The Zero Company trailer skips the explosions and spectacle. Instead, we get small squads moving from cover to cover, firing controlled bursts, and using abilities to control the battlefield. The marketing talks about “heroes,” but the screen shows tactical combat built on role-based systems that borrow heavily from established turn-based tactics games.
Cover and Positioning
Cover dominates every combat sequence. Characters consistently fire from behind rubble, barricades, or walls. The animations show soldiers leaning into firing positions instead of standing exposed. This tells us cover isn’t just window dressing, it’s central to how the game works. Solid cover systems track line-of-sight, attack angles, and distinguish between partial and full protection. If Zero Company reduces this to a simple “covered or not” binary, the tactical depth disappears fast. The trailer suggests more complexity, but we won’t know until we play.
Squad Roles
The trailer showcases clear archetypes. A Jedi rushes forward with a lightsaber. A clone trooper holds the middle ground with standard blaster fire. A bounty hunter carries heavy weapons and seems mobile. A sniper takes high ground for precision shots. This is the classic four-role setup: melee control, rifleman, skirmisher, and marksman. The obvious risk here is predictability. If each role gets locked into rigid patterns, every mission becomes the same puzzle with the same solution. The game needs flexible loadouts or overlapping capabilities to avoid that trap.
Abilities and Control
The ability wheel shown in the trailer confirms a layered system that goes beyond basic blaster fire. Each icon represents a tactical tool that interacts differently with positioning and squad coordination. The sprint option suggests mobility is gated behind limited actions, forcing players to decide between movement and attack efficiency. The explosive ability indicates area denial or clearing grouped enemies, which is standard in tactics games but essential for forcing entrenched units out of cover. The crosshair symbol points toward precision attacks, probably carrying higher accuracy or critical damage at the cost of action points.
Healing is on the wheel, meaning squad sustain is part of the system. If healing is plentiful, attrition loses its weight; if it’s scarce, the game forces you to treat every exposed movement as a significant risk. Melee combat, shown through the lightsabre icon, will function as the Jedi’s defining tool, closing gaps and breaking cover advantage through direct confrontation. The eye symbol suggests information warfare; Spotting or revealing hidden threats, which can change how aggressively you commit to movement. Finally, the outstretched hand is the clearest indicator of force powers as displacement tools, likely pushing enemies from cover or breaking formations.
Taken together, the wheel shows a tactical framework designed around trade-offs: mobility versus offense, healing versus risk, disruption versus direct damage. If every squad role has similarly structured options, the combat system has the flexibility to avoid degenerating into repetitive patterns. If only specific units carry these tools, the tactical ceiling lowers, and missions will funnel players into predictable playstyles.
Enemy Presence and Encounter Design
We don’t see enemy numbers clearly. Quick flashes show droids fighting squads, but not the scale. Without knowing how many enemies fill each encounter, pacing becomes impossible to judge. Too few enemies make every turn predictable cleanup. Too many turn each round into tedious attrition. Turn-based tactics work when the math of risk versus positioning stays tight. The trailer doesn’t prove the game gets this balance.
The “War Beneath the War” Framing
The trailer positions Zero Company as saboteurs and infiltrators, not front-line soldiers. This context suggests smaller, focused missions with objectives beyond killing everything that moves. If the tactical systems can represent real sabotage or intelligence gathering, it sidesteps the monotony of endless shootouts. If “sabotage” just means “clear the map, then shoot the control panel,” the framing means nothing.
The footage shows a tactics game built on familiar foundations: cover mechanics, role-based units, ability systems, and positional trade-offs. What we can’t see yet is how deep those systems go. The worst-case scenario plays out like this: Jedi pulls enemies from cover, sniper picks them off, trooper mops up. Repeat until credits roll. The trailer shows the right pieces, but gives us no proof there’s meaningful depth connecting them.