Star Wars Zero Company: the Clone Wars XCOM we dreamed of, published by the one we feared

There are announcements you have been waiting for without knowing it. Star Wars Zero Company is one of them: a turn-based tactics game set in the Clone Wars, with a squad you build yourself and characters who can die for good. In plain terms, an XCOM in clone armor. For anyone who still gets chills just thinking about the pre-mission boarding music in XCOM 2, fair warning right now: this game aims straight at that part of the brain.

The context

Zero Company releases on August 27 on PC, and it is a co-production with reassuring names on paper. Bit Reactor, a studio founded by Firaxis veterans (the creators of XCOM, then), handles the strategic core. Respawn, now a credible regular of the galaxy after Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, supervises. All of it under the Electronic Arts banner. We will come back to that, because that name is exactly what stops us from crying masterpiece ahead of time.

The pitch is clean: you lead Zero Company, an independent mercenary outfit hired by the Republic during the Clone Wars. The community has already renamed it ZCOM, and honestly, the nickname is earned.

What we know

This is pure turn-based tactics, in the lineage of modern XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns rather than real-time à la Desperados. Cover, line of sight, hit percentages on screen, squad management between missions: the grammar is there. The big difference from a classic XCOM lies in the squad itself. You build it, you customize it, and according to Bit Reactor, you can recruit and shape your soldiers from the ground up.

On the playable roster, there is already plenty to drool over: clones, Mandalorians, droids (a clone commando and a B2 battle droid on the same team is officially on the table), and a handful of more exotic specialists. The Jedi, however, seem to be unique scripted characters rather than recruits you mass-produce, and one class is still secret. Our bet, like half of Reddit's: a dark side user.

The injury system is the real talking point. Forget XCOM's brutal dice roll where a soldier bleeds out at random. Here, a downed character takes a wound, and it is the accumulated, untreated wounds that eventually kill them for good, once a certain threshold is crossed. We are closer to Chimera Squad or Necromunda than to the series' historic russian roulette: death exists, but it builds up, and healing it would not come cheap.

It is an approach you can read two ways, and that is the whole point. Either you see softened permadeath meant to reassure a wider audience, or you see a system that turns every wound into a decision: do I send this banged-up sniper back to the front because I need him now, even at the risk of losing him, or do I rest him and go in short-handed ? Well-tuned, that is exactly the kind of tension that makes the genre.

On atmosphere, early hands-on talk of a narrative leaning toward Mass Effect, with a company, characters and relationships to maintain. For Clone Wars fans, the idea of running our own cell at the heart of the conflict, far from the big scripted battles, has something intoxicating about it.

What worries us

First point, and it is a big one: EA. We all remember the Battlefront 2 microtransaction fiasco, and a Star Wars game with deep customization plus the EA crest reawakens legitimate reflexes of distrust. The publisher may have learned the lesson, and the current commercial context of the license pushes it to win back some goodwill, but we will wait to see the store before lowering our guard.

Second worry, more personal: it seems you only fight the Separatists. And reducing the Confederacy to a mere role of stock villains means missing a whole half of the conflict, the most interesting one politically. We would love to be able to play their side too, or at least to nuance this face-off. For now, nothing suggests it, and that is a shame.

Finally, the question of heroes who do not die. If the scripted characters are written to survive every mission while only our anonymous soldiers risk death, part of XCOM's salt evaporates. The joy, in these games, is forging your own legends, not hauling around the invincible. We are watching that closely.

Are we waiting for it ?

We are, and to be honest, we are waiting for a lot. Bringing XCOM and the Clone Wars together ticks two of our biggest weaknesses in a single box. The team has the right pedigree, the concept is solid, and the first images breathe the clone war we love, from the clones to the droids by way of the Mandalorians.

What remains is the EA unknown and the promise of tactical depth that will have to hold up controller in hand. August 27 will tell whether Zero Company is the galactic XCOM we hope for or a pretty surface laid over a golden license. Until then, we are crossing our fingers, and we already have the boarding music stuck in our heads. To be continued.