A late-night phone call. A pitch in a dark office. A Star Wars game that nobody saw coming.
That's how Star Wars Zero Company started. Bit Reactor founder Greg Foertsch, former art director on the rebooted XCOM series and Marvel's Midnight Suns, had left Firaxis after 22 years when he got a call from Vince Zampella, the Respawn founder and creator of Call of Duty. Zampella, who tragically passed away in a car accident last December, handed Bit Reactor its shot at the Star Wars license after a single pitch meeting. What followed is shaping up to be one of 2026's most interesting releases.
More than "Star Wars XCOM"
The easy shorthand for Zero Company is "Star Wars XCOM," and that's not wrong. Foertsch brought a significant chunk of ex-Firaxis talent with him to Bit Reactor, including lead producer Caydence Funk, animation lead Hector Antunez, and lead mission designer James Brawley. The tactical combat DNA is unmistakably there.
Here's the thing, though: the comparison undersells what Bit Reactor is actually building. Outside of combat, you have full third-person control of your customizable protagonist, Hawks, in environments that look like they belong in a Respawn action game. The production values are striking, built in close collaboration with Lucasfilm to nail the Star Wars aesthetic. Before a fight breaks out, you could genuinely mistake this for a spinoff of Jedi: Fallen Order.
Narrative lead Aaron Contreras, who wrote Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor at Respawn, is heading up the story. The tone draws from Dave Filoni's Clone Wars animated series but filtered through the grittier register of Rogue One. Think less Skywalker saga nostalgia, more boots-on-the-ground wartime drama.
How the combat actually works
If you've put time into XCOM, the combat loop will feel immediately familiar. Each character gets 3 action points per turn, with movement and abilities drawing from that pool depending on cost. The twist is a shared "advantage" pool earned by attacking enemies, which fuels special abilities and class ultimates separate from your standard AP.
Each of the eight standard classes, Assault, Heavy, Sharpshooter, Scoundrel, Soldier, Gunslinger, Scout, and Medic, has its own ultimate that demands a large advantage spend. Hawks can also spend a small amount of advantage to refresh one AP for a squadmate once per turn, which creates interesting tactical decisions about when to burn that resource.
Four "exotic" classes sit on top of the standard eight. The Astromech class is exclusive to droid squad members (with an extensive visual customization builder). Jedi Padawan and Mandalorian Warrior are locked to specific story characters. A fourth exotic class hasn't been revealed yet.
danger
Permadeath applies to all squad members except Hawks. If Hawks goes down mid-mission, it's game over. Everyone else can die permanently, and the story continues without them.
Enemy design adds real texture to the combat. Cultist shock troops have a mechanic where killing one causes their spirit to float off and buff a nearby ally, stacking until a recipient goes berserk and transforms into a boss-tier threat. Smart play means managing health bars across the entire enemy group, not just eliminating targets as fast as possible.
Tactical overhead combat view
The Den, the galaxy map, and operations
Between missions, Zero Company runs on a cycle-based structure. A galaxy map shows available combat missions and non-combat "operations," each with a timer counting down how many cycles remain before they expire. You can run as many operations per cycle as your resources allow, but only one full combat mission, which ends the cycle and advances the story.
Operations are text-based intelligence activities, reminiscent of the adventure sequences in Pillars of Eternity or Owlcat's Pathfinder games. Lead designer for operations Grayson Scantlebury described them as capturing "the feeling of running an intelligence unit." You might be gathering intel at a cantina, with options to bribe, schmooze, or start a fight, each with different rewards and risks, including potential path-to-permadeath injuries for whoever you send.
A key system ties operations to permanent enemy upgrades. Each cycle, enemy factions like the cultists or commando droids are set to gain one of two permanent power-ups. You pick which upgrade you want them to have less, then run a mutually exclusive operation to block it. Ignore operations entirely and both upgrades go through.
The writing team has gone deep on Star Wars lore to populate these missions. Scantlebury mentioned browsing Wookieepedia for planets with relevant Clone Wars-era history, including Onderon (a major location from the Clone Wars show, Tales of the Jedi comics, and Knights of the Old Republic 2) and Bespin and Lothal as examples of the research going into the operation design. That same attention to the expanded universe is what made Star Wars: The Old Republic feel so alive when BioWare built it, and Bit Reactor is clearly drawing from the same well of lore-first world-building. You can follow the latest from the broader Star Wars gaming universe on the SWTOR developer blog.
Characters worth caring about
The cast is where Zero Company looks most likely to surprise people. Hawks is fully voiced and customizable by sex, gender, and species (including Twi'lek and Mirialan). Clone consigliere Trick and Umbaran sniper Luco Bronc carry genuine bad blood from the brutal Umbara campaign in the Clone Wars, and a bond system means even natural enemies can be forced to work together through shared missions.
The standout character from hands-on impressions is Runa Blask, a dyed-in-the-wool Separatist partisan serving as an advisor at the Den. She lectures Hawks about Republic imperialism at every opportunity and once told the protagonist point-blank that her time with the Separatists was the best of her life, and Zero Company was a significant downgrade. She is, by all accounts, the best kind of awful.
Permadeath applies to the authored squad members too. Contreras admitted he initially resisted the mechanic but came around about 13 months before release. "I lost an argument about permadeath, and it was good that I did," he said. Foertsch frames it as thematically appropriate: "Star Wars is about loss."
What to expect and when
Star Wars Zero Company doesn't have a confirmed release date, but Bit Reactor has stated it is targeting a 2026 launch. Based on hands-on impressions, the game was described as looking "almost ready for prime time" with most of 2026 still ahead. For the latest updates, keep an eye on gaming news coverage as the release window approaches. Make sure to check out more:
