STAR WARS Zero Company™

Disclaimer: This review WILL reference X-Com a lot. I never had it in me to finish either and I think this games makes a lot of great changes to their formula) Went in expecting little more thana star wars skin slapped onto a straight X-Com rip, but I was very pleasantly surprised. As far as the star wars aspects, feels like your playing an epside straight out of the clone wars series, no changes needed there. Plot is interesting, characters are varied, setting is all very well done. It even avoids the trap of dragging in big movie names so far, so minor references to them in dialogue. The real gem is the changes to the X-Com format. To start, they give you the freed to make anyone any class and change at any time. This means you can actually adapt even when a unit is injured. This shifts the strength to just how much you have used a unit, rather than needing to ensure you have multiple copes of a single unit to keep your strategies usable. Then we have the per turn stuff. The removal of reloading lets things flow far better. Going up to 3 ap with balanced ways to add more keeps what you can do on a turn-by-turn basis very fluid. The various classes all seem to gel with one-another and while some combos are stronger than others, nothing seems unusable. Changing utility items like grenades from single use to usage limited per combat feels far better than the way X-Com had you make single-use items. Even the moment to feel of the game is very well done. During the fight, units will keep taking cinematic pot-shots at each other while other units take their turns (Even as I am writing the review, I have the game running mid battle on my other monitor and lasers are flying, missing, getting deflected). The set-dressing for each stage has been great so far. The maps on different planets feel nice and varied and even on the maps that have been on the same planet feel different from each other. Overall, it's very much the feel of the best parts of a big ol' gunfight in the Clone Wars Series. The BEST change BY FAR in my opinion comes to how units get injured. In X-Com, the minute your unit took a single point of damage it was off on sick-leave. This led to even my most bad-ass units feeling like they were having trouble dealing with basic enemies. And a couple of bad dice rolls could lead to your entire run ending when you lost your main squad Zero Company instead lets a unit take as many hit as it can, then has the unit go down and accrue an injury. The unit can be picked up to keep fighting in the mission, but 3 injuries and it's gone for good. Once a mission is over, you only need to put units in the med bay to heal injuries. Additionally, even when almost your whole squad is done you can still pull off a comeback which feels great to do (And has already saved my run a few times) I will say it feels like there should be a bit more a penalty during the mission. When a unit goes down. Right now they simply come back with Half their health and a 10% accuracy penalty per injury. As they can only accrue 2, I feel this could be nudged to 15% or 20% or maybe give them less AP when they are picked up. Continue with the negatives, there are certainly a number of "Oh this was just launched, how did this make it through testing, etc" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It has a habit of "getting stuck thinking" towards the end of most missions or when there are a lot of units on the field. While the dialogue is well written, a few (I am talking 2 or 3 in 9 hours of play) were paced a bit strangely, like the system had to stop and think before it played a response line to something. TL;DR The game is fun, engaging, and a surprisingly good evolution of the X-COM battle system. It has a few pains that will need to be ironed out in the first couple patches but seems to be worth the launch price. The story is interesting and I find myself wanting to learn more about the characters and their backstories.

Je ne comprends pas les critiques...

So I will caveat this with I am having a great time. Customizing my crew and enjoying the gameplay. Star Wars + Xcom and Midnight Suns, its a great combo. However, yesterday I crashed 4 times to my desktop on the tutorial mission when you reach the area in the 3rd person exploration and you have to use your scope to look at the battlefield. It starts a light little cutscene, but crashed every time Hawks put the scope to his eye. I finally figured i can just skip that scene which let me progress on. I've now gotten to the mission where I am heading to the cavern to finally find Fathom and again, in the 3rd person exploring part, I got to the point where i need to use my scope, and since it hadn't crashed in several hours or missions, I forgot and pressed the button to use the scope......and crash! I don't want to skip this scene like i did before, I want to experience the story, so its kind of sad. I get its only day 2, but I do not have any driver updates for my GPU and i already did a file verify through steams, just in case. I guess I'll have to wait till either a hotfix comes from Bit Reactor or my GPU. Either way, what I've played so far has been great, fun, loving the interactions between my crew and the graphics when things explode. I'm looking forward to see where this story goes.

Good game of xcom X star wars. Has a couple bugs here and there, nothing game breaking though. performance was decent. overall 7/10 game. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much reason to re-play after first completion, but got a good almost 40 hours out of it.

game is burning up my gpu the stutters are getting game breaking. games should not be released in this state... wait until they patch it and if you dont see them doing this soon then i would just hold off altogether. shame i think the games not that bad but cant get into it for the game running so badly....

Awesome. X-Com but better, and it is STAR WARS!!!!

Great game! I completed the campaign on hard in 33 hrs. Fans of XCOM will really enjoy the game loop and fans of starwars will really enjoy the story. In it's current state, there's a lot left to be desire for graphical optimization. The graphics and flow of the game even falls short when comparing to XCOM 2 or chimera squad (2020). Hopefully the devs will put the work into improving this. If you need to play the game on 4K super HD melt you mind amazing graphics, wait 6 months for the game to get fixed. Otherwise, it's fun and playable at this time.