I’m a sucker for a franchise. In 2022, Complex Games released Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Demonhunters, essentially an XCOM remake with 40K branding. And – it’s great. It’s a good game. Like XCOM, it’s a turn-based strategy game with grid movement, permanent character death, and chance-to-hit combat based on cover and angles of fire. I’ve played it through twice, maybe a hundred and forty hours – I like XCOM, and I like the 40K universe, and the pair of them together for me is just an instant sale. A couple weeks back, on August 28, the same thing happened again: EA Games released Star Wars Zero Company, another XCOM variant, this time with Star Wars branding. Again – instant sale. I’m obviously going to try it out.

As usual with this type of thing, Zero Company makes some changes to the formula, some of which highlight certain strengths of 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown. For example, Zero Company doesn’t have a fog of war. In Enemy Unknown, you were slowly uncovering an alien invasion – and you couldn’t see the whole map, so you’d stumble across new types of alien invader and go what the shit, and immediately get pummelled into the ground. The fog of war mechanic suits the setting of XCOM, which has that 60s-era sort of alien invasion aesthetic – it has a conspiratorial bent, all about alien abductions and UFOs, and early enemies like the Sectoids are your classic little green men. The slow discovery of different types of enemy feeds into that atmosphere of slowly unpicking the depth of the alien forces. It ties into McCarthy-era communist scares, both in the concept of aliens among us and in the paternalistic, shadowy government powers, who routinely tell you “And remember, we are always watching.” Zero Company doesn’t have any of that context, so it’s reasonable to jettison the mechanic – although in doing so, it also obviously loses those moments of accidental discovery, the ‘oh shit’ moments that were so great in in Enemy Unknown.

The health system in XCOM also reads cleaner. Most enemies will have three to ten health, which is depicted visually on the screen using little sectioned bars. You can see in the image below, the three Sectoids have three HP each. That clarity of information is lost in Zero Company (the second, snowy image), which uses much higher values and an undifferentiated health bar. You can see at a glance what percentage someone has left, but not their base health. That makes it harder to assign and prioritise damage – if someone’s at 50%, you don’t know if that’s 50% of 20 health or 50% of 200. In XCOM, you can go – oh, that guy’s got two health, so I’ll shoot him with a pistol, and then that guy’s on six, so I’ll send a couple assault rifles after him. It’s very easy to plan out your actions at a glance. Zero Company sets health in the language of tens and hundreds, making the math more fiddly and intricate, and harder to track at a glance.

That’s really the starting point here: Zero Company is a weaker version of XCOM. It feels thin, having stripped out a bunch of stuff that made the original great. In XCOM you could see each new base development, so there was a visual sense of your progress as you built up new facilities. If you captured enemies alive you could research them to unlock new technologies, which created this extra risk-reward factor. You would upgrade your guns and armour, moving from human assault rifles to plasma guns and all sorts of crazy alien technologies. When you received missions to defend against alien invasions, panic would rise in the areas you neglected. Obviously Zero Company doesn’t have to be the exact same as XCOM, but you’d hope that it could feel as rich and complex, rather than a paler sort of shadow-game.

There are a couple minor highlights in Zero Company – not enough to balance it out, but worth mentioning in passing. Between missions you’re able to walk around your base and talk with your crew, including the randomly generated mercenaries you hire on. Your office sidekick Runa Blask (voiced by Vic Michaelis) is a genuine joy to have around, and being able to customize all the armour and appearances for different characters is actually a good time. It’s fun playing dress-up. There’s also this one weird technician who spends the whole game trying to catch a stowaway mouse or something – there are some loveable moments. Amongst all of that, the big selling point of Zero Company is the bond system, which is actually pretty cool. As your characters go on missions together, they strengthen their relationships, unlocking bonus experience. You can build upgrades that let your soldiers strengthen their relationship while they’re resting at base, if they’re not chosen for a given mission, and for each turn of combat, a random character gets the action ‘Call for Backup’, where they can call on another character to assist their attack. The bond system gives gameplay weight to the way your team members interact. You figure out little combos – you can have your scout pair up with a guy with a repeater, and the scout will fire off a little – plink – pistol shot, marking an enemy target, and then the guy with the repeater will absolutely hose the target down. You don’t get experience for killing enemies like in XCOM, so relationship bonuses are the thing you lean into instead.

And the relationship stuff does tie into some of the game’s broader thematic concerns. I’ll say here – normally I don’t flag spoilers in advance, but given it’s only been out a week or two, you know, fair warning – Star Wars Zero Company is all about friendship. It’s about the desire for connection and community. The villains, the cult of the Infinite Coil, have a sort of psychic mind-link. They are all connected. The titular Zero Company, by contrast, are various sorts of dropouts and rejects. The main character Hawks was drummed out of the Republic Army after a military disaster. Kabbney, her alien companion, is a deadbeat dad. The Mandalorian Cly Kullervo has had her clan murdered, and the padawan Tel-Rea has fled the Jedi Order. Everyone has their brokenness, their experience of abandonment or desertion. Building a team, rebuilding those relationships – it takes time. It makes up the arc of the game. The bond system, then, operationalises that emotional journey. It explores togetherness through game mechanics. There are some interesting nuances in there – obviously when you start the game, you don’t really know how the characters work, so it takes time to understand their mechanics and how they can synergise in a productive way. As you work through that learning, people grow and develop, and you add more powers to the pile. The game does a pretty reasonable job of exploring through gameplay the experience of building community.

That theme is undercut by the plot, which tends to soften its blows. In one mission, you’re off to attack the Coil, and a clone battalion has come to join you. Then there’s a message on the radio, and Order 66 is announced: the clones immediately turn on you, demanding that you hand over Tel-Rea, your rogue padawan, and it turns into a firefight. Crucially, the clone trooper in your team, Trick, turns as well, conditioned to obey Palpatine’s instructions without question. You have this little radial menu with actions you can take each turn, and Trick’s only option is to shoot the traitors – to shoot your team. It’s a fantastic moment – you’ve built up this community, this little group of fighters, and suddenly one of them turns on you. It’s a deep, shocking wound. You fight off the clones, and you have to kill Trick as well. He’s your guy, but things change. There are a few other little blips around the same time – for example, you’re initially recruited to fight the Coil by a couple of Republic operatives, Jae Mordant and Bennic Halloren. Jae is a noble who’s been driven out of her mining planet. Once you help her get it back, she goes, well, thanks, and leaves. She got what she wanted, and she didn’t really care about the group beyond that. Bennic Halloren is a career Republic intelligence officer: when the Republic turns into the Empire, he chooses to preserve his burgeoning career, abandoning Zero Company to their fate as outlaws. These three moments happen in reasonably quick succession – Jae leaves, Trick attacks you, and Bennic flees. They’re very difficult moments. Jae’s leaving is softer, but in retrospect sort of exploitative. She’s welcomed onto the team, but didn’t really care about you except as a means to an end. She has some unique abilities as well, so you feel her absence – whenever an enemy is on low health after an attack, she’ll take a free action and finish them off. It’s a great skill, and it leaves a noticeable hole. The split with Trick and Bennic is more violent, more political, but still deeply personally wounding. Together these moments are the emotional low point of the game’s narrative arc. In your mission to build a community, they show that it’s not always perfect. Not everybody wants to be your friend. Sometimes people are there for shallow reasons, or they’re pulled away by politics or whatever else. Those failures deepen the theme by showing the difficulty of the goal. And then everything gets fixed up and it’s fine – Trick didn’t actually die, he went into a bacta tank, and then he got a mind-control chip or something taken out, so he’s fine, and Jae comes back because the Empire takes over her mining facility, so she’s mad about that and wants back in with you guys, and eventually in the final mission Bennic realises the Empire is evil and he switches back to Zero Company as well. This – I actually think this is really disappointing. All of the emotional stakes are undone: the difficulty of betrayal is recast as a mild delay, a bump in the otherwise linear task of building community.

In the broad view, this un-twist feels like a failure of emotional range. Zero Company can’t imagine a world where things are other than perfect – or, rather, it can imagine that world, but it sort of insists that these things only happen to somebody else. A few of the secondary characters in the game have serious setbacks in building their communities. Cly catches and kills her clan’s betrayer, who turns out to be her husband; in avenging the clan, she destroys her last remaining familial tie. Tel-Rea receives a message from a friend from the Jedi Academy, Trilla Suduri, who, if you’re familiar with Jedi Fallen Order, you’ll know as the Second Sister, one of Vader’s dark-side acolytes. Tel-Rea doesn’t know Trilla has turned, and walks right into her trap. Oh, and the sniper from Umbara – he gets revenge for his wife’s murder, but his wife’s still dead, so – the game does have these smaller moments of betrayal and ongoing loss. Community is not a perfect, unproblematic process. Not everybody gets to have their friends. But Hawks does – the main character does. There’s a sort of distancing effect in Zero Company, the emotional equivalent of plot armour. Hawks isn’t the one in a million who beats the odds – she’s the main character, and so her friendships and allegiances are protected in a manner that’s not extended to secondary heroes. The game cushions her. She supports people who have setbacks in building community, but she’s not really exposed to that struggle herself. It feels cheapening. It dilutes the emotional core of the game. They take this big swing at the end of the second act, knocking all these major relationships out of orbit – and it feels bold, confrontational – but by the end of the game, everything’s perfect and put back together. It feels a little twee. Probably the moral is that you shouldn’t just buy a game because of the branding tie-in – wait, is that a new Chaos Gate sequel?