Star Wars Zero Company review: "XCOM with lightsabers is a truly sweet deal, and it doesn't have to reinvent the tactics wheel to be forceful"

I hire Tagoz Tru fully expecting him to die. The Weequay bruiser isn't one of Star Wars Zero Company's big-name signings, like Tel-Rea the Jedi ronin or Cly Kullervo the Mandalorian bounty hunter. These characters – both of whom I have to google, just to make 100% sure they're not lifted from some Star Wars cartoon – come with their own dedicated side quests and hours of bespoke voice acting. And even they can be lost forever in battle. So what chance does a randomly rolled recruit like Tagoz have?

Better than I'd expected, as it turns out. Zero Company's permadeath is a tradition borrowed – like so many of this game's essentials – from XCOM, the seminal tactics game in which you fed faceless soldiers into an extraterrestrial meat grinder. There, finishing the campaign with a couple of dozen body bags to your name could be written off as an unqualified success.

Zero Company dangles this threat right from the beginning, killing off one of your starting roster in the tutorial, just to show that it means business. But that also illustrates just how thoroughly you need to fail for this ever to be a concern.

Death stars

A character whose health bar hits zero will drop to their knees, where a squadmate can revive them, Gears Of War-style. They'll get back up with an injury that limits their combat effectiveness, and it's only on the third wound that you lose them forever. At least on the default difficulty setting, it's pretty hard to get anyone killed, but that doesn't mean it has no effect.

Just knowing that permadeath is possible powers some brilliantly tense final turns. Most missions feature an objective – slice this computer terminal, rescue these captives – then an extraction, to pull you from one side of the map to the other. By the time the extraction zone appears, generally on the far side of an enemy reinforcement spawn point, your squad might have taken a wound or two achieving their objective. So, do you hunker down and fight off those reinforcements before a nice peaceful stroll to the exit, or just try to make a run for it?

The latter might sound like the easy option, but it can require at least as much brainpower to pull off. Each operative gets a very different mileage out of their three Action Points per turn – a heavy like Tagoz Tru isn't going to be able to keep up with a fleet-footed Jedi – and you probably still want to stick to cover, unless you've got some plan for running between the raindrops.

This leads to a lot of squinting at every character's abilities, which are presented on a thumbstick-friendly radial wheel. Is there some way of shunting spare AP from your speedier characters to the slowpokes? Can you tie up the pursuing foe with overwatch covering fire, or protect a more exposed route using smoke grenades?

Finally, if one of the retreating party does take a hit and get downed, do you send someone back to revive them, at the risk of the rescuer also catching a laser bullet? Once there's at least one body in the extraction zone, you can choose to end the mission there and then, leaving the others behind MIA. I'm not entirely sure how this works, though, because I can never quite bring myself to do it. No man – or Weequay – left behind.

Base elements

Back at base, you're dropped into the body of Hawks, the custom-created protagonist you can bring into missions as another unit (but, story requirements aside, don't need to). Wandering about the place in over-the-shoulder third person, chatting with squadmates, it's all very reminiscent of being aboard the Normandy, in Mass Effect.

Zooming the camera in from the aerial perspective of turn-based battles, to show that these little chess pieces actually have detailed faces and expressive animations is a cool trick, and it all holds up impressively well to close scrutiny. But look past all that and you'll find something that once again hews pretty close to the XCOM formula.

There are research projects for you to choose between, providing upgrades which won't bear fruit until after your next sortie, and opportunities to convert experience earned in missions into level-up rewards. There's also a med-bay where you can heal up those injuries, in exchange for cold hard credits. Even in the glory days of the Galactic Republic, it seems, the galaxy didn't offer free healthcare.

Running Zero Company, the eponymous mercenary outfit headed up by Hawks, you never have quite enough money to afford everything you want. That next big-ticket upgrade is tantalizingly out of reach, unless you're willing to let a couple of employees tick along with permanent injuries. So yes, it might look different – and incredibly shiny – but underneath it's that same old 'just one more go' XCOM magic.

Personally, I don't have a huge problem with Zero Company's reticence to reinvent the wheel. Not least because, well, it's a really damn good wheel. Besides, it's been long enough.

In the decade since XCOM 2, we've been blessed with a wide variety of takes on the format, from Into The Breach's bonsai-tree perfection to Mewgenics' wild excesses. And of course, Marvel's Midnight Suns, the missing link between XCOM and Zero Company, which was more experimental (for good and ill).

Having played them all, I've still got room in my heart for a more conventional take – especially one with the kind of big-budget production values I never expected to see lavished on this genre. Even when the game is idling, waiting for you to punch in your next set of orders, laser fire will dance across the battlefield, as both sides lay down suppressive fire. Occasionally, one of these blasts will connect with Tel-Rea's lightsaber and be deflected with an effortless flick of the wrist. And every time, my eyes light up like a child watching their favourite toys come to life.

This spectacle is offset, however, by frequent technical issues. Beautiful as they are, the animations don't always line up perfectly – I often find myself cursing a shot that has missed its mark, before the game catches up a second or two later, remembers to display a damage number and my target crumples to the ground. The camera can struggle to keep up, too, so that I'm left to watch some pivotal manoeuvres from the far side of a wall. A day-0 patch has been promised that will hopefully iron out these kinks, but they persist throughout my time with Zero Company, right up until the eve of launch.

Tru faith

Still, none of these bugs – nor the game's more conservative design choices – is enough to dampen my enthusiasm for just one more go. And shallow as it might sound, at least some of that comes down to the fact that Zero Company isn't just an XCOM-like game but a true Star Wars game.

There's something deep in my DNA that will always thrill at the sight of an R2-style Astromech launching a health stim from the top of its head, across the battlefield and into the waiting hand of a Jedi. When my scoundrel-class unit automatically finishes off an enemy clinging onto their last two health points with a quick burst from their blaster, it carries all the associations of Han and Greedo in the Cantina. Playing Zero Company has even helped give me a fresh fondness for the Prequel Trilogy droid army. Those might not be great films, but that's not the fault of Lucasfilm's art department, and the Droideka is a design classic.

These superficial boosts aside, what can Star Wars offer the tactics genre? A veritable toybox of abilities for you to play with.

In my campaign, Tel-Rea barely ever ignites her lightsaber, because I'm too busy Force Pushing and Pulling enemies into crates and over the edge of cliffs, and positioning her in 'Noble Stance', the overwatch-equivalent ability that returns blaster fire to sender. Cly Kullervo has a Boba Fett-style jetpack that not only allows her to flank enemies but spits a circle of fire wherever it lands; touching down in the middle of a now-burning crowd, you can follow up with a few quick-draw shots from her blaster pistol, each refunding your AP as long as it's fatal.

As you move up the upgrade trees, even the more unassuming characters can grow into distinctive heroes. I spec Tagoz Tru into a damage-eating tank, making the most of the high health and defence he had when I recruited him (stat boosts attributed, in a wonderfully characterful touch, to his history of hard labor). This is not exactly an unusual role for a unit in a tactics game, admittedly. But then there's this mission, one that begins with my objective complete and demands only that the squad make it safely to the extraction, with a Vulture drone hot on their heels, blowing up sections of the level and insta-killing anyone lagging behind.

I let the rest of the squad run ahead to safety while Tagoz brings up the rear, using his taunt and retaliation abilities to draw and then return enemy fire. When things begin to get hairy even for his formidable health bar, Tagoz is protected by a smoke grenade courtesy of my little Astromech, then buffed with a performance-enhancing stim from Hawks.

So, the mission ends with Tagoz drugged up to the eyeballs and shrouded in smoke, the gray cloud lighting up red and blue by incoming and outbound blaster fire, as a strafing drone closes in overhead. I fully expect him to die – and what a way to go! – but at the last minute, a change of heart: Hawks and the Astromech can surrender their own AP and pass it over to their Weequay saviour.

Tagoz dodges laser and rockets and makes it to the extraction, on the last turn before everything gets blown to hell. It's a perfect reminder of why I play every XCOM-style tactics game that comes along, and all the sweeter for knowing that, having brought Tagoz along not much caring if he lived or died, I can't stand to lose him to permadeath – and for how perfectly Star Wars this moment feels. I'm willing to forgive a lot, for a game that can leave me feeling like I've dropped a proton torpedo down the exhaust shaft of my own personal Death Star.

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