Star Wars: Zero Company First Impressions — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:08] This time bringing you some first impressions for Star Wars Zero Company, a TRPG set in the Star Wars universe, specifically in the Twilight of the Clone Wars. But this game dropped yesterday from the time of this video,

[00:21] and that timing alone should tell you that I did not receive a review key for it. I do plan on getting to a full review, but it is going to take me a I've been very excited for this myself. Also, a ton of people have been asking

[00:34] me about it, and so I wanted to put out this first impressions video to start off with. And as first impressions go, it's been pretty great. Um, I will say I performance issues that some people are dealing with, as tends to be the case

[00:48] with PC gaming. That is uh a little inconsistent in places. This has for me thus far, but I haven't gotten that far in. So, it's possible that might switch on me. But something to be aware of, I suppose. But moving beyond

[01:02] uh just that stuff, I was a little surprised at how very uh I would say high quality a lot of like the cinematics as well as some of the polish and the unique take on some of the mechanics that we see often in TRPGs.

[01:15] That has combined to make a pretty great experience at the beginning of the game here at least. that has me genuinely looking forward to playing even more of it. But let's get a little bit of background here. So, Zero Company puts

[01:27] you in the role of your character whose last name is Hawks. You used to be a captain of Zero Company as part of the Republic. However, you were uh basically made the fall guy for a bit of a fiasco that essentially ended your military

[01:43] career. Since then, you've been uh turning Zero Company into your own independent outfit, basically doing mercenary work for hire, and you've gotten yourself into some debt with the Huts. But lucky for you, or unlucky

[01:55] look at it, the Republic has need of your services, and they are hiring you to investigate a strange cult known as the Infinite Coil. That's about as far any more than that if I really wanted to, but that seems to be the gist of the

[02:10] plot. And yet, there's still a few cool things to mention. And uh for starters, character in terms of your background and everything, the character itself is customizable. You'll get to pick from six different uh species, I suppose you

[02:24] could call them. In the Star Wars universe, uh the Toguda, the Zabrak, regular old humans, etc. And then you can customize that character as well as their appearance, which is all cosmetic and you can change it later. But that

[02:36] bring into missions and everything. You are not alone, however. you'll be taking uh several actual companions and then as is usual with TRPGs, a bunch of uh like you know randomly generated so to speak mercenary characters that you can hire

[02:52] on. So it's a mix of like set companions who have their own stories and stuff and then just generic mercenaries you can bring with you for the ride. Now to make that even more interesting, however, uh perade death is often a factor in games

[03:05] like TRPGs. So the way they've handled that here is it is optional. The default is perma death is on for your characters. If they take three injuries you don't want to deal with that, turn

[03:18] Iron Man mode called Besar mode, which is your more traditional like one save file situation. So through that, you've got some added stakes to actually try to especially since you only get like one Jedi as an example. But as with any TRPG

[03:33] really, you managing all of those characters as well as your base and everything and the missions you tackle goes into formulating the actual sort of emergent experience that is then encompassed by the story. And before we

[03:47] start talking specifics about combat thus far, I did want to mention that your base as well as part of some of the bigger missions are areas that you can walk around in 3D as opposed to the uh more isometric view of say combat itself

[04:01] where they're going for a more tactical feel. In out of those situations, you have that more immersive thing that we see uh TRPGs do on occasion. Certainly just wanted to point out that it does look really good here. And when you are

[04:14] opportunity to do all of your typical management stuff. Talk to your you're going to pick up on things like their story and increase your bonds with them. Your bonds will potentially give you bonuses for being in combat with

[04:28] them. And then you can also customize like their weapons and appearance and whatnot. But you also eventually get the ability to unlock upgrades for your base as is also pretty typical, making sure that you get bonuses for everything you

[04:41] can do. And so we certainly have that classic base building element here, though I do really enjoy the way it is presented. But eventually you're going to have to actually go on some missions. This is divided up into operations and

[04:53] missions. Operations are not uh like boots on the ground, so to speak. You will typically assign someone, if anyone at all, and spend some of your gathered intelligence to deal with a situation. This will often lead to choices that

[05:07] but not always. And you'll get extra rewards for doing those. And then there's the actual missions themselves where we are on the ground actually fighting our turnbased battles. Now, in a lot of ways, I would say if you've

[05:19] played a TRPG system, you'll certainly get the gist here pretty quickly. I would say Zero Company's combat system is a combination of a lot of things as I've seen elsewhere that makes it feel very polished, even if it's not exactly

[05:34] mean, they might introduce stuff later that makes it feel genuinely innovative. I don't know. But in the opening hours, uh again, it just does feel really polished. Probably worth a mention that we are working on a threeaction economy

[05:47] here. So by default, all of your characters each turn, uh your team goes and the enemy goes, etc. And you get your three action points per character. And you can use these in any combination as you see fit, making use of the

[06:00] different classes you could have potentially assigned them, known as your specialization. So these are going to determine what your character is good different weapons as well. Different types of blasters basically such as

[06:14] sniper rifles, assault rifles, that kind of thing. And then you can also use your usual range of gadgets such as throwing grenades, healing yourself up, that kind there before you even start talking about individual characters talents or

[06:29] abilities as each one of them has something special they can do as well to help differentiate them, I would say. But like I said, the basics are pretty your standard attacks. There's hit chance based on things like cover and

[06:43] line of sight. If you miss, you will typically hit their cover and destroy it. Hit chance seems uh pretty reliable thus far. Haven't missed any 100% shots, as an example. But I think where it gets really interesting, at least in the

[06:56] opening hours, is the uh advantage as well as the teamwork system. So you can uh like give your characters support or request support basically. And what this character that you have requested support from. When you attack an enemy,

[07:11] potentially dealing more damage of course provided you actually hit them anyway. As you damage enemies, be that from that or any other method, you gain advantage. advantage is a shared resource between all of your characters

[07:25] that you can then access your special abilities with like shooting rocket launchers or in the case of my sharpshooter an attack that doesn't miss. So there's a lot of cool stuff like that. I think advantage is a pretty

[07:37] solid idea. And then of course there's your environmental stuff, the actual mission objectives and a variety of other things to keep that encounter diversity hopefully pretty high which all makes for a pretty promising setup.

[07:49] And I would say while I don't get the impression this game is like wildly big in scope or anything, it seems to be doing a lot with a lot of polish in terms of the tried andrue mechanics of the genre. I still have a few questions

[08:04] as I move to actually review the entire thing, which will take me a bit and I'll get to that in a moment. But things I'm keeping in mind are how interesting are you have these companions that could potentially die and you could then

[08:17] potentially miss out in their entire story line. I'm very curious uh you know what the quality of that story line actually is. I'm also interested to see how combat evolves over the course of an entire campaign, how it feels with all

[08:29] your upgrades going. Do they manage to keep that being really interesting? Because so far it seems like there is a ton of potential here and I'm not surprised that it did so well. But long story short, this seems super cool. I

[08:42] dig what they're doing. I'm excited to play more of it. Though it will take me a little while to actually play more of it because right this second I am in the another project that you guys should see

[08:54] need to finish that because of the state it's in before I can give this game my full attention. Especially since we are past the release date at this point. So that combined with the fact that it looks like you are looking at a two

[09:07] playthrough minimum to 100% this thing and I would fully expect it to probably be at least pushing two weeks. Um in a super well I could get it done by like the 10th of September, but I started

[09:21] college recently so hard to say how that's actually going to work out. But just don't know if I can actually hit that. But one way or another, I will definitely be reviewing this thing in full, but it will take me a little bit.

[09:35] But thus far, it seems great, which is where we are going to leave off this enjoyed it. If you did, or if you're looking forward to the review, I suppose by all means, like, comment, subscribe, all the YouTube jazz. But regardless of

[09:47] any of that, truly just thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.