Every so often a Star Wars game shows up that is not chasing the same audience as everything else on the shelf, and Star Wars Zero Company is one of those games. A single-player, turn-based tactics game set in the closing stretch of the Clone Wars is not something this franchise has really given us before, and as someone who has spent more than a decade writing about Galaxy of Heroes, a Star Wars game built around squad composition and turn order was always going to get my attention.
I want to be upfront about where I am coming from, because it shapes everything below. I am not an XCOM player. I have never really spent time with tactical battlefield games of this type at all. My Star Wars video game background is overwhelmingly Galaxy of Heroes, which shares some vocabulary with a game like this — squad composition, turn order, character roles — but plays nothing like it. So if you are a veteran of the genre, some of what follows is going to read as obvious. If you are coming to Zero Company the same way I am, as a Star Wars fan first and a tactics player a distant second, then we are in the same boat and I think you will find this useful.
Zero Company unlocked worldwide at 15:00 UTC on August 27, 2026, which was 11:00 AM Eastern for those of us in the States. There was no rolling midnight rollout and no early access window, so PS5, Xbox and PC players all started at the same moment. I picked up the Deluxe Edition, which adds the Grand Army of the Republic Cosmetic Pack, the Shadow Collective Cosmetic Pack and five painted weapon themes. Those are cosmetics only, so if you are on the fence about the upgrade, know that you are paying for armor and paint jobs rather than campaign content.
What follows are my thoughts from the opening of the game through the end of the tutorial mission. No deep strategy yet, no build recommendations, just first impressions as they happened.
Setting Up: Difficulty, Permadeath and Beskar Mode
Before you touch a single mission, Zero Company asks you a few questions that matter more than they might appear to.
There are four difficulty settings, and I went with Normal. There is also a separate toggle called Beskar Mode, which the game flags for advanced and expert players. Beskar Mode is the ironman-style option that stops you from reloading an earlier save, and it stacks on top of whichever difficulty you choose rather than replacing it. I left that one off for a first playthrough.
Permadeath, however, is its own switch, and it is on by default. I kept it on. Losing squad members permanently is exactly the kind of pressure that makes a tactics game interesting to me, and I would rather live with my mistakes than reload past them. Hawks, your player character, cannot be permanently killed, so if the squad leader goes down the mission simply restarts. Everyone else is fair game.
I also left the tutorials enabled, which turned out to be the right call.
Coruscant, Pong Krell and Creating Hawks
The game opens on Coruscant, and the first real piece of characterization we get is a good one: Hawks previously served under Pong Krell. For anyone who has watched The Clone Wars, that name carries weight. Krell is the Jedi general who deliberately fed his own clone troopers into a meat grinder on Umbara. Zero Company was formed in the aftermath of that service, which quietly tells you a lot about why Hawks builds a unit the way he does.
From there you get the character creator. You can adjust gender, appearance, species and voice, and Hawks can be recustomized later back at base if you change your mind. I kept the standard look. You also pick a starting weapon from four options, and I went with the blaster rifle.
The First Battle, and a Control Scheme That Needs a Better Explanation
The opening sequence starts in space and transitions into a ground fight alongside clone troopers, and this is where I ran into my first real friction with the game.
Moving units was not clicking for me. The radial menu tells you to select and confirm with X, and the game shows you your valid destinations clearly enough, but nothing was happening when I pressed the button. I hit the same wall with Hawks and then again trying to get Aurellio into cover, and spent longer than I would like to admit assuming I was misreading the interface.
The answer is that movement requires a double tap of X. Not a single press, not a hold. Once I figured that out everything opened up, but I want to be direct about this: the tutorial does not make it clear, and the on-screen prompt reading “confirm with X” actively points you in the wrong direction. This is a small thing that is going to cost some players their first fifteen minutes, and it should not.
I will grant that a genre veteran may have found this instantly. But that is sort of the point. Zero Company is going to pull in a lot of Star Wars fans who have never touched a game like this, and the opening minutes are exactly where you cannot afford to lose them.
Learning the Tools
Once the movement clicked, the tutorial did a solid job of layering in mechanics rather than dumping them all at once. After clearing out the B1 battle droids and getting through a story beat, a new wave of enemies arrives and the game walks you through positioning your troops, setting up Overwatch and using melee attacks. Meeting the next group of Separatist mercenaries went considerably smoother now that I understood what my options actually were.
The following engagement introduces grenades and calling for backup. That pacing worked for me. By the end of the tutorial I had a real sense of the verbs available to me instead of just a list of buttons.
The Squad, and the First Loss
The team through this opening consists of Hawks, a clone trooper, and a large blue alien who we first meet doing welding work. That last one I want to confirm on screen before I put a name to him, and I will follow up in a later article.
We also lose Aurellio, and the ship arrives to pull us out. The pickup is handled by M-3VO, a bipedal utility droid who serves as pilot and medic aboard the Caisson. That one has “recurring sidekick” written all over it.
I want to give Bit Reactor credit here. Losing a character in the opening mission, before permadeath has had a chance to take anyone from you, is a smart bit of design. The game shows you what loss feels like before it hands you the mechanic that can inflict it for real.
Meeting the Coil
The tutorial closes out with a wounded enemy who has just enough breath left to deliver a speech before he dies, and it is a genuinely unsettling scene once you know what you are looking at.
The faction is called the Infinite Coil, a Separatist-aligned paramilitary cult led by a figure named Kundri Fathom. Every member is infected with something called the Shadow Plague, which is why they come across as believers rather than hired guns. Importantly for the lore crowd, the Coil is not pulled from existing canon. It was created for this game, and it is being dropped into the Clone Wars as a threat operating alongside the war we already know.
The Ring of Kafrene, and a Note on the Graphics
The ship takes us back to home base at the Ring of Kafrene, which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has seen Rogue One. It is the trading post where Cassian Andor meets Tivik in the film’s opening act, and here we are visiting it roughly twenty years earlier.
On the visuals, I have mixed feelings this early. Up close, the game looks solid. Character models and interiors hold up well and the presentation is clean. The space environment surrounding the Ring of Kafrene is a different story, and it reads as very obviously a video game backdrop rather than a place. It did not break anything for me, but it is the first moment where the seams showed.
TL;DR: Early Impressions
- Zero Company launched simultaneously worldwide with no early access period.
- The Deluxe Edition is cosmetics only. No extra missions, no earlier start.
- Four difficulty tiers, plus a separate Beskar Mode for no save reloading. Permadeath is a third, independent toggle and it is on by default.
- Movement requires a double tap of X. The tutorial does not tell you this and the prompt is misleading.
- The tutorial layers in Overwatch, melee, grenades and backup at a comfortable pace.
- Hawks served under Pong Krell, which is a strong hook for Clone Wars fans.
- The Infinite Coil is a brand-new faction created for this game, not existing canon.
- Character models look good. The space skybox around Kafrene does not.
I am early enough that none of this should be read as a review, but the foundation here is promising. This is a real tactics game wearing Star Wars properly rather than a Star Wars game with tactics bolted on, and the Clone Wars setting is being used for more than set dressing.
For a genre newcomer, the more interesting question is whether that holds up once the training wheels come off and permadeath has actual teeth. I will find out the hard way. More to come as I get deeper into the campaign and start building out the squad.