A casual X-Com clone wearing a Star Wars skin.
---
Mechanically the combat is X-Com light, it's not nearly the absurd random difficulty that X-Com is known for. Tactical positioning sets you up for fairly reliable wins. Global movement and exploration (though limited) takes some hints from Mutant Year Zero, dumping you back into turn based tactical combat after the (rather rare) exploration sections.
Between missions has you in a hub home similar to Marvel's Midnight Suns, though not to the same extreme. It doesn't borrow much else from Midnight Suns or Mutant Year Zero, there's no card decks or big open world sections. The core is very much X-Com adjacent with a Star Wars holo table replacing the X-Com style holo globe. The open plan base replacing the static flat base of the X-Com 2 ant farm window.
The world overall has the adequately grunge "lived in" feel of a Star Wars criminal element. The story is little more than guide rails. You're not saving the Earth on the scale of either X-Com or Midnight Suns. You're just a mercenary company casually trying to pay your rent and keep the lights on. The threat of death isn't from some grand mystery or world ending event, it's just another droid, another mercenary, another bounty hunter, another every day menace.
Graphics are circa 2016 and very much on par with X-com 2. Sounds and music are decent, on par with any EA Star Wars game of the last decade. Voice acting is adequate, and not too cringe inducing. Customization feels lacking, but the default characters are good enough for a play through.
Compared to X-Com, Midnight Suns or Mutant Year Zero, this tries to make you feel like you're going to live in the world and this is your life. Though the world you have access to isn't large enough to experience beyond your home base, and your only interactions are with people either trying to hire you or kill you.
You wake up each cycle, have a short (optional) conversation with each of your team and then select from a few missions that you'll need to pick and choose from before they expire and gradually pay off your debts. Buying new weapons, finding new team members and just casually being a mercenary in the Star Wars universe.
---
It feels weird to me that I'm not excited about this. I am enjoying it, it's a decent game. But it does lack some of the thrill and pressure to move forward. This is Star Wars, but you aren't the hero, you're the background characters. When the hero's in the movie talk about "so and so got us some intel" these are the types of mercenaries you're playing. Go find this map, go collect this weapons cache, go kill this bandit that stole something from the local Hutt cartel, etc. At the end of the day you didn't save the galaxy, and if you failed some other guy would get hired in your place.
But if you don't need the challenge that X-Com provides or the excitement of being a superhero, then the tactical layer here can offer a respectable amount of turn based fun. Positioning matters, cover and teamwork matter, special knockbacks and world interactions matter. On a functional level the tactical combat is enjoyable while the world you're in is just the window dressing.
So while it's X-Com dressed up as Star Wars it really just wants you to ignore all of that and hop from one tactical combat to another without thinking about it too much and the battles are fun enough to pull that off.
---
Bottom line: It's more fun than single player chess.
---
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38232109/]While you are here, would you consider following my curator page?[/url]
[url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/kunovega/recommended/]Want to read all of my reviews and not just the curated ones?[/url]
