A great turn-based strategy game and Star Wars title in its own right, Zero Company also did something special for me: it more or less made up for the disappointment of XCOM 2. And now, with the recently added campaign modifiers, it might finally prove to be a challenge, too.
The great predecessors
There was always a bit of awkwardness about Firaxis’s XCOM, excellent games though they have been. Not knowing whether you’d have a shot from a given position in the original, or the percentage chance of hitting in the sequel. Inconsistent pod activations and such. The extremely frontloaded difficulty also put me in a bind: Classic Ironman was too easy even for my first-time campaigns where every new enemy unit was a genuine surprise, and Legendary I couldn’t crack in either game no matter how much I tried, such little is your room for error in the early game.
Looking back, I have somewhat sour memories of XCOM 2. I’ve actually put a little more time into it than the original, 240 versus 220 hours—especially because of the technical issues it had at launch, with massive hangs (and my PC at the time was much closer to top-of-the-line, sclerotic GTX 970 included), long loading times and many camera inconsistency issues. Though I understood the need to introduce a ticking clock (move-once-and-Overwatch was a genuine scourge in the original) the sequel’s implementation didn’t sit right with me.
Story-wise, the nameless-faceless Commander becoming Space Jesus and taking the shine off the soldiers I built up was too anime-brained for my liking. And I genuinely disliked War of the Chosen from the off: the Lost attacking you more often than ADVENT felt gimmicky (and even if you modded them not to, the game clearly wasn’t designed around that balance), and the Chosen broke the established gameplay loop a bit too much. At that point, I wasn’t interested in downgrading to Classic and slowly moved away from the games.
Neither Chimera Squad nor Marvel’s Midnight Suns interested me enough to return – but I figured even a mediocre XCOM clone with a Star Wars skin would be a good time.
Zero Company surpassed all my expectations. Piss easy as it might be.
A galaxy close to my heart
There are many small touches of care in Zero Company that speak to me. From the intelligent UI integration of the shot odds you’d get upon a specific move to the enemy status list and precise Overwatch cones, I finally don’t feel like a turn-based tactics game is maliciously withholding information from me. The ambient pew-pew in an otherwise static battle diorama does a lot in keeping the thinking portion fun, with pleasant music to boot.
Crucially, three action points and the Advantage system feel like a near-perfect halfway house between the nouveau XCOM games’ streamlined but restrictive one-plus-one system and the old-school “here’s 100+ AP for every toe wiggle and eye squint, make sure none of it goes to waste” approach. It feels like I’m in control of what I’m doing, in a universe I like.
And while the game’s baseline challenge level is toddler-height even on the highest difficulty, this was always going to be an easier thing to correct for, either on the player’s side with self-imposed challenges or a patch or two, than the overly steep initial difficulty curve the way XCOMs 1 and 2handled their campaigns.
I also thought I would hate the more handcrafted missions, as they’ve typically been the most repetitive and predictable parts of the predecessor games. But here, it works well: the redistributable action points (all hail my beloved Astromech) and the secondary resource mean that they make for interesting one-turn wipe combat puzzles even if the challenge is altogether not that high otherwise. Thing is, the pre-baked missions put you immediately in the middle of the action—none of that sneaking around and looking for randomly roaming pods business—and the threat of so much oncoming damage makes for a much better ticking clock than the random turn timer would.
I’m still not keen on the time wasted in the Den and the middle-school-level “drama” writing we seem to get in AAA games these days, but it’s tolerable fare—a price I’m willing to pay so I can enjoy the tactical portion of the experience.
It’s been a slow but pleasant playthrough for me, each battle carefully chewed and digested when I have a little spare time—and I’m already looking forward to a fresh, spicier start, enabled by the 1.2 patch and its added difficulty options. With genuine death on injury, you might have a real reason to build a wider roster.
The changes suggest the developers get what they made and what its shortcomings are – players really didn’t have a reason to engage with a wider roster apart from the story stuff, and everything in the Upgrade Facility was monstrously overpriced (yet somewhat irrelevant).
Once I finally wrap up my first playthrough, these options might offer me exactly what I was looking for in XCOM 2 back in the day: a fair and challenging turn-based strategy game in a universe I like where the challenge isn’t an immediate brick wall, but it does threaten to crack my head in down the line if I’m not careful. After all, I’ve got some extra spare gaming time where I expected Galactic “Racer” to be.
