Star Wars meets XCOM is an exciting premise, its Clone Wars setting even more so

Star Wars: Zero Company was shown off in a little more detail during Star Wars Celebration this week, and I’m intrigued to say the least.

It’s essentially Star Wars meets XCOM, a tactical turn-based strategy game that’ll see players put together a team to complete impossible objectives.

Check out the teaser trailer for the game below

While gameplay wasn’t really shown at Star Wars Celebration we did get a few brief snippets to go off, and again it looks exactly like XCOM but Star Wars.

The game will be set during the Clone Wars, and see a new, customisable characters called Hawks lead a band of Republic misfits, and even some former Separatists, on a mission against an unknown threat.

On a panel with some of the creators from BitReactor, Respawn and LucasFilms, fans were told several new characters were created for the game, including a new Jedi and Mandalorian.

Players won’t actually need to bother with these new characters if they don’t want to though, as it was said players can run a team entirely composed of their own custom characters, regardless of their role or species.

One example given was an entire team of astromech droids like R2D2, which was said to not be the most effective team you could come up with, but it is doable and also hilarious.

What fascinated most about what was said was the promise of enhanced difficulty modes, including permadeath.

This means some of the custom characters you create could die permanently if you choose to run that difficulty setting, and I think that’d be a great way to play considering we get to create our own Star Wars characters so rarely in video games, we’ll have more of a connection.

Star Wars: Zero Company will be launching sometime in 2026 for Xbox, PlayStation and PC platforms, and plenty more surprises are promised for the game’s full release.