PC Gamer has run three Star Wars Zero Company pieces in short order: the best starting class, how to respec, and the best talents for each specialization. Individually they’re standard strategy-game service journalism. Stacked together they sketch a pretty clear picture of where the game leaves players stranded.
Think about what each guide implies. “What’s the best starting class” is a question people ask when the opening choice feels heavy and the game hasn’t given them enough to judge it. “How to respec” gets searched when that first choice turns out to be wrong. “Best talents for each specialization” is what you look up when the talent tree presents six options with tooltip text and no sense of which ones actually matter in a fight.
Squad games have a front-loaded information problem
This is an old failure mode in the XCOM-descended tactics genre, and Zero Company is squarely in that lineage. You commit to a build well before you understand the encounters that build has to survive. The tutorial teaches you verbs. It doesn’t teach you the math, and in a tactics game the math is the game. So the first ten hours become a guessing exercise, and the guessing gets outsourced to whoever wrote the guide.
The respec guide is the interesting one. That a dedicated how-to exists at all means the feature is buried, gated, or unclear enough to need explaining. Games that expect you to experiment make respeccing obvious and cheap. Games that hide it are betting you’ll live with your mistakes, which is a legitimate design stance, but then the class-choice screen needs to carry a lot more weight than a name and an icon.
The guides are the fix, and that’s the problem
None of this makes Zero Company bad. Plenty of great strategy games have opaque systems, and some of the appeal is figuring them out. But there’s a difference between a system that rewards experimentation and one that punishes an uninformed early click. The first is depth. The second is just a tax on players who didn’t have a second monitor open.
What I’d want from a game shipping in 2026 is the information surfaced in-game: sample builds, clearer talent descriptions, a visible respec option on the same screen where you pick the class. Firaxis-style tactics games have had two decades to learn this. The genre keeps not learning it.
The practical advice, if you’re starting now, is to find the respec rules before you find your favourite class. Know whether you can undo the choice, and how expensive it is. That single piece of information changes how much anxiety the opening screen deserves, and it’s the one thing the game should tell you unprompted.
Three guides for one game’s character system, all published within days of each other. Somebody at PC Gamer was watching the search traffic.