Why Star Wars: Zero Company was an instant buy for me

I don’t buy that many games any more. There was a time when I’d pick up new releases fairly regularly, try things because they looked interesting, and generally keep up with what was coming out. I don’t really do that now — partly age, partly time, partly because games increasingly ask for dozens or hundreds of hours and I’m much less willing to give that unless I already know it’s my kind of thing.

I almost never pre-order either. But I pre-ordered Star Wars: Zero Company for PS5, and now that I’ve actually played it, the decision looks even more obviously right than it did at the time.

The obvious reason is XCOM 2

I loved XCOM 2 — not because I’m especially drawn to turn-based strategy as a genre, but because of one specific thing it does well: it makes you care what happens, because your decisions have consequences. You build a squad. People become useful, then familiar, then — without really noticing it — you’re attached to them. A mission goes wrong. Someone gets wounded, someone misses a shot they should have made, someone survives something ridiculous, someone dies. And suddenly a tactical game has generated a story you actually care about. That, more than the combat, is what stayed with me.

So when I saw Zero Company putting something close to that formula into Star Wars, it was immediately interesting.

But the Star Wars part is quite specific too

I’ve always been more interested in the dirtier edges of that universe than the shiny centre of it — smugglers, mercenaries, bounty hunters, people making deals they probably shouldn’t, characters working out which side they’re really on. The Han Solo part of Star Wars, essentially. Keep the enormous armies and perfectly noble heroes. Give me a crew of dubious people with complicated motivations and a bad plan.

Having played it, that’s exactly what Zero Company delivers. It’s got a mercenaries-struggling-for-credits energy that’s closer to Cowboy Bebop than to anything in the main trilogy — a crew doing morally grey jobs for money rather than glory. Firefly is probably the more precise comparison, though: Mal Reynolds is a former war hero who fought for the losing side and has been getting knocked around ever since, doing whatever job pays rather than the noble one. Used to be heroic, got screwed over enough times that heroic stopped being the point. That’s precisely the register I wanted, and it’s rare to see Star Wars actually commit to it rather than just gesture at the edges.

The RimWorld connection, briefly

Once I started thinking about why that combination appealed to me, I realised there’s a line connecting Zero Company, XCOM 2 and RimWorld, a game I’ve spent far too much time on. On the surface they’re quite different. But I think I’m drawn to the same thing in all three: games where the systems do part of the storytelling rather than a script doing all of it.

I’ve made that case in detail already, using RimWorld as the worked example — systems collide and you supply the meaning the writers didn’t script, the moments that stay with you are usually the ones where something went wrong rather than the ones that went perfectly, and naming a character is most of what turns a set of statistics into someone you’re actually invested in. I won’t rebuild that argument here. What Zero Company and XCOM 2 add to it is more specific.

It’s not really about the genre

That’s the bit I hadn’t really worked out until Zero Company. I’ve always assumed I like strategy games, and that’s true, but it’s not really about genre. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the clearest counter-example — an RPG, not a tactics game, and I loved it for exactly the same reasons: turn-based combat where a decision actually costs you something, a party I got attached to, and choices that ripple forward in ways I didn’t fully control. I’ve drifted away from RPGs generally over the years. Not from that specific kind.

I think what I actually like is games with three things: turn-based structure that forces me to commit to a decision instead of reacting on reflex, characters I can become attached to, and enough uncertainty that I don’t know what story I’ll end up with. Strategy games happen to deliver that reliably. They’re just not the only genre that can.

I don’t want complexity for its own sake, and I don’t want to spend hours learning a game because mastering complicated rules is intrinsically satisfying. I want the rules to create difficult choices — do I risk moving someone forward, do I use the resource now or save it, do I protect the strongest character or take the chance, do I retreat, do I sacrifice something now to make the next situation easier. Those decisions are where the story starts. If you can tell somebody what happened afterwards, that’s usually a good sign.

I don’t think I could have managed this at twenty

XCOM in particular punishes you for treating each move in isolation. Permadeath means a soldier you’ve spent hours getting attached to can just be gone, and there’s no reloading your way out of a decision you didn’t think through. Managing that well takes a lot of connective thinking — working out what a move does three turns from now, whether the position I’m about to leave someone in exposes somebody else, whether the piece I’m committing is actually the one I can afford to lose.

Unlike a lot of games, which reward reacting quickly to whatever’s already happened, this rewards thinking several moves ahead about what’s about to. It’s closer to chess than to reflexes — the same systems quality that pulled me into RimWorld in the first place, just showing up here as a cognitive demand rather than a narrative one. I don’t think I had the patience or the working memory for that kind of sequencing at twenty the way I do now.

That’s not really a game skill, when I think about it. It’s the same connective thinking editorial work runs on — understanding how a decision now changes what happens three steps later, and putting things in the right order, because getting the sequence wrong is expensive and you don’t always get to reload.

Zero Company and XCOM 2 also both bet on something I noticed in RimWorld too: designing the conditions for a story is a different kind of authorship than writing one, and when it works, the player ends up doing some of the telling. They just do it with a tighter, more authored spine around it than RimWorld’s total sandbox — probably exactly the balance I actually want from something with a real story mode rather than an emergent sim.

So yes, I pre-ordered it — and I was right to

Pre-ordering is always a bit of a gamble, for obvious reasons. This one paid off. Take the tactical tension I loved in XCOM. Put it in the murkier, less heroic corners of Star Wars. Give me a squad of people I can become attached to, decisions with real consequences, and just enough authored story that the world feels meaningful while leaving room for things to go wrong in unexpected ways. Apparently that’s all it takes.

I don’t buy many games any more. But give me a mercenary crew, a system that creates stories, and a bit of Cowboy Bebop energy, and I become extremely easy to sell to.