Star Wars Zero Company Is My Game of the Year
I knew I was in trouble when I finished Star Wars Zero Company and immediately started a second playthrough.
Not “maybe I’ll come back after a few patches.” Not “I should try a different build someday.” I rolled credits, thought about the choices I made, thought about the squad members I still wanted to test, and went right back in.
That almost never happens for me anymore.
I have over 1,000 hours between XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, and their expansions across PC, Switch, and PlayStation. I love the genre, but I am also picky about it. I notice bad controller controls. I notice when the menus fight me. I notice when a tactical game on console feels like a PC game shoved onto a couch setup with no care.
Star Wars Zero Company does not have that problem. On PS5, it feels confident, readable, and surprisingly smooth where it matters most. It has flaws. The graphics are not going to melt your TV. The voice acting is average. I wish it auto-saved more often. There is some stutter here and there.
Still, after about 90 hours and two back-to-back playthroughs, one on hard and one on normal, it is my PS5 game of the year.
The PS5 version gets the hard part right
The best compliment I can give the PS5 version is that I stopped thinking about the controller.
That is a big deal for a tactics game. This genre can feel clumsy on console because so many of its basic actions were born on mouse and keyboard. Moving a cursor, checking line of sight, comparing abilities, swapping gear, reading enemy info, rotating the camera, confirming an action, canceling it before disaster, all of that has to feel fast.
Here, it does.
The UI is friendly and easy to navigate. I never felt like I had to fight menus to get to the interesting part, which is making hard choices under pressure. The game presents its information cleanly enough that playing from the couch on a big screen works. I played on an 80-some-inch Samsung TV in gaming mode, and the setup felt natural.
The port also gets the pacing right. Missions move at a good clip. You can assess a battlefield, plan a route, and start taking risks
There was occasional stuttering, but it was not bad enough to hurt the experience. I noticed it, but it showed up more as a small irritation than a deal-breaker.
What impressed me more was how rarely I felt the usual console tactics compromise. I did not keep wishing I was at a desk. I did not feel like the PS5 version was the lesser way to play. Like the best console ports of XCOM, it respects the fact that controller players need speed, clarity, and simple access to deep systems.
That is why Star Wars Zero Company works so well on PS5. It is not only playable. It feels at home.
It scratches the XCOM itch without copying every bruise
The obvious comparison is XCOM, and the comparison is earned. If you love that loop of squad management, tense positioning, punishing mistakes, and dramatic saves, Zero Company knows exactly what you are here for.
I came in with a lot of XCOM baggage. More than 1,000 hours will do that. I am used to missing high-percentage shots. I am used to watching a favorite soldier get deleted because I got greedy. I am used to spending too long deciding whether one risky flank is worth losing a whole campaign.
Zero Company gave me that same nervous energy, but it is more forgiving.
That does not mean easy. On hard, I loaded saves more than a few times. Sometimes a character died, or the main character, Tesh, died, and that was enough for me to say, “Nope, run it back.” I still made plenty of bad calls. I still paid for overextending. I still had those moments where a mission went from controlled to chaos in one turn.
The difference is that the game usually gives you room to recover. It feels less interested in crushing you and more interested in making you adapt. That is a smart call. A Star Wars tactics game should have tension, but it should also keep the adventure moving.
Across my two playthroughs, I only lost one companion by the end. That number says something about the balance. I was challenged enough to care and cautious enough to reload when things went sideways, but I never felt like the game was built around punishing me for daring to experiment. And experiment I did.
That is the sweet spot.
I do wish the game auto-saved more often. Manual saving becomes part of the rhythm, especially if you are the kind of player who gets attached to squad members. The game is more forgiving than XCOM, but it can still hurt when a bad turn spirals. More frequent auto-saves would make the experience feel safer without removing the stakes.
Still, the important part is that I wanted to keep playing. I wanted another mission. I wanted to see if a different ability setup would solve a fight more cleanly. I wanted to take the same squad into a new mess and see what happened.
That is the hook. That is the thing a tactics game cannot fake.
Builds matter more than character looks
I did not spend much time customizing the looks of my characters, though you can easily lose time tweaking appearances, colors, races, and every details that make a squad member feel personal. For me, in Zero Company, I cared much more about what everyone could do.
That is a good sign.
The game gives you enough room to play with powers, utility items, weapon mods, and squad roles that the customization is endless. I spent far more time switching around abilities, testing equipment, and thinking about how one character’s setup could cover another character’s weakness.
The best feature here is the ability to refund upgrade points. That one choice makes the whole game more fun.
Instead of feeling locked into early mistakes, I felt free to experiment. If a power did not fit my playstyle, I could change it. If a build sounded good on paper but felt awkward in battle, I could rework it. If a different mission demanded a different approach, I could adjust. I especially had fun using three characters with Scout as their secondary characteristic. Those Action Points and the Spotting mechanism really can add up to some damage.
Refunding upgrade points also lowers the stress of playing blind. You do not have to look up a build guide before spending points. You can try things. You can make weird combinations. You can build around your favorite companion instead of chasing some perfect spreadsheet version of the squad.
The most fun thing about Star Wars Zero Company is not just winning. It's building a plan, watching it fail, changing the plan, and then watching the new version click.
This is where the game’s RPG layer helps the tactical layer. The more I played, the more I thought about roles:
Who can get us out of trouble when the opening plan collapses?
Who pairs well with Tesh?
Which powers are actually useful every mission, not just impressive once?
How much AP does each special power consume?
Those questions kept the second playthrough from feeling like a repeat. Even on normal, I was still engaged because I was testing different ideas. The lower difficulty changed the pressure, but it did not remove the pleasure of building a better squad.
The game is at its best when it lets you tinker.
The presentation is good enough, but not the reason to play
If you are coming to Star Wars Zero Company for a graphical showcase, you might walk away underwhelmed.
The graphics are serviceable. That is the word that keeps coming back to me. They do the job. Environments look fine. Characters look fine. Effects are readable. Nothing is ugly enough to distract from the game, but very little made me stop and admire the screen.
On a big TV, the game holds up well enough. I played on a large Samsung screen in gaming mode, and while I noticed the occasional stutter, the overall image was clear and easy to read. For this genre, readability matters more than raw beauty. I would rather know exactly where my squad can move than stare at a fancy texture.
The cut scenes fare better. Most of them are good, and they help give the campaign some shape between missions. The game understands that a tactics campaign needs downtime. You need a reason to care about the next drop. You need tension outside the grid.
The voice acting is more uneven. I would call it average. It does not ruin the story, but it rarely lifts a scene above the writing. Some lines land. Others pass by without much weight. It feels professional enough, just not memorable.
The story itself is pretty good. It has enough Star Wars flavor to feel like part of that larger world without losing track of the squad-level focus. The best parts are the smaller moments, the choices around companions, and the feeling that this crew is scraping through a dangerous conflict one mission at a time.
And yes, spoiler alert, a Force user or two may pop into your game.
That will be enough for some players on its own. For me, it worked because the game does not seem to forget what it is. The story supports the missions. The missions support the squad. The squad supports the choices you make between fights.
That structure is stronger than any one cut scene.
Two playthroughs proved it was not a one-run thrill
The first playthrough was the test. The second one was proof.
I finished one run on hard and one on easy, with about 90 hours between them. That is a lot of time to spend with a game back to back, especially when the broad structure is familiar. If the combat had worn thin, I would have bounced off the second run quickly.
I did not.
Hard mode gave me the version I wanted as an XCOM veteran. It made me respect the board. I had to think about positioning, ability timing, and the cost of pushing too aggressively. It also made me care deeply when a character dropped. That is where the save loading came in. I am not ashamed of it. If Tesh went down, the timeline had to be corrected.
The forgiving nature of the easier modes make it easy to recommend. While a tactics veteran can push the difficulty and find real bite, someone who cares more about Star Wars, story, and squad progression can lower the difficulty and still have a good time.
That flexibility is a big reason it rose above other games for me this year.
It is not perfect. I would still like:
More frequent auto-saves
Smoother performance in busy moments
Stronger voice acting
More impressive visuals
A few more reasons to care about cosmetic customization
None of those complaints changed the larger truth. Every time I sat down, I wanted to play one more mission. Every time I finished a mission, I wanted to check gear. Every time I checked gear, I wanted to test the new setup.
That loop is deadly in the best way.
Why it wins my game of the year
A game of the year does not have to be the most technically impressive release. It does not have to win every category. It has to be the game that sticks. The one that keeps pulling you back after the credits. The one whose flaws you can name, then immediately forgive because the core is that good.
That is Star Wars Zero Company for me.
It takes the tactical tension I love from XCOM, makes it work beautifully on PS5, adds enough flexibility to encourage experimentation, and wraps it in a solid Star Wars story that kept me invested through two complete runs.
The console port matters. The controls matter. The easy-to-read UI matters. The ability to refund upgrade points matters. The fact that I could play comfortably on a huge TV and rarely think about the hardware matters.
Most of all, the squad matters.
I cared when characters died. I cared enough to reload. I cared enough to play again. By the time I finished the second run, I was not thinking about the average voice acting or the serviceable graphics. I was thinking about better builds, different choices, and whether I had one more campaign in me.
That is why Star Wars Zero Company is my game of the year. It won the old-fashioned way. It made me keep playing.
My game of the year so far, through September at least.