《Star Wars Zero Company》评测

An already winning genre is matched with the perfect setting in this earnest, heartfelt, smart and slightly ramshackle turn-based tactics gem.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise something obvious about Star Wars Zero Company. The fate of its eponymous crew - short of cash, betrayed by the shifting sands of circumstance in a tumultuous wider world, scrambling to just about get the job over the line - is really a lot like that of its developers at Bit Reactor. Furloughed for about a month before the game was released, those staff have clearly hustled and scrapped and fought to the last. And so Zero Company the game bears the signs of its development. In places it feels a little patched together, a little under-ready, a game that launched into the world like a roguish pilot might launch a half-repaired starfighter. The windscreen's rattling, warning lights are flashing, one particularly hirsute engineer is deeply unimpressed at the decision to take off, and nobody knows where that ominous groaning noise is coming from. But somehow she's up. And in the end that's all that counts.

Zero Company is not a tidy game, then - truly, I've a list of nitpicks longer than this review - but it is also a bit of a gem. There's so much love here. At times it borders on the saccarine, some characters getting a little too wistful, moments of crewmate dialogue a little too breathy, too aww, shucks. But I've an enduring soft spot for games where you can feel the development of it as you play. And it's more than just the slightly taped-together vibes that give Zero Company that impression here. You can feel the development of this game because you can feel the thinking behind it. The many hours that years-long experts of turn-based tactics (many Bit Reactor devs have pedigree at Firaxis, developer of the modern XCOM games) have spent sat in, I'd like to imagine, a big, comfortable chair. Perhaps with their feet resting, legs crossed, up on their desk. And staring intently at the ceiling until the solution to one design problem or another presented itself. A game I imagine as being developed much the same as it's played.

A nice twist, however, is in how relaxed that playing can be. Zero Company's default difficulty is on the easy side, pitched at newcomers to the turn-based tactical genre, and in turn it makes for a perfect match to the source material. Star Wars Zero Company is set in the late Clone Wars era - roughly parallel to Episode 3, in other words - which also happens to be the prime kids TV era. This is the time when Obi Wan Kenobi was a cool action figure warrior-general with big shoulder pads and there were lots of Trooper dudes with names like Rex diving around shooting their lasers. It's also the period that plays home to Andor, the gloriously realised political melodrama about revolution, solidarity, and the banality of evil under fascism, perched right at the opposite end of the Star Wars Seriousness Spectrum. And so Zero Company has these two, ostensibly opposing threads running through it, tasking it with somehow tying together light entertainment and timely introspection. And somehow, it does it quite well.

The default difficulty is part of the reason why (though there are hard and ironman-like modes for the true tacticos and sickos out there, of course). There's a novelty to angling a game in this genre - a genre more often associated with those iron men - at the casual crowd, in aiming for breeziness and satisfaction first. This is my first time enjoying one of these games as a good old-fashioned romp, where there might be the occasional grabbing of a hat beneath the closing door but, broadly speaking, you will find yourself playing as the good guys who ultimately always come out on top.

That pairs nicely with Zero Company's take on telling a story. Rather than the XCOM approach of an aggressively replayable campaign with a feather-light narrative layer, Zero Company has a proper beginning-middle-end story. This is where the Andor side of things comes in. Zero Company is far from that level of writing and execution, unfortunately, and perhaps expectedly. It relays its themes broadly and a little clunkily, falling into familiar video game traps that so often feel unavoidable because of the way the game itself is structured.

Characters, for instance, often need to deliver entire backstories in a couple of throwaway lines - lines which most players might never hear because they didn't opt to talk to the right static NPC between the right missions. Or which they might hear a variation of multiple times because they talked to them at every opportunity, and developers need to make sure those skip-lots-of-conversations players get their required minimum exposition to know what's going on. There's also a lot of overly-breathy voice work - Jae, who has a moderately interesting background as a kind of ore-baron nepo baby who wants to do good, is a particular culprit of the kind of over-earnestness that can jar just a little.

The truth is a lot of Star Wars media is always going to struggle to execute its themes with the sophistication we now know to be possible, post-Andor. But what helps Zero Company is that those themes are at least there, and more than that, they're both fully understood and delivered with heartfelt sincerity. There's a wonderful transition, which I'll try not to spoil, where this crew's story shifts from underdog adventure-romp (that's the third of Star Wars' three pillars accounted for: original trilogy ruffian-camp), through Clone Wars action melodrama, and out the other side into something about bigger ideas. I only wish it had gone on for a little longer after that point - you'll know it when you play it - to give that final part a bit more time to breathe.

All that said, I expect most people coming to Zero Company are coming because you can conveniently shorten it to ZCOM. This is a tactics game from tactics virtuosos, ultimately, and in the playing is where it really shows. The big twist for XCOM fans is the removal of the two-action limit. Here you get three, though rather than that simply feeling like action point creep - like before, but more! - it's another decision I can feel the armchair thinking in. The genius of two is the simplicity, and the tension that comes from it. Move and shoot, or move further? By moving to three action points - but, crucially, in doing so making some actions cost one point, some two, some three or all the points you have left - you introduce a new kind of tension. Now it matters even more which character shoots first, and at whom.

An example: Trick, a trusty ex-Republic trooper, has an automatic 'repeater' blaster that, when used, consumes all his remaining action points, doing more damage the more he has left to spend. This means he can only ever shoot at one enemy per turn, but also that he can do a lot of damage to that one enemy if he stays still. Or he can move quite far - two thirds of the maximum range - and still do a little damage at the end. Now you have an interesting choice to make: do you make Trick a single-target nuke for taking chunks of HP out of elites? Or do you send him off on quests to pick off puny, dead-in-one-shot battle droids? Over the course of a single battle he could be both.

All this is instantly more sophisticated when you add in each character's various abilities - both passive and active - and items. I opted for my delightfully customisable main character, Hawkes, to be a sharpshooter, giving him a sniper rifle and some excellent sniper-related skills. He can zero in, gaining a load of stacks of lethality - critical chance, accuracy - in exchange for one of his three points. That sniper rifle takes the remaining two to fire, and all those stacks are lost if he moves or is otherwise rudely displaced. He, like all named characters, also comes with a few unique aspects too, such as being able to give another ally an extra action point, and providing a couple passive buffs.

Those active abilities require you to spend a resource called Advantage, which builds up as you land hits on enemies through the course of an encounter, up to a maximum of 10. At harder difficulties or in tougher encounters this quickly becomes part of your planning: I want to use this ability, but am a little short of Advantage. Do I instead just do something else with that character, or do I use another character to land some hits, build up the Advantage, and go with my original plan? Then the synergies start to kick in.

Cly Kullervo, for instance, has low-cost abilities such as her hugely helpful jetpack, and an electric dart you ideally want to stack up en masse, before triggering one huge, multiplying explosion. That already works nicely with her pistol, which can be fired three times for three Advantage-building hits, but it's even better if you have another character like, say, Tel-Rea Vokoss. As a Jedi Padawan (smartly introduced as a real novice, to keep her deftly balanced), she can push and pull enemies around repeatedly and into one another - both for racking up multiple hits and, if you're clever, disposing of tougher foes in one hit for a bit of good old-fashioned lobbing off the edge of the map. By the end I often found myself using those two, plus Kabb Uppercut, built as an attention-drawing tank, for their excellent dovetailing kits.

But then Jae, for all her sins, has an extremely useful execution ability that picks off an enemy left on low health from almost anywhere on the map. You can work that in with one of Zero Company's other great additions, Assists, for some lovely chain reactions. Each turn, one of your operators gets the option to call for another operator who'll take a free shot at the next enemy the first operator attacks. More than once I found myself nodding proudly at my own late night reflection in the PC monitor, after triggering a chain of attack, assist, execution. Or better yet, you could use an ability to make an operator such as Kabb retaliate after getting a hit. So Kabb could, in theory, call for an assist, shoot an enemy that retaliates, have his ally shoot them for the assist, then get shot by them, then retaliate, then have Jae relieve them of their final chunk of HP from halfway across the map. You could use an ability that lets Kabb assist the next ally who attacks. You could build him so he does lots of extra assist damage. On and on.

The missions themselves are, broadly speaking, enjoyable enough. There are a couple of standouts - escaping along a long bridge that's being blown up behind you is good fun, as are a couple of similarly dynamic missions right towards the end of the story. A few too many follow a slightly rote format of going in and rescuing a temporary extra party member, activating a button, or standing in a zone, although these are the ones that get a fair bit more enjoyable when the challenge is higher.

These are also, typically, the more optional missions, which is where the other half of Zero Company comes in. Like so many others in the genre, there's an element of base management to be overseen between the missions themselves. This time, in what feels like a nod to another Firaxis game in Marvel's Midnight Suns, that base is a physical space you can run around in third-person. This is where those largely static NPCs loiter, your crewmates waiting to pop out a little exposition or mission-by-mission character development on request. At times they are actually quite lovely - I will forever love Kabb's strangely endearing cockney-like dialect, where he seems to speak entirely in rhymey-timey versions of the types of idioms I have spent my life aggressively editing out of video game reviews.

Specific places in your base also act as the various necessary upgrade stations. Each character has a skill tree - later upgraded into two skill trees, the second offering a choice of any character class, which is a nice twist. These are a relatively light touch, some upgrades doing the classic plus-some-percent-crit-chance that can slide under the radar somewhat. But many, even with minor improvements, have a subtly important impact. Upgrading a skill all the way to the end of the tree just to take it from two Advantage points cost to one sounds minor, but can make all the difference in a tight encounter. And those crit chances can, at least, be built up to really significant levels, where with the right play there's a good chance of a crit on almost every shot taken.

Slightly less effective are the Black Market store and the upgrades to the base itself. Both of these were, in my experience, just too expensive to actually implement to the point of making a meaningful difference. On standard difficulty I bought maybe one item in my entire run, the rest being earned as rewards or from various other upgrades (all of this with in-universe credits earned from completing missions, to be clear). Likewise with the base upgrades: the rewards from missions mean you can afford to take roughly one upgrade per 'cycle', with each upgrade typically taking one or two cycles to complete, and you later being able to do two or three upgrades at a time. All of which is to say: you just upgrade them one at a time, with little meaningful choice or strategy to the approach because you simply can't afford to do anything else.

There's a similarly light touch to Operations, a kind of mini-mission system that you must go through each cycle before you undertake that cycle's one mission. These are FTL-like choice-based, text-only scenarios - sometimes dilemmas, sometimes a choice of three equally okay rewards - that can also occasionally impact your bond with crewmates. In being text-only and largely very short and simple, they felt a smidge underrealised, almost as though the third-person view, only used around the base and in introductory snippets of main story missions, originally existed as the vehicle through which you'd be doing these operations instead, only to be cut back at some point along the way.

Bit Reactor could also have skipped the third-person sections of missions themselves. These are brief interludes or prologues to the main story missions themselves, and often little more than a case of jogging in a straight line and scanning two things when prompted. They feel like a legacy of a game with a bit more ambition than it could afford. Perhaps with another six months in the oven - with its staff having not been furloughed before the game even arrived - they'd have been cut, smartly papered over and worked around; us players never knowing they'd even existed. This is what I mean by Zero Company being a game that seems to wear its development in the open.

Lastly on the limitations front, those inter-character bonds, too, feel a little too easy to ignore. Increasing your bond with a character - by taking them on missions, doing assists with them, making Operations decisions they agree with - gives a kind of XP boost to your bond. After enough XP your Bond levels up, then you get a choice of three bonuses for both characters. The motivation then is to increase the bond through the thresholds but, as far as I could gather, that's about the only benefit, and so in the end they feel like a kind of background bonus to simply playing the game over time, rather than with any specific intentionality behind it.

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Attribution

These systems do, though, provide a kind of colour and texture to Zero Company that still has merit in its own right. They're layers. Most of them, on their own, can feel a little lightweight, but combined they still mesh together nicely. What Zero Company does so well is to always give you a decision to make, always a pathway to optimise, an option to prioritise. These management layers work so well over turn-based tactics games because fundamentally they're tapping into that same part of the brain: how can I best allocate my very limited resources with all the information at hand? What are tactics, after all, if not a test of maximising efficiency in a series of individual moments; a part of a strategy that tests your ability to then find that efficiency consistently over time?

This is the magic with Zero Company, ultimately. There are brilliant revisions to the formula here that add nuance and tension and decision points, layering on complexity without complication. There are wonderful moments of theming and tone: through one of Star Wars' richest moments in time, through some deeply likeable characters, and through the old chestnut of emergent storytelling too, as you scramble to get your no-name Glupp Shitto-alike out of one particularly hairy mission alive. And there's depth here if you wish to mine for it. But above all it's just another example of an endlessly winning formula. Of action figures, cartoons, dramas, chessboards, and bottomless pits you can drop bad guys into, with all the glorious, goofball sounds and sights that Star Wars can slather over the top. And on top of all that, it's a game with its developers' earnest effort bursting through it at every opportunity. It's not perfect. It's also just impossible not to love.

A copy of Star Wars Zero Company was provided for this review by EA.