Following a leak earlier this month, Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm Games have officially announced Star Wars Zero Company, a turn-based single-player tactic game that sounds like might be very similar to XCOM.
On April 14, EA confirmed that Star Wars Zero Company was the name behind its previously announced tactical Star Wars game. The new game is being developed by Bit Reactor with help from Titanfall and Jedi: Survivor creators Respawn. EA didn’t share much about the upcoming game, but did confirm that we’ll get to see more of the tactical game on April 19 during a panel at Star Wars Celebration.
Earlier this month, a Bit Reactor artist shared some screenshots of the Zero Company online game via an art portfolio. The screenshots revealed that Bit Reactor’s game was known internally as Star Wars Bruno. The leaked screenshots, which appear to be from an early build of the tactical game, show off some very XCOM-like gameplay, including cover and overwatch mechanics. In the leaked screenshots we can even see a “hit chance” stat above different enemy, which seems to point to Zero Company playing a lot like XCOM.
That’s not surprising to hear as Bit Reactor is a relatively new game studio that was founded by a former XCOM dev alongside over a dozen other people who worked on the beloved series at Firaxis. And considering how most Star Wars games these days are third or first-person action/adventure/shooter things, I’m really excited to see EA letting a studio do something different. Star Wars is a franchise that can support basically any type of video game and I’m happy to see more genre variety coming from the galaxy far, far away.
Star Wars Zero Company doesn’t have a release date yet and we don’t what platforms it will arrive on in the future. We’ll learn more about the game and see the first gameplay of Zero Company on April 19 as part of Star Wars Celebration, the sort-of-annual Lucasfilm approved fan convention. This year’s Celebration is happening in Japan. You can expect a lot of Star Wars news to come out of the event over the weekend.
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