[STEAM] Star Wars Zero Company wants to be more than XCOM with lightsabers: "Gamers are more sophisticated now"

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(Image credit: Firaxis) These are the

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you should have on your radar

Talking with Foertsch and narrative director Aaron Contreras, confidence in their audience's literacy comes up more than once, even if it's in the strangely niche inspirations behind it. "We want to build on [Star Wars] from what we've already seen in the TV and film," explains Contreras. "So screwball comedy, film noir, mid-century spy, John LeCarre stuff. I was just bombarding my writing team with influences from there. Our main character is called Hawks, explicitly as an homage to Howard Hawks, who's the director of movies like His Girl Friday or Only Angels Have Wings."

The latter, about a group of pilots in the 1930s, is a major touchstone for Zero Company, which focuses on a mercenary strike force during the Clone Wars who put aside their ideological differences to shoot people for money. "When I joined, we already had the notion of the team that would eventually be named Zero Company operating in this liminal space between the front lines and covert operations, sort of in the middle," says Contreras "That naturally lends itself to a tactical strategy game where you've got people going out and doing sneaky stuff, but you're also doing shooty-shooty all the time."

That murky, grey space is a recurring theme in Zero Company, with your advisors and employers all holding differing worldviews (or galaxyviews, perhaps) and may consequently get shirty with you depending on the choices you make – the choice of whether to hand over a snitch to an enraged mobster springs to mind. "The Clone Wars, for lots of reasons, was just a really natural fit," says Foertsch. "The political climate, all the guardedness of everybody. You don't know who to trust. Like the biases, political and non-political, that people had really lent itself to us telling this kind of story."

Having played it myself, I wouldn't say that Zero Company is a politically charged-game, not in the way that Andor was. Politics exist within the game, but they're largely presented in the same vein as sports teams, and protagonist Hawks pointedly doesn't care who's side you're on as long as they're shooting lasers in the right direction. "If you're a good pilot and you're there when we need you, you're one of us," says Contreras, speaking for their hero.

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(Image credit: EA) Space combat, perhaps? "No, we've done some games before that had interception and stuff," says Foertsch, referring to XCOM. "Each game kind of dictates what it needs, and in this case, that was one of the things, like fog of war, that just wasn't something that made sense to us early on."

Despite its simplicity, I still enjoyed my preview of Zero Company, and hope it carves out more of an identity as it progresses past that first act. Foertsch's "sophisticated" comment sticks with me in part because I feel sure that a sophisticated audience could handle a more complex dish than what I've sampled so far.

Still, it was only a preview build, and whatever the final result, Bit Reactor's passion is undeniable. "We hope that's recognized by the audience and see that we're trying to honor this great legacy of the genre of strategy games while picking our battles about where we must step up."

Star Wars Zero Company is out on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC on August 27, 2026.

Want an early tactical fix before Zero Company flies into view? Find out the

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you can play right now!

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