Star Wars strategy game Zero Company has reignited a reader's love of the franchise, not just through its gameplay but its surprisingly good storytelling.
Reader Tim Colman finished Star Wars Zero Company in three days, a feat he can't remember achieving recently. While he adored XCOM and is a huge Star Wars fan, it wasn't the sheer fun of playing that made him race through it—it was the story. He felt invested in what was going on and, crucially, wanted to know what happened next, something that hasn't happened in a game for a long time.
A childhood Star Wars fan
Colman grew up as a devoted Star Wars kid in the 1980s. He played out intense battles in his Star Destroyer playset, featuring a central mediation chamber that his characters would often call 'Darth's Toilet'. He wrote to his local ITV station demanding to know when The Empire Strikes Back would be on terrestrial TV, including drawings of Imperial walkers that looked like malnourished horses. He also made a lightsaber out of a snooker cue and attacked his cousin with it—noting his cousin is fine and hardly limps these days.
Over the years, he has played many Star Wars games, from the wireframes of the Spectrum through the Nintendo Rogue Squadrons and most recently the two Jedi games. While they had some half-decent stories, nothing ever really got him like Zero Company has—it has real heart, and he cared about how it would end.
A story with heart
Colman contrasts Zero Company with the recent Mandalorian and Grogu film, which felt less like a movie and more like watching someone play a game: 'We must go to planet X, have a mid-boss fight and get the item. Then we can go to planet Y, have a slightly harder mid-boss fight, and get a bigger item.' He describes it as the cinematic equivalent of watching your mum write an unnecessarily complicated shopping list and then having to silently accompany her to Sainsbury's, Lidl, Morrisons, Aldi, and Tesco in two hours.
Zero Company's story is genuinely engaging, he says. It's not Andor levels of groundbreaking, but it has proper progression, a beginning, middle, and end that naturally comes together. It's funny, sad, and surprising, and Star Wars games—and games in general—need more of that.
Characters and voice cast
Colman credits a set of really good characters: the world-weary rogue with a heart of gold, sarcastic droids, a cool Mandalorian, and a sniper bloke with a comedy Russian accent. The voice cast are uniformly excellent, each giving proper life to their character, and chatting with the team after a mission is a nice little pause rather than the grind it is in so many other games.
He will always think fondly of characters like Hawks, Tel-Rea, Jae, Bennic, astromech IM-8008-IES, Fathom, and Typhon, even if one of those names he completely made up just to see it regularly displayed on screen.
As the final scene finished, Colman found himself giving the game an actual real-life round of applause for a great story well told. He realised that childhood wonder—being a kid again and just loving Star Wars as a brilliant, exciting world—had come back, even if Darth's Toilet didn't make an appearance.
He would love a sequel, although the fact the development team appear to have been sent to the spice mines of Kessel doesn't bode well. He hopes their story continues, because it really deserves to and also because he really, really wants to find out what happens next.
