Ex-Firaxis devs make Star Wars tactics game Zero Company

Bit Reactor, a studio formed by former Firaxis developers, is releasing Star Wars Zero Company on Aug. 27 for Xbox Series X|S. Electronic Arts is publishing the single-player turn-based tactics game and Lucasfilm holds the franchise rights.

The game puts players in control of Hawks, a customizable protagonist who leads a mercenary unit during the Clone Wars. Players assemble a roster that mixes authored characters created by the studio with custom-made operators. Missions combine third-person exploration and role-playing story beats with grid-based tactical encounters, and permadeath can remove characters permanently from both combat and narrative threads.

The studio’s core team includes developers who worked on XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. The developers say they built Zero Company to combine character-driven narrative and XCOM-style tactical combat while keeping the game offline and single-player.

Each character starts with a primary specialization drawn from eight general roles: Assault, Heavy, Sharpshooter, Scoundrel, Soldier, Gunslinger, Scout and Medic. Midway through the campaign players may add a secondary specialization to create two-point class combinations. Combat squads field up to four operators, and weapons use falls into four broad types.

Zero Company tracks a bond system that records a relationship score for every pair of characters on the roster. “The more you have those characters do things together, the stronger that relationship grows,” Lead Designer James Brawley said. Relationships rise through shared missions and in-combat support actions such as healing and shot assists. Some authored characters begin with negative relationships toward others, and those scores can shift based on assignments and battlefield actions.

Combat rules differ from some recent tactics games. The developers removed fog of war so enemy positions are visible at the start of encounters. Overwatch is directional: players place cones that trigger responses when enemies enter them. A shared resource called Advantage accumulates when squad members damage enemies; many strong abilities spend Advantage instead of action points, which the team designed to encourage sequencing and resource choices during a turn.

Map layouts and objectives vary to promote different approaches. Some encounters favor short-range positioning and counterattacks, while others require advancing across longer spaces to reach objectives. Players can customize character appearance, backstories, loadouts and even an astromech. The studio provides authored figures meant to represent archetypes such as Mandalorians and Jedi alongside tools for player-created characters.

Bit Reactor’s core group of roughly 20 developers comes from strategy backgrounds and is supported by other hires. The studio states the goal is to integrate story choices, squad bonds and tactical combat so mission outcomes connect to both gameplay and narrative. Star Wars Zero Company publishes Aug. 27 on Xbox Series X|S.