[UPDATE] Star Wars Zero Company's Reviews Are In: Best in the Series, but Mind the Crashes

Star Wars Zero Company is out today, and the reviews have shown up ahead of it. The short version: it's very good, and a couple of technical rough edges are worth knowing about before you commit forty hours to a squad you can't get back.

The scores

It's sitting around 86 on Metacritic and 87 on OpenCritic at the time of writing. PC Gamer gave it 90 and called it a new all-timer for Star Wars games, one that lands for tactics fans and lore-hungry fans alike. That's a strong showing for a genre that usually gets a niche audience and a shrug.

Where it gets awkward

Here's the bit that matters if you play tactics games the intended way. TechTimes and others flagged that hard crashes can erase permadeath progress, which is exactly the nightmare scenario for a game built around losing soldiers for good. PC Gamer hit two hard crashes in its own playthrough. Lose a mission to bad luck and that's the game working as designed; lose an hour to a crash and that's just a crash.

Performance is mostly fine on strong hardware. On a high-end rig it generally holds 60fps at 4K without frame generation, with some hitching when the camera cuts or a new area loads. Steam Deck, though, is a hard no for now: reviewers reported 15 to 20fps at minimum settings, so don't plan a handheld campaign yet. EA says a day-one patch is shipping that reviewers didn't have during testing, so some of this may already be softer by the time you read it.

Worth it?

If you liked the idea we wrote up last week, the game underneath the bugs is the real thing. I'd just save often, keep an eye on the patch notes, and play it on a proper PC or console rather than a Deck for now. If you're jumping in, our newcomer tips still apply.