There’s a lot to love about Star Wars Zero Company. The story offers a more grounded view of the Star Wars universe, the XCOM-like tactics are sharply tuned, and I can’t get enough of my goofball squad with all their clashing personalities. But the deeper I’ve gotten into Bit Reactor’s hit strategy game, the more I’ve come to appreciate the little details that elevate it. For instance, Zero Company has a unique approach to difficulty that’s downright ingenious.
In your average strategy game, ratcheting up the challenge can be a tricky task. Many games just tend to introduce more powerful units as the game progresses, or fill maps with more enemies. Those are both sensible solutions, and Zero Company does a bit of that itself. Its more creative approach to challenge scaling, though, comes in the form of Crisis Missions, the strategy game’s star feature.
Occasionally, when you head over to your holotable to select a mission, you’ll be greeted by a scary red warning. That indicates that a crisis is happening in the universe which needs your urgent attention. What’s a crisis? It’s when enemy troops are on the verge of learning some new combat techniques that are about to make your life even harder. Sniping droids may be about to gain an evasion perk, or learn how to bypass a bit of your troops’ defense with their shots.
It’s a bit of an ingenious system. Crises create a narrative-driven reason for enemies to grow and become more skilled. There’s a sense that your foes are a coordinated army that has its own research and development department that you need to sabotage. Zero Company naturally gets harder the deeper you get into it, not because more droids are on the field, but because those droids are receiving better training over time. It makes the difficulty scaling feel less mechanical than it can in your typical tactics game, making your enemies feel like a living threat that reacts to your counter-attack.
Image: Bit Reactor/EA via Polygon
That’s a strong system on its own, but Crisis Missions are made even better by the agency you have in shaping your own difficulty. Whenever a crisis arises, you have a chance to partially shut down your enemies’ plan. You’re presented with two separate perks that a unit type could get, then asked to pick one to disrupt. That choice allows you to create a custom difficulty throughout the game, as you get to choose what evolutions you want to deal with going forward.
It’s one of the most strategic aspects of Zero Company, even though that decision happens off the battlefield. As Hawks, Zero Company’s leader, you have to make tactical decisions based on your play style and squad composition. If you’re building a crew around long-range snipers who rely on movement-disrupting overwatches, it might make sense to allow an enemy to empower its melee rather than to make them harder to hit from afar. It’s one small but effective way that Zero Company pushes you to understand your crew’s strengths in order to survive.
It’s setting a gold standard for how games can approach escalating difficulty in a way that feels both narratively justified and natural. I love that each crisis makes battles just a little tougher, rather than tossing me into a mission where enemy units suddenly have more health for no good reason. It allows me to keep up with the challenge by planning around each permutation as they come. That’s more satisfying than coming up against an artificial skill check that I’m either prepared to face or not. It’s little details like this that elevate Zero Company from a good XCOM clone to a great tactics game in its own right that I hope will have a broader influence on the genre.
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