If a Star Wars game built like XCOM sounds like your kind of thing, Thursday is the day. Star Wars Zero Company is out August 27 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and it's a single-player, turn-based tactics game rather than another blaster.
The pedigree is the selling point. It's made by Bit Reactor, a studio led by former Firaxis developers who worked on the modern XCOM games, with EA publishing. So the DNA here isn't a guess, it's on the team's CVs.
What you're actually playing
It's set during the Clone Wars, on and around the Ring of Kafrene, the grimy mining-turned-trading outpost you'll recognise from Rogue One. You build a squad, mixing customisable characters with procedurally generated teammates, and run tactical missions where positioning and ability combos matter more than raw firepower. Between jobs you manage things from a base called the Den, which is where the story beats land too. There's an 'Advantage' resource that fuels your bigger abilities, so you're spending as much as shooting.
The permadeath bit
Here's the part that'll define how you play: rack up three wounds without resting and that character is gone for good. If you've played XCOM, you know the feeling of a favourite soldier eating a bad roll and staying dead. Zero Company is leaning into exactly that tension, so play cautious and don't fall in love too fast.
The previews we covered earlier this month were warm on it, but previews aren't reviews, and the full verdict only lands once people have finished the campaign. It's not on Game Pass either, so this is one you're buying. If tactics games are your comfort food, though, this looks like a proper one.
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