Star Wars Zero Company adds new difficulty options that can bring it closer to XCOM

Star Wars Zero Company's 1.2 patch introduces a new granular difficulty system in addition to the usual bugfixes and tweaks. These new options exist alongside the original difficulty levels (easy, normal, hard, ironman beskarboy etc.), and home in on more creative/tactical tweaks, rather than just beefing up enemies. The highlights:

• You can remove the injury system, so downed operatives are instantly killed.
• Alternatively, you can lower the injury allowance before permadeath, and/or add a risk of death to getting downed.
• The patch allows you to lower or eliminate health scaling, so operatives are more fragile by the end of the game.
• It also allows you to restrict the respec function by degrees, removing class and even weapon swapping.

I like these options a lot: They're sharp, targeted changes that make Zero Company harder by restricting your options, forcing you to think and play more creatively. The game's normal, default difficulty, with all of these modifiers added, represents a more interesting challenge to me than the shipped hard mode, and I think my first replay will mix in a few of them. These options remind me of survival mode in an RPG, or skulls in Halo⁠—creative difficulty options that eschew ballooning enemy health bars just make me excited.

Zero Company goes down a lot smoother than the XCOMs of old (which much of the Bit Reactor team worked on). That smoothness isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I thought Zero Company already had a reasonable skill ceiling with the options it shipped with⁠—you can read more in my 90% review. But a modular suite means you can tweak pain points without taking the leap of a full difficulty level jump.

My friends and coworkers who thought Zero Company went down too smooth should be well-served by this update. The only classic tactics disconnect I see remaining is fog of war. PCG online editor Fraser Brown is a strategy connoisseur, and he felt let down by how Zero Company shows you the full map and locations of all enemies on every mission. XCOM, by contrast, would obscure portions of the map and enemy activity unless you were directly observing them.

I'm agnostic on the issue, myself⁠—I think Zero Company offers interesting tactical challenges regardless. This big patch is a nice win for developer Bit Reactor, which has reportedly started bringing back furloughed employees following the critical and apparent commercial success of Zero Company.