I will admit that when Star Wars: Zero Company was announced I neither needed to hear nor see anything beyond “it’s Star Wars XCOM” to know I was going to buy it.I love the XCOM strategy games and I love Star Wars. Mixing the two together is a dream for me.
The game came out this week and, yes, the moniker is apt. It’s a strategy game, you’ve got a ragtag band of heroes, and there is permadeath. I’m a couple hours in and I’m enjoying it immensely, to no surprise. It scratches that strategy game itch plus, y’know, it’s Star Wars and I am a sucker for that galaxy far far away.
I also can’t help but to think how refreshing it is to play a Star Wars game that’s a turn-based strategy game. The big Star Wars games we’ve gotten over the past decade have been shooters like Battlefront or action-adventure games like Fallen Order and Outlaws (give or take a Squadrons). The games are fun and I’ve enjoyed them all (better not to publicly admit the hours I’ve sunk into Battlefront II), but I’ll admit that they all kinda fall into the design philosophies that permeate most major mainstream games these days where the first-person shooter and third-person action adventure game are the dominant genres. This isn’t necessarily bad: Outlaws and Fallen Order feel like very different games, just as Ghost of Yōtei and James Bond: First Light are too.
Yet I am someone who considers Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, a 2001 reskin of Age of Empires II, to be one of his favorite Star Wars video games. There was a time when big video games had the space to be a little more weird, when the medium hadn’t quite calcified. Zero Company, so far, isn’t trying to reinvent the strategy formula that XCOM defined, but that it is a tactics game is already refreshing per se. It’s not an action-adventure game, it’s not a shooter, it’s something else! That the something else takes its cues from a game I love is all the better.
Star Wars is a massive galaxy with space for all sorts of stories and adventures; I feel like it lends itself better to variously different genres than a property like Indiana Jones or James Bond (both of which almost should be action-adventure games by nature). Zero Company taps into that breadth of potential and belies a willingness to experiment beyond the blockbuster genres.
Look, I love action-adventure games and first-person shooters as much as the next guy, but as much as I’m looking forward to playing the new Wolverine game, I also relish games that offer something outside the current norm. Star Wars games once ran the genre gamut from RPGs to RTS to, yes, FPS. Even if you played only Star Wars games, you’d been playing a lot of different types of games. Zero Company feels like a return to that variety — and Galactic Racer coming out in a month risks awakening the memory of being an eight-year old playing Episode I: Racer. All I need now is a Star Wars JRPG and I will be complete.
Essays, Not Rants! 