Overview
Star Wars Zero Company is a single-player turn-based tactics game developed by Bit Reactor and published by Electronic Arts, set during the twilight of the Clone Wars. You play as Hawks, a former Republic officer who takes command of Zero Company, an outfit of professionals pulled from across the galaxy and thrown into an operation against a threat serious enough to reshape the war's outcome. The story is original, meaning no reliance on familiar Skywalkers or Kenobis to carry the weight.
The game's structure spans both a base of operations and active battlefields, and your decisions in both spaces carry consequences that shift how each playthrough unfolds. Bit Reactor has built the squad progression around deployment, so operatives grow specifically through field experience rather than a static upgrade menu. That's a meaningful design choice for a tactics game, because it ties character development directly to how you actually play.
Gameplay and mechanics
The core turn-based combat loop in Star Wars Zero Company centers on squad composition and tactical ability selection. Your roster pulls from a range of archetypes:
- Scoundrels for flexible, off-the-books roles
- Astromech droids with utility support functions
- Jedi operatives with Force-based abilities
- Clone troopers with Republic military training
- Specialists tied to specific factions
Each operative can be customized in appearance, loadout, and ability set, and Hawks himself has an adjustable combat specialization on top of that. The depth here isn't cosmetic. Pairing certain squad members unlocks combat synergies that can genuinely change how a mission plays out, which means roster decisions before a mission matter as much as positioning during one.
What kind of story does Zero Company tell?
Zero Company's narrative sits in a specific and underused corner of the Star Wars timeline. The Clone Wars are winding down, the Republic is fracturing, and the factions involved in the conflict include some of the setting's more morally complicated groups. The Shadow Collective cosmetic content alone references the Pyke Syndicate, Hutt Cartel, Death Watch, Black Sun Syndicate, and Crimson Dawn, which signals that the story isn't staying on the clean side of galactic politics.
Hawks leads an unconventional outfit rather than a standard military unit, which gives the writing room to bring in characters who wouldn't fit inside a traditional Republic command structure. The framing as an original story rather than an adaptation means the plot isn't constrained by what audiences already know happened during this period.
Squad customization and replayability
Customization runs deeper than visual loadouts. Hawks' combat specialization can be tuned to suit different playstyles, and every operative on the roster has their own appearance, equipment, and ability configuration. Because squad synergies unlock through deployment, the combinations you build over a playthrough are genuinely yours rather than prescribed by a skill tree.
The branching consequence system means mission outcomes feed back into the broader campaign state, so two players working through the same scenario can arrive at different situations depending on how their squads performed and what choices they made at the base of operations. For a tactics game, that kind of structural replayability is the difference between a game you finish once and one you return to with a different squad build to see what changes. Star Wars Zero Company is available on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, Xbox, and PlayStation.