Marvel’s Midnight Suns is one of my all-time favorite games, so when I learned that many of the people who worked on that game were releasing a new tactics game, I immediately put it on top of my to-play list for 2026. And Star Wars Zero Company delivered in spades. This is an incredibly fun game with stunning graphics, great characters and a good story, and that’s coming from someone who’s not a big Star Wars fan.
The core gameplay loop of Zero Company is very similar to Midnight Suns: you move around your home base, The Den, interacting with the other characters and then you select a mission to go out on, where the game becomes similar to a Star Wars XCOM variant. Resources gathered on the missions are then funneled back into upgrading the Den and your team, and this makes for a very fun loop.
The actual missions themselves are varied, and although there are basically only a small handful of enemy types, they never felt too repetitive to me. There’s some fun new mechanics in Zero Company, such as the assist system where your characters can take a second free shot at an enemy, and at the same time level up their bonds, which means you’re playing strategically with what pairs of characters should be assisting each other, and that was a lot of fun. Turns use the typical three action points system common to other XCOM-like games, but also an advantage system which lets you do additional powerful actions based upon how many advantage points your team has built up. In practice, this meant that each turn I was planning out which advantage actions I wanted to use, and figuring out the best path to build up enough advantage points to get there, which was a very fun twist on the XCOM formula.
I did find myself wishing for an “undo” button during the tactics sequences. Playing with a controller, the action I thought I’d taken didn’t always match the action that registered with the game, and it would have been nice to be able to scout out a move’s options before committing to it. Some of the main story missions include third-person sections, where you’re walking your crew between combat arenas, which is an interesting idea, but didn’t add much to the game for me owing to how linear the world maps were and how little there was to do in them. I also ran into occasional camera issues, where it would suddenly change position away from the action before correcting itself, along with some extremely long pauses during turn transitions, both of which I hope Bit Reactor will be able to fix in a patch.
I wound up sticking with a core group of companions for most of the combat sequences, because, unlike in Midnight Suns, you increase your bond with your teammates mostly through actions in combat rather than through interactions back at The Den. That seems to be an attempt at getting you to rotate through different companions in order to be able to max them all out, but since character upgrades are directly tied to the bond level between each pair of characters, I found that keeping the core group together made them strongest. In-universe it does seem a little odd that your characters bond more over an assist in combat, than they do in discussing what’s going on in their lives back at The Den.
While using resources gathered during missions to upgrade The Den was a compelling gameplay hook, I wish The Den visually changed as the upgrades completed as well instead of staying fairly static throughout the game. Compared to the Abby in Midnight Suns, the Den here is thankfully much smaller, making it a lot quicker to do the rounds and talk to all your teammates between missions.
The core cast of authored characters was well-written, and had some good character development as the game went along. You also can recruit other characters to bring on missions with you, although I never ended up using them, choosing instead to stay with the main characters of the story. In fact, I typically wound up doing all of my missions with Jae, Tel-Rea, and Cly. I did very much enjoy interacting with Kabb back at The Den, though, and did bring him along occasionally on missions, just because I found his in-combat quips entertaining: “What’s for supper? Cutty-upper!” “Fist in gutty, upper cutty!”
I found the story the game was telling to be engaging, and it was often a driver of wanting to play one more cycle, despite me not being much of a Star Wars fan. The mystery of what The Coil and Fathom are unfolds well, with a couple of turns I didn’t see coming. The second half of the story, in particular, had several gut-punch moments, and the whole thing wrapped up in a satisfying conclusion.
I went in with high hopes for Star Wars Zero Company based upon its pedigree, and it did not let me down. This was a game I did not want to put down at the end of the night, and I could easily see this being one of my favorites of the year when all is said and done.
