Star Wars: Zero Company

 A long holiday weekend was enough to get through Star Wars: Zero Company, and I'm fine with that. To state is up front, it's good.

As a tactical game, it's good. I might describe it as something closer to Wasteland 3 than XCOM, though the quality of the latter shines through, because of the heavy story focus. The XCOM games I've played largely felt about the combat missions and everything in between fed into and supported that. In this case, the combat missions are just as good, but they serve the story rather than the other way around.

The credit economy gets real tight real fast until perhaps the last few missions. It doesn't feel great, though it does fit a barely-scrapping-by mercenary outfit. It pushed me to run almost all missions with a non-companion recruit because they had an ability granting a few extra credits each mission.

There is a bit of time pressure in that missions only last so many cycles (each mission taking 1 cycle). If you delay running a companion mission, it's possible to get stuck doing a required story mission and miss it. The worst outcome I had though is having to pass on a mission to prevent enemies from getting a buff to complete a companion mission.

Which gets into probably my only other gripe: counting Hawks, there are seven main story companions and missions only allow taking four people at most. It always kind of sucks to be sidelining cool characters. As often happens in such games, some of those character arrive later than others and some are unusable in certain stretches (or can permanently die, if such settings are enabled), so the redundancy isn't a huge negative, at least. There are some missions that give you a fifth controllable unit, so the engine can handle it, but maybe it was too hard to balance around or the designers just wanted to enforce that choice.

The story is one of the best Star Wars stories I've seen in a long time. The perspective gives a lot of insight to the late Clone Wars era that I'll get into in another post. The companion operators (and non-mission support characters) are all pretty good in my book and develop a certain found family vibe. There are a couple twists I genuinely did not expect. The companion stories all work well, even if a couple are revenge-driven (cliches are unavoidable at some point). The Infinite Coil works pretty well as an opposition force, having potential to be a serious threat, but still being small enough to plausibly fade into the background of the setting without ripple effects being necessary in other stories.

It's a Star Wars, story-heavy, tactical game. If someone is into at least two of the three and not totally against the third, I'd easily recommend it.