It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise something obvious about Star Wars Zero Company. The fate of its eponymous crew – short of cash, betrayed by the shifting sands of circumstance in a tumultuous wider world, scrambling to just about get the job over the line – is really a lot like that of its developers at Bit Reactor. Furloughed for about a month before the game was released, those staff have clearly hustled and scrapped and fought to the last. And so Zero Company the game bears the signs of its development. In places it feels a little patched together, a little under-ready, a game that launched into the world like a roguish pilot might launch a half-repaired starfighter. The windscreen’s rattling, warning lights are flashing, one particularly hirsute engineer is deeply unimpressed at the decision to take off, and nobody knows where that ominous groaning noise is coming from. But somehow she’s up. And in the end that’s all that counts.
