Why You Liked … Star Wars: Zero Company

I’m going to spoil the ending of a 43-year-old movie here, but the close of Return of the Jedi needed to be better than “villain turns good and dies.” I mean, the rest of the movie was great! All the parts that didn’t involve barbecuing Ewoks, that is. Back in 1983, George Lucas let us believe a galaxy-spanning military dictatorship could be dismantled by a teddy bear with a rock and a last-minute change of heart. To misquote Ben Kenobi, it was a beautiful, elegant conclusion for a more civilised age. But the Star Wars of today knows that toppling an empire just leaves you holding a bucket of greasy ashes.

We can go home again in 2026, but we have to pay the boatman.

There are, canonically, 9 good Star Wars movies, ignoring the made-for-TV Ewok nonsense (and you should totally ignore Caravan of Courage and The Battle for Endor unless you like hurting yourself).

There are also 4 excellent Star Wars games… or there were, until now. A fifth has joined their ranks. Star Wars: Zero Company has arrived, and it’s the Mass Effect sequel we never got, the Andor tie-in we never deserved, and it totally makes up for the hard fail of The Phantom Menace. Okay, maybe not: it doesn’t have the power of the divine! But it’s the story I can’t stop thinking about the most.

Wait, story? Wasn’t this about a game? We’ll get to that. First, let’s toss democracy out with the bathwater. 

The Intentional Politics of Star Wars

I was once asked at a job interview if I preferred Star Wars to Star Trek. I knew immediately it was the kind of place I wanted to work, but that’s beside the point. There’s a place in my heart for both, but I’m a Star Wars kid right to the core. There are lots of reasons for this, from the sublime artistic substrate of Ralph McQuarrie, the soaring music of John Williams, and right up to the world-building and vision of Big Hair Lucas.

A real power of the stories told in this universe is that you can totally leave your brain in a jar at the ticket booth and just enjoy the lightsaber duels and pod races. Star Wars doesn’t ask much of you as you journey to a galaxy far, far away, but the political superstructure isn’t subtle. Structuring the Empire and Rebellion’s conflict on the Vietnam War was pretty ballsy, but Lucas didn’t stop there, basing the visual design of the Empire on Nazi Germany uniforms. The cheering that ushers in the fall of democracy is inspired by the fall of the Roman Republic, the rise of Napoleon, and the political climate of the early 2000s. I’m fairly sure Lucas would have had something to say about today’s political climate as well, but he sold Star Wars to Disney in 2012. He may not have been great at writing dialogue, but the man knew a Nazi when he saw one.

Zero Company is built on the same DNA. It’s set in the twilight of the Clone Wars, sneaking in right around the events in Revenge of the Sith. You even meet a pre-Vadered Anakin, and kick some ass alongside him. The game bridges the gap into the early days of the Empire, handing over to Andor and showing the immediate aftermath of the war. It holds the door open for the Imperial era we see in Solo and Rogue One.

This is not a good time to be a free-thinking sentient organic.

But like any good Star Wars story, you can engage with the politics or leave your brain in that jar. There are plenty of blaster bolts, thermal detonators, droids, Clones, and rocket launchers to go around. And if you root around in the trash compactor, there’s even a spare Padawan in there somewhere.

Combat for Conflict Resolution

There’s an old saying from the wise man himself: blasters solve problems. Zero Company is richly festooned with just the kind of ordinance that means you don’t have to use your words to communicate. Someone receiving your thermal detonator overarm is going to appreciate that this has gone beyond mediation.

The game starts looking a lot like X-Com, complete with four-in-a-row 85% chance-to-hit shots missing. It’s learned a lot from its older sibling, and soon enough you get a collection of miscreants, desperados, and lost souls to join your mercenary company. The setup is simple: you are a fool, and you got yourself in deep with the Hutts. They are as consistently heavy, or perhaps heavy-handed, as they are in the original trilogy. Gorga the Hutt gave you a loan and has begun the squeeze.

Not to worry, though, because bright-eyed Republic intelligence officer Bennic Halloren presents you with an offer. Take part in his series of deniable suicide missions, and he’ll square away your debt. He’s good for it, too, and he’s got fury on his side in the form of Jae Mordant, an Ore-Baroness from Luunata who is absolutely merciless.

And so begins Zero Company’s ride to redemption. Along the way you’ll do standard X-Com style things. Upgrade the base. Level your heroes. Recruit new ones. There’s a sting in the tail here, though: these people can die. While the Den is populated with an outstanding cast in Runa Blask, your sometime financial adviser, sometime operations truth-talker, M-3VO, a robot who taught sarcasm classes before winding up as your medic and pilot, mechanics Clev and Disha who seem to do nothing useful, and Neesh Renark, a sort of black-market-meets-kitchen-hand dude, the rest of the inflow can be flatlined in the field.

It creates more personal attachment with the heroes you recruit, and a great deal of that is based on excellent writing coupled with game mechanics. There are named heroes: your friends Trick, Luco, Kabb, Jae, Cly, and best girl Tel’Rea. There are also ten distinct personalities given to redshirts, such as the Mentor, the Maverick, and the Professional. When you get yourself a custom recruit, the personality you choose dictates their voice, their dialogue during missions, and how they interact with others back at the ranch. These personalities rise up to face-rake you during the game’s narrative Dilemmas. They bicker, they support each other, and they are huge pains in the asses just as they are valiant in backing each other when the chips are down.

Through the game’s 40 or so Cycles and 35-hour runtime, you’ll fight for the Republic and watch its inevitable fall. We all knew it was coming, so… why did we fight when we knew how it was going to end? It’s because of these let’s-call-them-heroes. Throughout the plot, a reasonably brisk character-action affair, we see the same Republic become the same Empire, but we see it through different eyes. We feel it through the failings of our Padawan, Tel’Rea. Through the broken life of Mandalorian Cly Kellervo, where there’s nothing left but shards and bones. We see Kabb’s horrible background, his stoic presence all the more heroic once we learn the truth. And Trick – what’s behind that broken-down soldier’s facade? Is it friendship, a companion, or something much, much darker? Luco Bronc starts as an asshole, but aren’t we all in a war; his best beloved, Rhy, was murdered by Clones. He’s got anger management issues and excellent aim, but he’ll also find brotherhood again in the least likely of places: serving the Republic that destroyed his life.

The game could have taken the easy path, given us the trite ending where we all just hug it out. But Zero Company knows this wouldn’t be the iron price. It wants you to fear what happens to these heroes, because fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. And we all need to suffer for redemption to mean anything at all.

I have never felt more inclined to protect a computer-generated companion in my life.

Time for a Cameo

One thing I respected quite a lot about Zero Company is how it knows its material. During the trailer, the YouTube comments went nuts for Captain Rex. People noticed Anakin up there in the big lights, and his missions are fun for sure, because he kind of kicks ass for the Lord.

But I went nuts when I heard Trilla on the comm.

If you know, you know.

One of the best things to come out of Star Wars has been the Cal Kestis Jedi games. Cal’s on his own journey, a man carrying the psychological burden of being a survivor. You get to become a powerful Jedi, sure, but to get there you need to navigate trauma, isolation, and the constant, constant temptation to give in to despair. It’s this last that’s the most powerful component of the second game’s close.

And to get there, Cal has to have a conversation with Trilla Suduri.

Zero Company is a little guilty of borrowing someone else’s homework here, but the use of Trilla and the mission she’s in gave me pause when it booted up. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for this, not with the team I had. My Force user was a Padawan, and the rest of them … I mean, do you remember how Jedi can deflect blaster bolts with lightsabers?

It’s this kind of excellent use of previously learned narrative that gives sublime double layering to some of Zero Company’s moments. Yes, we know about Order 66, but we get to play the moment when friends suddenly … aren’t. We know what fighting the Second Sister was like when we were a Jedi Knight, but now… we’re not.

And that conflict isn’t even the real deal. The game orbits villain Kundri Fathom, a woman infected with a mysterious Coil Plague. Infected, but not suffering, because the Coil gains recruits through a bit of a rough ceremony, becoming biological puppets dancing at the end of her strings. The game leans into the questions of free will, and what it would mean if bad things suddenly all made sense. It is a shadow theatre of how people are manipulated by forces they don’t understand, can’t combat, or even comprehend. Fathom is a worse Facebook than Meta could ever design.

All of this is backed by exactly the kind of sound and visual spectacle you’d expect from anything going through a Star War. While the technical performance of the game is… let’s call it highly uneven, the visuals, music, and sound design show the kind of artistry that makes me wish I was good enough at literally anything to work at Industrial Light and Magic.

The game designers and narrators knew the property left to right and up and down, from the story bedrock through to what the sound of an ion cannon should feel like when the bass is up so loud you can feel it in your colon.

Unfortunately, Mos Eisley Exists

While Zero Company has been made with a lot of heart and a tremendous amount of intelligence, it’s not perfect. Those imperfections were more annoying than deal-breaking, but as Lando learned the hard way, it’s super important to know how the deal may be altered against you.

There are three flaws with Zero Company. 

1. Erratic difficulty,
2. Shit performance, and 
3. Timers and artificial drama

Erratic difficulty is the easiest one to tackle and probably your real make-or-break with the game. As you cruise through the game’s opening hours, you might be tempted to think, “You know what, maybe this game isn’t that difficult. I’ve got this,” and crack a Solo-esque smile at your wife who’s enjoying watching it from her navigator’s perch on the couch.

Then: the Coil.

These guys storm onto the scene with all manner of exciting abilities that make the Jedi Council look like Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po. They regenerate. They retaliate. They hit like a truck and have the health reserves of one, too. Critically, they come in a volume-discount bulk-buy pack, and with these skills unavailable to you at the early game stage, you can feel like this has turned from X-Com into a woodchipper simulator, and to be clear about the analogy, you’re the wood.

The difficulty remains precipitous until you level up to slightly before the dual skill trees come online for your own team. It’s brought into contrast by some of your S-Tier units like Tel-Rea and Cly feeling like extras in a clown show, because their own game-changing powers aren’t really evident until a lot of levelling has gone on. You can of course turn down the difficulty, but wars weren’t won on Easy, son.

The second problem is performance, and there’s no real fixing this. BitReactor has pushed out some updates and a setting or two to help with the problem, but the ultimate sin is that it seems to have been designed with 1080p in mind. On my ROG Xbox Ally X, this runs on Medium fairly well at 1080p, with FSR on Quality. On my 4070 Super, it runs at High at 4K, but somewhat reluctantly, requiring frame generation to get close to 100fps. It doesn’t look quite good enough for this, and while it’s not Borderlands 4 levels of woe, it’s not great, Chief. However, on a 3070, it’s miserable. That machine just can’t really crack a decent 60fps even at Low settings, with both the CPU and GPU hovering close to 100% utilisation. Something’s fucky. It’s not going to break the game as this isn’t a twitch shooter, but it’s annoying.

The final problem is the one that didn’t need to exist. The game has Dilemmas, a sort of desk test where you have a question like, “Should we help the stranded freighter?” You choose an option, say: doing it for free. Some of your mercs will get sandy over it and lose Bond with you, while others high-five your dope management skills. These are, broadly, fine outcomes – you should be able to balance your way through the game and not have anyone exit out the back door, but some of your dudes will align closer with you by the end. 

However, when it comes to story missions, it’s a pisser. You’ll get conflicts where one named companion will want to do X, another Y, and you have to choose. You can’t, despite having a roster of 20 dudes, go on both missions. You need to go through a Sophie’s Choice and decide which one you love the most. This hit peak irritation just the once, and if memory serves it was a choice between Luco and best girl Tel-Rea. The problem here was Luco – I’d started to like this guy. Or, I could get his motivations, at least. I knew why he was angry all the time, and I was on board the revenge train.

The game said, “You know what? Nah. Your character must be on both missions.”

It turns out this doesn’t actually matter that much. It’s totally synthetic, because Luco can make it to the podium finish. You can still have a highly loyal squad. It also reduces the actual amount of game you get to play by reducing two missions into one. I felt there needed to be a better solution, perhaps even a simple options toggle to disable this nonsense. Mods exist to do just that now, so if you use them, I won’t tell anyone.

It’s a false anxiety that didn’t need to exist, a mechanical punishment in a game that already excels at punishing you narratively. You can mod away a frustrating conflict, but you can’t mod away the consequences of your poor decision-making skills. And that brings us to the real meat of Zero Company.

The Steep Hill to Redemption

In 2013, PR executive Justine Sacco boarded an 11-hour flight to South Africa. What made this momentous wasn’t the destination or the in-flight meal. It was her departure tweet: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

2013 was a different time. No in-flight Wi-Fi, for one. Sacco arrived after 11 hours of radio silence to find she’d been publicly fired after her tweet went viral. See, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended globally. People demanded her head. First example of cancel culture?

Well.

The internet didn’t invent the inability to forgive. Pop culture has been wrestling with the permanence of our mistakes for decades. Star Wars has been aware of this for a long-ass time. Spoilers again, but Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker. His road to ruin was a little more robustly paved than a stray tweet, as he murdered everyone at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, including a bunch of kids, when Revenge of the Sith landed in 2005. He didn’t have to tweet about it, because he made sure everyone knew! But this road to villainy and ruin was laid in the bedrock of 1977’s A New Hope. Lucas knew that to make a villain who wouldn’t flinch, they had to fear coming back from the Dark Side.

To stop being Vader, he’d have to embrace the truth that Anakin had done something profoundly evil. He couldn’t be right about that decision to murder younglings. It’s not like any of their parents would give him a Light-Side participation trophy and forgive him, not least of which because he probably killed them, too.

There’s a particular thought I can’t stop turning over in my mind: if you’re a villain, and there’s no forgiveness, what’s the incentive to turn over a new leaf? If there’s no road back, not even a rutted track, then… how do you even think you can? Why would you?

Zero Company uses this foil effectively. Without spoiling the game or what happens, there’s a particular line that’s stayed with me. “We came down on opposite sides of a lose-lose situation.” One character is talking about another, a situation where shit turned south and kept going until it Thelma & Louise’d off the Order 66 cliff. What Zero Company understands is that for someone to come back from the edge of evil, there needs to be someone else willing to let them make that journey.

Not to forgive them, or say it’ll be okay. But someone who can see the whole of them, not that mistake that seems to have defined their life. There’s no easy path here, by the by. But Zero Company shows that perhaps part of being a hero is seeing how someone begins to become a villain. It’s not good-guys-wear-black.

It’s that, sometimes, we all wear black.

Each of Zero Company’s companion missions, alongside the main one, has some flavour of this. It’s war, man. Shit is complicated and messy. People are dying. There is no rainbow here, no unicorn at the end of it.

But the struggle is worth it. At the end, if you keep the squad together, if you fight the best fight you can… maybe you can help someone who needs it to come back.

New Beginnings

Zero Company is a top-five game for me. Not top five of the year. I mean top five. It’ll give you the chills when the brass kicks in on the main theme. It’s got excellent, chewy mechanics. It’s even got a Padawan party member so you can feel like a motherfucking Jedi and toss fools off of cliffs. And I haven’t even talked about the humour that balances out the darkness, or the voice cast who are at the top of their game. Seriously, Freeman’s work is S-tier, and he’s not alone.

It’s not that it’s mechanically perfect; it’s been beaten with the industry standard UE5 optimisation problems. It’s not that the company behind it is perfect, either; reporting seems to suggest the execs Order 66’d their own staff right before release because they couldn’t work out who should be in charge.

But something doesn’t need to be perfect to be excellent. The great parts need to be good enough to make you forgive or forget the bad. What Zero Company does is continue the evolution of the Star Wars fantasy. Knights of the Old Republic used dialogue and choice to make you question what it means to be a Jedi. Fallen Order and Survivor use their combat mechanics to make you feel the discipline, focus, and mastery required to be one. And Zero Company uses the political canvas and human tragedy of fascism, war, loss, betrayal, friendship, and forgiveness to pull back the curtain and show us a way back to our better selves.

Perhaps the writing team were fans of Anna Quindlen, who said, “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” Zero Company is unapologetically itself, but it’s also showing so many different types of people doing it hard, and still finding their own way through. They do it through grit, but they also do it together.

And maybe that’s all we really needed to know, to work out how to get through our own difficult times. I thought about closing this review out with something pithy, maybe, “If you are someone who misses the squad dynamics of classic Mass Effect; or if you are a Star Wars fan desperate for a story that treats you like an adult; or even if you are just a glutton for punishment who loves missing 85% chance-to-hit shots, play this game.”

But that’s not the whole truth, is it? This isn’t just a story for gamers. It’s a tale for people, as timeless as the universe it’s based on. So I say to you, those who believe in our better angels: if you are someone who has ever felt like they were on the wrong side of a lose-lose situation; or if you are someone who needs to believe that people can actually change; or even if you are just someone who needs a reminder that it’s never too late to turn the ship around… Zero Company has something you’ll love.

I wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful game.