STAR WARS Zero Company

STAR WARS Zero Company is a single-player, turn-based tactics game set in the twilight of the Clone Wars. It released on August 27, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. You play as Hawks, a former Galactic Republic officer who builds and leads Zero Company, an unconventional outfit of professionals for hire drawn from across the galaxy. The team is recruited for one operation against an emerging adversary that threatens to consume the galaxy if left unchecked.

Premise

This is a story about the war beneath the war, the fights that happen in the shadows while the main Clone Wars rages elsewhere. Hawks answers to no army. The squad mixes story-driven companions with custom-created mercenaries, all of them flawed, expendable, and motivated by their own reasons for taking the job. The adversary is the Infinite Coil, a Separatist-aligned cult led by Kundri Fathom.

How It Plays

Combat is turn-based and viewed from an isometric camera. You deploy a small squad, spend Action Points to move and act, use cover to survive, and try to keep everyone alive through permadeath, which can take a squad member out of the story for good. Outside of fights, the camera shifts to third-person exploration. Between missions you run the Den, the squad's home base, where you research upgrades, buy gear, recruit new Operators, and pick your next target from a galaxy map that changes over time. Bonds form between characters who fight together, feeding a relationship system that affects both the battlefield and the narrative.

Key Facts

Where and Who

The campaign runs across two location layers. Official material gives both figures: a galaxy map of more than 150 planets where strategic Operations can take place, and a smaller set of purpose-built worlds, described as "over a dozen", where Tactical Missions are played. Bit Reactor has never published an exact count for that second set; a July 2026 reveal graphic named eleven of them, and official posts name Bespin separately, so eleven is a floor rather than a total. Planets and Locations covers both layers and every world named in official material. The full voice cast was announced in July 2026 and is listed on Voice Cast, including both performers for Hawks.

Scope and Structure

The main story runs roughly 30 to 40 hours for an average player. It is a linear campaign rather than a branching one: squad composition changes which story moments you see and how bonds develop, but the conclusion lands in broadly the same place for everyone, and there are no romance options. Gordy Haab composes the score.

Most cutscenes render in real time so that a customized Hawks shows up in story scenes, with a small number of pre-rendered exceptions.

The campaign is played on one of four difficulties, Story, Normal, Hard and Expert, which can be changed between missions. A separate Beskar Mode removes the ability to load an earlier save, and permadeath is a toggle of its own, switched on by default. There is no New Game Plus, though some customization options unlock on later playthroughs. The PC version carries 53 achievements.

The game is sold outright rather than as a service. Bit Reactor has said it has no plans for monetization or microtransactions, nothing to announce on downloadable content, and no official mod support. It is also available through EA Play Pro.

Reception

Reviews of the finished game went live on August 26, 2026, the day before release. Critical reception was strong. Aggregate scores settled in the mid-80s across roughly ninety reviews, the large majority of critics recommended it, and essentially none of the coverage was negative. The console and PC versions scored within a point or two of each other. Reviewers consistently praised the tactical layer as a genuine deepening of the squad-tactics formula rather than an imitation of it, singled out the writing and cast, and called the production values unusually generous for the price. The most common narrative criticism was that Kundri Fathom is underused.

Player response has been positive but more qualified. Two weeks after release the store user rating stands at Very Positive, with roughly 81 percent of about 17,600 reviews recommending the game. Players and reviewers alike singled out the writing, the cast, and the way bonds between Operators feed back into both the battlefield and the story, along with a tactical layer that stays readable for newcomers to the genre. The recurring qualifier is technical: a visible minority of otherwise favourable players filed negative reviews explicitly pending a fix.

The most common criticism at launch concerned PC performance: reports of low framerates, stuttering, and weak scaling between graphics presets, including on hardware at or above the recommended tier, alongside crashes in early missions. Bit Reactor's own launch guidance points the same way. It describes the game as more CPU bound than GPU bound, removed the word "native" from the published PC targets before release, and states that the recommended 1440p at 60 frames per second is reached using the game's default upscaling rather than at native resolution. See System Requirements for the published tiers and what they now promise. A smaller group of players criticised the interface and controls as console-oriented. Known Issues and Bugs collects what players have reported since release.

The game shipped with a day-one patch that pre-release reviewers did not have. In the thirteen days since, no post-launch patch has been released and no patch notes have been published on the game’s news hub or its store announcement feed. In early September the team said a first post-launch update addressing bugs and performance was being prepared for all platforms, and separately acknowledged a specific targeting bug in which a 100 percent chance to hit is recalculated lower when the shot is taken. See Patch History for the full timeline.

Performance in the Market

Zero Company was the best-selling game on its main storefront for the week of August 25 to September 1, entered the UK physical chart at number two for the week ending August 29, and was the eleventh most-downloaded PlayStation 5 game in the United States, Canada and Europe for August. No unit sales figure has been published. Concurrent players on the main storefront peaked at just under 37,000 and have averaged in the low twenty thousands across the first month.

The Studio After Launch

The launch was followed by reporting that Bit Reactor had placed most of its staff on unpaid furlough about two weeks before release, with one account putting the figure at 80 percent of the team. A studio representative said the decision was Bit Reactor’s own rather than the publisher’s, and the studio was described as hoping to bring furloughed staff back. Development covers this in more detail.