Story praise and shrugs
PC Gamer put Star Wars Zero Company in the same breath as Rogue One and Knights of the Old Republic. Game Informer called the same story “competent if unremarkable.” Both agree on the rest: this is a very good XCOM-style tactics game with a Star Wars coat of paint that’s far thicker than it needed to be.
Our consensus score is OpenCritic’s Top Critic Average of 85, the average of its Top Critic reviews, from 122 critic reviews counted, with 92% of critics recommending it.
| Outlet | Score | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| PC Gamer | 90/100 | “A new all-timer Star Wars game” |
| IGN | 9/10 | Far more than a Star Wars reskin of XCOM |
| Game Informer | 8/10 | Great tactics carry a so-so story |
| GameSpot | 8/10 | Iterates on XCOM rather than imitating it |
Bit Reactor’s XCOM roots show, and so does its appetite for risk
Bit Reactor was founded by XCOM veterans, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. Ted Litchfield’s 90/100 review for PC Gamer describes “a Terminator skeleton of pure XCOM” under lavish production values, third-person exploration between fights and set-piece missions he calls jaw-dropping. He found the difficulty “very well-judged” on Normal, and calls it “one of the best games of 2026.”
Dan Stapleton’s 9/10 at IGN pins down what’s different: smaller maps with no fog of war and an aggressive style that rewards diving into the fray and knocking enemies into each other. The rotating Backup ability, which hands a teammate a guaranteed follow-up shot, gets singled out as one of the trickier systems to master.
That same piece carries the main gameplay complaint. Troops are hard to kill: a character has to be downed three times, without healing between missions, before permadeath takes them. Stapleton didn’t come close to losing anyone in a 35-hour first run on Normal, though he notes he brings thousands of hours of XCOM to it. He also wanted more enemy variety and judged its replayability “a bit limited relative to XCOM 2.”
The story is where critics part ways
IGN rates it “one of the better Star Wars stories we’ve seen since Rogue One,” helped by a cast of non-Force-users and a cult villain who isn’t another Sith. PC Gamer goes further. James Galizio at Game Informer isn’t buying it, calling the story and characters “competent if unremarkable” and saying it “ultimately detracts more from the game than it adds.”
Steve Watts’ 8/10 GameSpot review mostly sides with the fans, calling the characters “well-rounded” and saying they “feel alive with humanity.” His exception is the Mandalorian Cly, whose story is “the thinnest of all the named characters” and whose inclusion “felt perfunctory,” even though her power set suits the combat. If you’re buying a Star Wars game for the Star Wars, that split matters more than the tactics praise, which is close to unanimous.
PC performance is fine on a desktop, not on a Deck
Litchfield played on a Core i5-12600K, RX 9070 XT and 32GB of RAM and hit two hard crashes, one severe graphical glitch that forced a reload, flickering UI and long hangs on enemy turns. His Steam Deck test was blunt: with settings at the bottom and FSR maxed, he got “a soupy, unparsable, 15-20fps mess.” IGN saw graphical bugs during air-drops, a repetitive, unskippable transit cutscene that “tends to hitch on both PC and PS5 Pro,” and a few 20-second hangs, but says it never had to reload over a glitch.
Nvidia owners did get day-one driver support: the GeForce 616.56 driver added DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation for the game at launch. On Steam, players rate it Very Positive, with 19,517 of 23,382 user reviews positive.
Patch 1.2 answers the “too forgiving” complaint
Bit Reactor’s 1.2 patch, released on October 15, adds Campaign Modifiers for new campaigns. Instant Death kills any Operator defeated in a tactical mission, Two Strikes kills anyone defeated with one injury already, and Escalating Risk of Death starts at a 20% chance of permanent death that rises to 40% and then 80% with each defeat. Other options cut health growth, stop assist shots from always hitting and trim how much Advantage you earn.
The studio says it built these because players wanted “the ability to increase the game’s difficulty,” particularly around injuries and permadeath, and still recommends a first run on the default rules. That’s the right call, and it turns IGN’s biggest reservation into a menu setting. It doesn’t touch the replayability point: the campaign is still hand-built, without XCOM 2’s procedural maps.
Buy it or skip it
- ✅ Buy if you loved XCOM 2 and want a tighter, more aggressive take with excellent missions.
- ✅ Buy if you want a Clone Wars story without Jedi in the lead. Two of the four critics here rank it among the series’ best.
- ✅ Buy if you like a full-price game at $49.99 rather than $70.
- ❌ Skip if you mainly play on Steam Deck. PC Gamer’s numbers make it a desktop game.
- ❌ Skip if you want XCOM 2-style endless replays. IGN finds the hand-built, story-led campaign less replayable, even if PC Gamer disagrees.
Our take
We think the 85 is fair, and the price makes it better value than the number suggests. Zero Company is $49.99 on Steam with no discount right now, and nothing in the reviews says you should wait for one: the crashes critics hit are real but rare, and the 1.2 modifiers have fixed the biggest design gripe for veterans. If you’re new to the genre, start on Normal with default rules, as Bit Reactor suggests. If you’ve got a few thousand hours of XCOM, turn on Escalating Risk of Death and see whether it still feels kind. It’s quite a debut for a studio we first wrote about when it launched in August.
Price checked on Steam, Oct 17.
