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Star Wars Zero Company is hitting all the vibes I wanted from a tactical narrative adventure based within the larger Star Wars universe. There’s political intrigue, characters with big personalities, silly little moments and rivalries, big-scale battles across many different recognisable planets, and, of course, some lightsabers here.

In the roughly ten hours I’ve played so far with a preview build of Star Wars Zero Company, I’ve got a good handle on the game’s core systems, while also getting to know the cast of characters you’ll meet and meeting the new villainous group, Infinite Coil.

You start the game by being able to customise your version of ‘Hawks,’ the leader of Zero Company, who doesn’t have to be human, even if the trailers have all been promoting that one look for the character. I went with the human version, nonetheless, though I messed around with the character creator for a bit and made my version of Hawks a bit more of a shevled, younger rogue-type.

Hawks has gotten himself and Zero Company into a bit of debt with The Hutts. The first couple hours of Zero Company deal with some early missions the team take on to get that debt paid off, which largely comes when a secret mission from the Republic is greenlite to hire a group in secret to look into the Infinite Coil, which is a new Separatist-aligned group who inflict themselves with a string from a scorpion like creature, which gives them the Shadow Plague, to which some die, and others, the survivors, grants resilience and unusual abilities.

Even with my ten hours of the game so far, I don’t have a great idea of what the group’s long-term plan is, but they’re certainly interesting for a Star Wars villain. There are some magic elements involved in the Shadow Plague, or at least it seems. And you’ll see some of these happen in-mission, when you’re battling members of Infinite Coil.

Let’s get into the combat, because a few members of developer Bit Reactor worked on games like XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. To a degree, it plays as you’d expect, but there’s a focus on defensive movements, and an even bigger focus put on team-based interactions to reinforce the game’s Soldier Bonds systems, which sees characters grow stronger when interacting with one another in and out of missions, and unlocking new skills and buffs at the same time.

Once you get a handle on the game’s movements, you’ll move someone like Hawks into position and use his ability that asks for an ally, like Kabb Uppercut, to help him attack his next target. As long as Kabb has a line of fire, he’ll fire upon who you target as Hawks in their attack. Moving on to using some of Kabb’s actions, you can now use his ability that signals out an enemy and lets him get a free attack off on the next ally to attack the enemy. Move to another ally, Jae Mordant, for example and run in with a melee attack, and Kabb follows it up with a support attack. You can then have Kabb attack another enemy whom Jae is now in line of sight of after her movement, and get them down to low health, triggering Jae’s passive ability that allows her to take down a low-health enemy once per turn.

A big aspect of the game is planning how you’ll use ‘Overwatch,’ which you can trigger at any point using one or all of your characters’ remaining CP for your current turn, and it will end their actions for your current turn. What it does, though, is let you set a character to watch a zone, and if an enemy runs into it, they’ll blast them and hopefully stop their movement. I found myself basically always wanting to save enough CP to set up everyone in my squad into Overwatch before I ended my turn. It can save your ass. Enemies who would run into your face doing strong melee damage can be stopped in their tracks; weaker enemies like droids can just be taken out during your enemy’s turn, and you can also set up a kill triangle when you know where and when some new enemies will be coming from.

Throw in some grenades, a mixture of repositioning, the use of other characters you’ll unlock like Cly Kullervo, a Mandalorian who can fly up into the sky and land with a thud among enemies, and you’ll quickly learn the combat in Star Wars Zero Company is reliant on synergy between the characters, and a strategic use of the order and when you use characters’ abilities.

Talking about characters: there is permanent death in the game, which might scare some off. However, that option can be toggled off (though the developers suggest playing with it on), and if this is your first strategy RPG, don’t fret either, as the team at Bit Reactor want this adventure to be accessible to everyone, including Star Wars fans who might be coming in without any of the genre experience. There are several difficulty options, including a ‘Story’ one.

The team at Bit Reactor are doing several things to make Star Wars Zero Company stand out within its genre, and their approach to the game is to bring just as big a narrative and adventure to the genre as you’d expect from a Star Wars game in a third-person action game. Adding to these cinematic, more character-driven moments are key narrative missions where you wander through a town or section of a planet before the battle begins, and along the way you can stop and gather intel to help you in and post-mission. There’s no room for exploration in these moments, but I appreciated how it breaks up the gameplay. They do help you feel more drawn into the world, rather than just going from ‘The Den,’ which is Zero Company’s base of operations, to clicking on a mission and being thrown onto a battlefield — though that still happens, of course.

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When you’re at The Den, which you’ll return to after each mission, with Hawks awaking somewhere in his office as a day moves forward (some missions have dates they’ll become unavailable after, so picking whic ones you want to do, will lock you out of others), and then you’ll be free to do some shopping, customisation, and chatting with your crew. You can upgrade The Den to earn more facilities for healing your team members who got hurt on a mission, get access to better weapons and accessories on the black market, and grow your ability to recruit more Zero Crew members to use during missions and operations.

When you take the time to talk to crew members, you’ll unlock the ability to follow up on something they mentioned and take on what I can only think of as character-driven side quests. These will help you bond with those characters, increasing their effectiveness in battle, but you’ll also genuinely see some really insightful and at times dark and sad moments for your team. Jae Mordan, for example, has a mission in which she tries to talk some sense into her own father, who has been turned to join the Infinite Coil.

At The Den you’ll also use ‘Intel’ to take part in ‘Operations,’ where you can send some operatives on missions that take place in the background; you’ll sometimes get choices to make which will affect which rewards, and also how members of Zero Company and their relationship with Hawk is affected. These can lead to other boots-on-ground missions being unlocked as well.

The back end of my preview playtime was spent on a very cinematic mission in which Hawk, on a solo undercover mission, meets Anakin Skywalker, and he joins your party for a section of battles which have timer-based objectives. Anakin is a beast; obviously, he can take out enemies in one attack and throw his sabre through multiple to take them out in easy succession; getting to play as a powerful Jedi on the battlefield makes short work of enemies, so thankfully, there was always a mixture of disarming bombs and saving civilians that needed to happen to keep me on my toes. This mission was certainly the most cinematic one of my time with the game, as it moves through several different changing environments and has a dramatic backing to everything happening with the Infinite Coil planning bombs and performing terrorist actions. I now wonder just who else from the Jedi Temple could show up in the rest of the game for some guest gameplay?

This was one of those preview periods where I didn’t want to stop playing the game, and it was disappointing when it all had to come to an end. I want to know what the Infinite Coil is up to; I want to know more about my different crew members, like Tel-Rea Vokoss, a padawan who has abandoned the Jedi temple to put an end to the Coil. Fortunately, it’s not far now until the full game releases.

Star Wars Zero Company is set to release on August 28 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Preview access was supplied by the publisher.

Read more about my time with Star Wars Zero Company and what I learned from the press briefing in the articles below: