn-based tactical combat, and it's set during the Clone Wars, which is my second favorite era of this universe. Avoiding a comparison to XCOM is impossible, and I personally believe the developers aimed for it—the game's title (ZCOM) can't be a coincidence.

Attempt No. 1

The game's abysmal technical state hit me immediately. I bought it on PC, started playing, and while I genuinely enjoyed the story and characters (which surprised me the most), the constant stuttering, crashes, freezing, and the fact that the game was practically unplayable forced me to return it. I mean, what did I expect? Another UE5 nightmare.

Attempt No. 2 on PS5

I slept on it and decided to pick it up on PS5 the next day. It was more expensive, but something about the game kept pulling me back. So, I bought it and started playing. To my horror, I discovered that the performance on PS5 is only slightly better than on PC, though the stability was improved (the game only crashed five times during my 18-hour playthrough).

The setting is very familiar, and despite my negativity, Star Wars still manages to stir positive emotions in me, especially when the iconic music kicks in and I get goosebumps. The story started very well and kept me hooked for the entire 18 hours I played. It constantly evolved, featured interesting twists, and overall, I was shocked by the small amount of clichés and boring stereotypes that have literally flooded this series over the last decade or more.

Most of the characters are very well-crafted and interesting. The new cast is great. Hawks feels like the best combination of Mal Reynolds and Han Solo, Trooper Trick has his own personality and isn't just another "clone," the Mandalorian is a bit of a dry character but has great charisma and humor, and the rest of the cast is worth it too. I was surprised by how many times I heard DC Douglas's voice in the game, but as always, he is a master of his craft, and it was great to hear him here.

A familiar face appears during the playthrough, and if you've seen any of the trailers for this game, you know who it is. However, I was disappointed that although one of my favorite actors, Matt Lanter, provided the voice, his appearance is based on the movie version rather than the series version, which just felt weird. Yes, I'm talking about Anakin, of course.

Okay, let's start with some negatives…

The user interface is just terrible. Nothing is clear, everything is confusing and hard to read, and without reading tooltips, it's practically impossible to tell what each ability does (I'm a millennial, not a boomer). In XCOM (any of them), you can look at an icon and immediately know what it means. Whenever you have to play with some verticality (rooftops, hills, etc.), it's very difficult to move units without messing something up. Maybe it's easier without a controller.

The combat flow isn't very good either. It's very slow. And you can't skip or speed up any animations, which take an eternity. After an hour of playing, I was already missing the zip mode from XCOM 2.

There are also parts where the game suddenly switches to a third-person over-the-shoulder view for you to explore the surroundings, even though it's actually just a hallway with nothing interesting in it, and I wish these parts were simply replaced with short cutscenes. They just slow down an already sluggish game. Again, you can't skip or speed anything up.

So, XCOM is great because you can play it ten times and encounter something new every time. ZCOM has every level hand-crafted, which means very little randomly generated content, so you won't see almost anything new. I played missions on six different planets, and they all felt like they were taking place on the same one. The story also remains the same with every playthrough. No branching paths or different choices. Similarly, the characters play the same way every time, although it's fair to say you can change their specialization, but their main talent remains the same. Which means once you finish this game once, you've seen almost everything a character has to offer. Plus, there's very little motivation to use different units because there's no fatigue mechanic. Let me explain.

In XCOM (and other similar games), units have morale that drops every time they participate in a battle, forcing you to rotate units and essentially meaning you can't keep using the same ones. There's nothing like that in ZCOM. The only reason you'd want to use someone else instead of the same four units is injuries (which you get every time a character is knocked down). But I never got any injuries during combat. I only got them in some non-combat missions, but that only happened twice. And that brings me to my next point.

From Normal to Ironman mode

I started playing this game on Normal with Ironman and Permadeath enabled. And the game is too easy! It was extremely boring. Every turn, my units did the same thing, and it gradually became a chore that I just had to endure. After about 10 hours, I switched to Hard, and the game became much more fun. I really had to think and use different tactics, but I was still using the same four units while everyone else was lounging at the base doing nothing. Ironman mode means you play with only one save file, you can't save manually, and you can only load this single save that updates itself.

It also feels like they were inspired more by Fire Emblem than XCOM, because using your own characters doesn't make much sense. In ZCOM, you get 7 heroic units that have their own appearance, voices, abilities, and, of course, play a huge role in the story. You can also create 13 other custom characters, including small copies of R2-D2. None of this provides any benefit, however, because the maximum unit size in the game is strictly set to four characters (and cannot be upgraded), so you'll never even use the other 3 story heroes, let alone the other 13 custom characters.

The last straw

This game also has a mandatory time limit for the campaign, and I just have to ask why? A similar mechanic was in XCOM 2, and if I remember correctly, nobody liked it there. When Firaxis released the War of the Chosen expansion, they reworked the time limit so you could safely ignore it and play the game at your own pace. So why are we going back to that?

I was in Chapter 9 (out of 14) playing a mission where I had to get to a spaceport, retrieve data from a console, and then return to the start of the mission. Meanwhile, a red area was slowly moving behind me, being bombarded by "ships" off-screen every turn, and I definitely didn't want to stay in it because it would damage my units.

So what happened was that one enemy unit had a reaction to being hit by Hawks. This reaction was called "drain," and in practice, it meant the enemy ran across half the map right to my guy (huh?), drained all his action points, and stunned him for one turn (OP). I was starting to get nervous. The red zone, where the ships were supposed to fire every turn, was approaching, but I still had at least one more turn because Hawks was stunned outside of this red zone. He would have to get out of it in the next turn. I could have done it, sure, it would have been tight, but not impossible. So, I ended my turn.

The ships off-screen fired, the red zone behind my group exploded, I got an achievement, and a huge GAME OVER screen appeared. I could only press X, which took me back to the main menu, and the only option was to start a new game. All my campaign progress was gone, and there was nothing else to do.

I just shook my head, ejected the disc from the PS5, packed it back up, and went to return it to the store. I looked it up later and found out I'm not the only one who had this bug. The developers' response to this problem was: "Don't play in Ironman mode and load a previous save." Well, that was completely useless to me in my situation.

I've never had anything like this happen to me. Never. I couldn't finish this game (twice!) from start to finish. In my opinion, zero out of ten is for something that simply doesn't work. Even the worst game deserves at least 1 point.

In the end, it's very poetic that Zero Company gets a 0/10 from me. Damn, at least I can use the money to buy the upcoming Blood of Dawnwalker.