Star Wars strategy game Zero Company has reignited a reader’s love of the franchise, not just through its gameplay but its surprisingly good storytelling.

I finished Star Wars Zero Company in three days. I can’t remember the last time that happened. Yes, I adored XCOM and I’m a huge Star Wars fan, but it wasn’t the sheer fun of playing that made me race through it, this time it was the story. I felt invested in what was going on and, crucially, I wanted to know what happened next. And that hasn’t happened in a game since a long time ago.

I grew up as a devoted Star Wars kid in the 1980s. I played out intense battles in my Star Destroyer playset, featuring a central mediation chamber that my characters would often call ‘Darth’s Toilet’. I wrote to my local ITV station demanding to know when The Empire Strikes Back would be on terrestrial TV and included drawings of Imperial walkers, where they looked like malnourished horses. And I made a lightsaber out of a snooker cue and attacked my cousin with it – he’s fine and hardly limps these days.

I’ve played so many of the games over the years – many of them with great action set pieces, from the wireframes of the Spectrum through the Nintendo Rogue Squadrons and most recently the two Jedi games with the bloke who appeared in the last Tron film for 12 seconds. They had some half-decent stories, but nothing ever really got me like Zero Company has – it has real heart, I cared about how it would end.

It’s the opposite of the recent Mandalorian and Grogu film, which felt less like a movie and more like watching someone play a game: ‘We must go to planet X, have a mid-boss fight and get the item. Then we can go to planet Y, have a slightly harder mid-boss fight, and get a bigger item.’ The cinematic equivalent of watching your mum write an unnecessarily complicated shopping list and then having to silently accompany her to Sainsbury’s, Lidl, Morrisons, Aldi, and Tesco in two hours.

Zero Company’s story is genuinely engaging. It’s not Andor levels of groundbreaking, but it has proper progression, a beginning, middle, and end that naturally comes together. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s surprising, and Star Wars games (and games in general) need more of that.

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Of course, it helps to have a set of really good characters: the world-weary rogue with a heart of gold, sarcastic droids, a cool Mandalorian, and a sniper bloke with a comedy Russian accent.

To be fair, the voice cast are uniformly excellent; each gives proper life to their character and chatting with the team after a mission is a nice little pause rather than the grind it is in so many other games. I’ll always think fondly of characters like Hawks, Tel-Rea, Jae, Bennic, astromech IM-8008-IES, Fathom, and Typhon, even if one of those names I completely made up just to see it regularly displayed on screen.

As the final scene finished, I found myself giving the game an actual real-life round of applause for a great story well told. And that’s when I realised it, that childhood wonder, that being a kid again and just loving Star Wars as a brilliant, exciting world had come back. Even if Darth’s Toilet didn’t make an appearance.

I’d love a sequel, although the fact the development team appear to have been sent to the spice mines of Kessel doesn’t bode well. I hope their story continues, it really deserves to and also because I really, really want to find out what happens next.

By reader Tim Colman

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