It’s hard to be confident about the game’s future after the studio that made it furloughed most of its staff.
If you’re on the fence about Star Wars Zero Company, you should know what you might be getting into. The game currently has an aggregate critic score of 85 on Metacritic, making it one of the best reviewed Star Wars games in recent memory. When it comes to story and gameplay, it’s a masterfully executed tactics game in the style of X-COM with memorable characters. What none of the reviews I read or watched mentioned is that Zero Company is also something of a technical mess.
On PC, the game has all the trademarks of a janky Unreal Engine 5 release. I’m running a system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5060 Ti and 16GB of RAM, and I’m getting constant traversal stutter and input lag when I try to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve also encountered a bug that forced me to restart the same mission twice. Yes, you might say I’m running the game on a glorified RTX 3070, but even those with more powerful GPUs like the RTX 5090 are complaining of poor performance. On Steam, the game has a “mostly positive” rating across nearly 9,000 reviews, and yet almost every one of those reviews mentions stuttering, game-breaking bugs and crashes.
“Started off having a great time,” one negative review starts. “Then came the crashes. Crashed almost every hour, so needed to save every few minutes. On the times I forgot to save, I had to replay the entire section again. Of course it only ever crashed as I was about to complete a mission.” Over on Reddit, console players are complaining of their own set of issues. YouTuber Daniel Owen has also made a video about the game’s PC issues. While I haven’t played the Xbox Series or PlayStation 5 ports, there are similar reports of crashes and stutters floating around the internet for each.
The experience of playing Zero Company is frustratingly similar to that of another recent UE5 Star Wars game, Jedi: Survivor. As I wrote about in 2023, that game was broken on release. It suffered from constant traversal and shader compilation stutter on PC, meaning the game would constantly hitch even on high-end systems. For NVIDIA users, the game also shipped without DLSS support. Even after nearly a dozen major patches, Jedi: Survivorstill stutters on PC. At this point, I’ve given up hope that the game will ever play smoothly; Respawn Entertainment, Jedi: Survivor‘s developer, hasn’t released a new patch in nearly two years.
Unfortunately, I can’t confidently say Zero Company will receive even a fraction of the post-release support that Jedi: Survivor got from Respawn. That’s because while Electronic Arts published both games, the new one was made by an independent studio named Bit Reactor, not a direct subsidiary, and its future depends on whether Zero Company sells enough copies.
On Monday, Game File’s Stephen Totilo reported that Bit Reactor had furloughed the majority of its staff just weeks before Zero Company’s release on August 27. One source told Totilo that as much as 80 percent of the studio’s employees aren’t being paid right now. Another source told him that only a skeleton crew remains, “ready to address any of Zero Company’s post-launch bugs.” A spokesperson for Bit Reactor told Totilo that the studio hopes to bring the furloughed workers back with restored pay, a promise the employees he spoke to said they weren’t confident it would be able to deliver on, even if the game is a commercial success. The studio is also embroiled in a legal dispute between its co-founders that won’t go to trial until early 2027.
If what remains of Bit Reactor is working to address Zero Company’s many bugs and performance issues, the one public statement the studio has made on the subject isn’t reassuring. On the day of the game’s release, it simply said on Steam’s Community forums it was aware of “emerging issues (crashes and CPU threading),” and that it was working on implementing fixes. “We’ll let you know when we’re able to provide an update,” it added.
On the face of it, that’s a fine enough statement, but it was issued before the news about its staffing levels came out, and it hasn’t said anything since. EA and Bit Reactor did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request, asking what, if any, post-release support the game will receive.
If you’re thinking about buying Zero Company, just know that it might not get to a better state than it is right now. You might think I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’ll point out it took Respawn, a studio with the full financial backing of EA, a year-and-a-half to get Jedi: Survivor to its current state. Another comparison here is just as illustrative. Cold Symmetry, the indie studio behind Mortal Shell II this past Saturday announced a hefty “Week One” update for its new game, which it released just seven days before Zero Company. Those two comparisons give a sense of the potential difficult road ahead for Bit Reactor, but also what an indie studio can do when it’s fully staffed. Right now, Zero Company doesn’t that have going for it.
