I still remember where I was when I heard that Firaxis was making a Marvel game. While the game I dreamt of – XCOM with the Marvel license – ended up differing pretty substantially from what we ultimately got with Marvel’s Midnight Suns, I still thoroughly enjoyed the unique deckbuilding and social mechanics layered on top of the turn-based tactics I had come to love about Firaxis.
However, with many of the developers who created XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns departing Firaxis to form Bit Reactor, and that studio announcing its debut game to be a Star Wars title, it was safe to say I was excited at the prospects of the end result. And now that I’ve spent upwards of 10 hours exploring the Galaxy Far, Far Away in this turn-based tactics experience, I’m finally getting the licensed tactics game that hits many of the same notes that made me fall in love with XCOM back in 2012.
Back to Square Zero
The Maryland-based Bit Reactor was founded in 2021 by several former members of Civilization and XCOM developer Firaxis Games. Co-founder and director Greg Foertsch, who spent 22 years at Firaxis, was joined by several other former Firaxis developers, as well as team members from other studios with diverse backgrounds, which Foertsch says brings new spins and perspectives to that core group’s way of thinking. However, having that foundational group of Firaxis employees helped Bit Reactor hit the ground running, even though the studio was started during the COVID-19 remote work period.
“We were starting this up while people were remote, but we haven’t just shipped one game together… a lot of us have shipped four or five games together, and have been together for decades, not just a year or two,” Foertsch says. “We’re a weird company in that we’re a completely independent startup, and we have days where, from a business side, we’re a startup, but we’ve got the soul of a much older team, and we’ve got a shorthand with each other. We have trust. All those things are so important to building a game that if you don’t have them, they create hurdles. We were, out of the gate, able to sidestep some of the early startup stuff because of our experience together and, most importantly, our trust in each other.”
Bit Reactor was always going to make a turn-based tactics game for its debut title. However, it was the late Vince Zampella, former head of Respawn Entertainment, who pushed Bit Reactor to create a Star Wars game. “I wanted to work with existing IP to begin with; it’s a hurdle that’s taken care of for you, and you can focus on the game part of it and the studio part of it,” Foertsch says. “Vince ended up calling me and said, ‘Hey, can you talk to me about what you want to make?’ And I did, and I can’t say enough about Vince having the vision and conviction to let us pursue this. […] I was pitching a few other places before I talked to Vince, and then once I talked to Vince, I steered all of my attention toward Vince and Respawn because I felt that ideologically, we aligned. Vince believed in developers, and it’s not just about where your funding comes from, it’s about making sure that the people you’re working with understand game and understand that there’s a point where they don’t look good, and understand that there’s a point where, ‘Wow, why did I ever go on a journey to make this thing?’ But that if you have faith in the process, eventually you come out with something great, and you just have to stick with it. So that became pretty clear to me that we matched up well.”
Once that match was made, Electronic Arts signed on to publish the game, with Respawn helping Bit Reactor with development. Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi franchise takes place between the Prequel Trilogy and the Original Trilogy, telling the story of a Jedi taking on the Empire following the execution of Order 66. Bit Reactor decided to go a different route, telling a story during a well-trodden, but ripe part of Star Wars history: the Clone Wars. Despite having a long-running animated series devoted to explaining the events of the Clone Wars, Foertsch knew it was the right time period to tell the story he wants to tell. It turned out Lucasfilm agreed.
“The fact that there is so much stuff surrounding the Clone Wars allows us to put our story in that Clone Wars bubble, and it can kind of exist inside of this thing,” Foertsch says. “And so the edges of the Clone Wars kind of reach in and touch it a little bit, but you’ve got this little bubble that the player is in, and they’re playing a story that’s new and fresh and different, yet it’s got all the familiar stuff that we can pull in. So, if you’re a big Star Wars fan, you’re going to have lots of little things where you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a deep cut! That’s really cool!’ If you’re not, you’ll learn about some of those things. It’s a way to position us to tell a really good story with enough familiar elements available to bind it.”
As someone who loves both XCOM and Star Wars, I couldn’t wait to dive into the pre-release preview build, which gave me unfettered access to the first several missions of the game, leading up to a climactic battle that gives a big nod to that broader Clone Wars era. That conclusion served as the exclamation point for my time with Star Wars Zero Company, but it was far from the only highlight.
Telling You The Odds
Star Wars Zero Company casts you as Hawks, the fully customizable leader of Zero Company, a ragtag group of mercenaries who start off working jobs for the Republic before slowly unraveling a mystery surrounding a fanatical cult. This cult, The Infinite Coil, is led by Kundri Fathom, who infects all members and initiates with a plague that improves their physical strength seemingly at the cost of their mind and free will. After the first couple of hours, The Infinite Coil establishes itself as insidious, capable, and relentless. Not only that, but it aligns itself with the Separatists and its army of battle droids.
At the start of the story, Hawks is on a mission with Zero Company, which consists of a Rodian named Aurelio, a Clone Trooper named Trick, and a retired Felshi boxer called Kabb Uppercut. By the end of my time playing, I also added a Jedi and a Mandalorian bounty hunter. Each of these characters has an authored personality and signature look, which might lead you to think they’re irreplaceable. That would be a mistake. As you navigate the turn-based tactical combat, which makes up the bulk of the Star Wars Zero Company experience, there are various ways your play impacts the story and future battles. If you do everything great, leaning on your teammates and relying on assists, your characters will level up, earn focus points to upgrade their abilities, and even develop stat-boosting bonds that make your squad even more formidable. That happened the vast majority of the time. However, it wasn’t always cause for celebration.
Star Wars Zero Company carries forward the common convention of permadeath, so while I was consistently recruiting new members of Zero Company, it wasn’t always due to expansion. In fact, this may be telling on myself for some of the boneheaded moves I made, but by the time I reached the end of my demo, only Hawks and one other Zero Company member from the start of the story remained alive. Sure, I could have reset the mission and tried again, but that feels disingenuous to the way it’s intended to be played. Not only that, but I appreciate the emergent stories that come out of just pushing forward in the game no matter how things go.
“The narrative team did an awesome job on that,” Foertsch says. “We wanted to make sure that the characters provided some archetypes for people to latch to and are familiar with, but weren’t so heavy that you couldn’t attach – like, they didn’t bring too much backstory. Trying to balance that amount of archetype and character and backstory that you bring with your ability to still be able to latch on to these authored heroes as much as the ones that you custom-make was a real big goal for us. I think we’ve threaded it pretty well for people.”
Outside of combat, you can use your intel points to undergo menu-based operations that earn you credits, regional reputation, new tactical missions, and other rewards. You can use your credits to upgrade your base with new modules, upgrade your squadmates with new skills and equipment, send teammates to the medbay for healing, and even purchase new weapons on the Black Market.
There are also gameplay areas where the camera abandons its typical isometric perspective in favor of swinging behind Hawks as he navigates various Star Wars environments. Often, these sequences are quick or inconsequential, but they do add a small touch of gameplay diversity and a heap of immersion you can’t get from a bird’s-eye view. This is especially true in your base, which you explore in the third-person perspective. Walking around the base, talking with teammates, and interacting with different base modules directly gave me Mass Effect vibes, which perfectly complements the kind of story Bit Reactor hopes to tell.
My only major concern from my time with Star Wars Zero Company is the seeming lack of mission variety. While the maps are all thoughtfully crafted, the missions often boil down to eliminating all enemies or reaching a point of interest before evacuating your squad while more enemies spawn in. While those are tried-and-true tactics classics, I was more excited when missions with more variety popped up. One of those had me rescue a downed ally, then blast our way out of the sticky situation alongside the rescued operative. Another broke up the tactical gameplay with a brief espionage sequence in which Hawks donned an officer’s outfit and infiltrated a restricted area to gather intelligence.
Fascinatingly, despite playing on my desktop PC, I only used keyboard and mouse for half of my time playing. I picked up my Xbox controller just to quickly see how it feels and never went back. That may seem sacrilegious for longtime tactics players, but for Bit Reactor, it was by design. “We’ve considered controller just as much as we’ve considered keyboard and mouse,” Foertsch says.
Star Wars Zero Company thoroughly impressed me from the time I started. I cherished each well-executed plan. I cursed my squadmates’ missed shots despite the 90-percent chance of hitting. I gripped my controller tight as the Coil and battle droids descended upon my injured team from multiple angles. I mourned those I lost along the way. I celebrated those who survived and leveled up. But the most telling aspect of my time with Bit Reactor’s debut game is that even after spending more than 10 hours with these characters, I can’t wait to reassume the role of Hawks and lead Zero Company to another hard-fought victory.
A Familiar Hope
I went into my demo expecting an experience that might lightly scratch the XCOM itch I perpetually have. I didn’t expect Star Wars Zero Company to scratch it with the intensity of a lightsaber. I came away from my time with Bit Reactor’s leap into the Star Wars galaxy not only excited to see where the story goes and who might show up, but also feeling incredibly compelled to jump back in for more tactical missions. The gameplay loop, the tactical combat, and the impactful choice and risk/reward mechanics all amount to a formula for something potentially special. Add in the Star Wars dressing, and the nostalgia factor amps the anticipation up even more.
As Foertsch looks ahead to the launch of Star Wars Zero Company in just two weeks, he understands that the gaming world is perhaps more ready to embrace the tactics genre than it was in 2012 when Firaxis retooled the XCOM series. “Our mission is to challenge that space, the thought that these games are niche; they’re not, and we’re about to bring the biggest franchise in the world to it, and hope that people come along for the ride on it and can understand and accept it,” Foertsch says. “A lot of the things that interfered with the genre coming over in the early 2000s are gone, and I think people are more open to, ‘It’s just a great game.’ Final Fantasy Tactics is a great game. I don’t think of it as a tactics game; it’s just a great game. I think we’re starting to see a gamer population that’s more open to, ‘It’s a good game, cool story, cool mechanics, it’s something different.'”
And with an IP like Star Wars, Zero Company may just have a noteworthy leg up over other titles in the tactics space, a feeling further amplified by the fact that it’s crafted by several masters of the genre. However, we won’t know for sure how far-reaching it is until Star Wars: Zero Company arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on August 27.
