Star Wars Zero Company understands that Star Wars games should feel less like

What the report says

I'm still early days on Star Wars Zero Company, but I think I'm in love. And this is kind of expected and also kind of strange. It's kind of expected because this is XCOM: Star Wars at first glance, and jeepers I love XCOM. I love moving my little units around, pondering when to advance and when to hang back, and I even love missing a shot that surely was almost a dead cert.Crucially, I also love the way that every new XCOM game messes with that beautiful two-action-points-per-turn formula. I loved Enemy Within's mechs and Meld crates that made the game into American Football.

And I really loved the breaching mechanics and interleaved unit turns of Chimera Squad. When it comes to XCOM I am happy to experiment, to put Shreddies in with my Coco Pops, just to see what happens. Zero Company, then, is another blessed chance to see what's new and what's been fiddled with. Three action points rather than two? A little cone for the hands-on directing of Overwatch attentions? Advantage Points? By gosh, this is interesting: let's see what I make of it all.But as for Star Wars? I tell myself that I am at best a lapsed fan.

I was born in 1978, so Star Wars belonged to my older brothers. I will watch Harrison Ford in absolutely anything (along with Scott Bakula, I swear he is the eternal father figure of the divorced-parents-early-90s-kid) and the music still stirs me, along with that magical shot of a Star Destroyer in all its stark, stately glory, ghosting overhead. I've watched the original films, but not the prequels, the sequels, the side stories, the TV shows.All of which should leave Zero Company as an 85 percent chance of hitting, in other words: target within range but partially obscured by cover (cover in this scenario is the fact that I often find myself humming the doomy Vader music, but I don't know what Coruscant is).

Key details

And yet here I am, barely out of the tutorial and it's love. What happened?A lot of things, certainly. A lot of neat little ideas and clever bits of world building, and that eternal back-and-forth between a hub that you build out and street-by-street missions that may kill all your favourite units. But a lot of this stuff that I love, I think, can be wrapped up in one big idea. And look at that, I've already spoiled it in the headline: Zero Company understands that Star Wars games should feel more like the toys than the games.Star Wars toys: now we are talking.

It is impossible, I think, to understand quite the impact these things had on people of my age back in the early 1980s. They were everywhere: they were a language that my brothers and everyone my brothers knew spoke beautifully. I can remember the figures hanging in racks in supermarkets and I can remember the squeal of pulling the plastic carton off the cardboard and freeing any bonus weapons from that little bit of tape that held them back.But I can also remember playing with these things. And it's always seemed that playing with Star Wars toys was a creative endeavour on several fronts.

For one thing, the toys just sat there. You had to decide how to animate them. You had to decide whether you were going to repose the legs as they walked, or whether they would just pogo around a bit like Muppets. You had to decide how they were going to interact, and, if you were playing with other kids, you had to decide how you were going to handle sound effects and who was going to win in a fight between cherished favourites. 1 of 4 Caption Attribution You also - this is an aside, but I am old so let me have it - had to populate the wider Star Wars world, which meant coming up with solutions for spacecraft and bases given that the official spacecrafts were really expensive.

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In our family, this meant that our Star Wars heroes knocked around in egg boxes. They had seats in them by design, kind of, and you could fit a bundle of figures into each box. They were easy to come by - eggs were cheap back then! - and the cardboard egg boxes often had this kind of utilitarian ruggedness to the external design that chimed well with the kit-bashed Star Wars space vehicles from the movies.It's all of this - Egg Box Star Wars - that comes back when I play Zero Company.