I've been waiting for a reason to start a new playthrough of Star Wars Zero Company ever since I beat the game in early September. EA and Bit Reactor have finally given me a reason to come back to the game, as Patch 1.2 added a lot of new gameplay settings that will allow me to tweak my next playthrough's difficulty to my liking. Star Wars Zero Company was an excellent XCOM-like tactics game, but there wasn't much else to mess around with after beating the game once.
Players had to turn to mods for more detailed campaign settings, as post-launch updates were nearly nonexistent after Bit Reactor furloughed many developers before release. Bit Reactor brought back some furloughed workers earlier this month and subsequently released Patch 1.2, which goes beyond simple bug fixes. The update includes gameplay tweaks to encourage Upgrade Facility use and make Cly's Combat Jump movement ability less overpowered.
The most exciting additions are a plethora of campaign modifiers that let players tweak a campaign's difficulty. Keep in mind that you do have to turn these settings on before you start a new playthrough; they currently can't be changed mid-campaign. It's typically pretty hard for units to die in Zero Company, as they had to be injured three times in one mission.
It's now officially possible to turn on "Instant Death" so units die after one injury, or "Two Strikes" so they die after two injuries. Alternatively, players sticking with the three-injury setup can enable a static or escalating "risk of death," which adds a chance that units die when injured. You can also remove or disable health increases from earning Focus Points, disable cross-training for disliked pairs, or reduce the advantage gained from different attack types.
Perhaps my favorite new setting is "No Perfect Shots," which adds to the chaos by making it so the maximum chance to hit for any attack is 99%. All these new settings can make Star Wars Zero Company much harder, even on its standard difficulty, and are exactly the kind of modifiers that can draw me back to replay a tactics game. I'm definitely looking forward to a playthrough with the Instant Death and No Perfect Shots settings turned on in the near future.
Star Wars Zero Company Update 1.2 is live now across PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Bit Reactor also teased that it plans to "explore additional configurations in future updates" for campaign modifiers. If you want to read through the whole list of patch notes in more detail to learn more about every single campaign setting you can now tweak, character nerfs and buffs, and bug fixes, this is what EA and Bit Reactor shared, sans developer notes: The Call For Backup ability can now be bound to a hotkey of your choice.
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