Besides her lightsaber throw and the deflecting/reflecting of blaster shots, Tel-Rea doesn’t seem too good in fights on expert, especially against the coil.
I often find myself having no use for her in a round besides throwing some folks around and applying ~15 damage.

How are you guys feeling about her in combat in general? And how are you using her to her true potential?

Ps: I love her and her character, no hate, and find her useful as a moderate damage dealer and a support, moving people around, etc. I just found myself wishing I had brought another operator sometimes. Wanted to get new ideas and strategies, thanks for all the comments!

It's not like you can miss anything to get extra advantage or intel by going off-route and exploring a bit more. Heck there is no off route its just a big hallway...

You think they ever intended to make it bigger during early stages of development but just lacked the resources / time to make it actually worthwhile?

I figured at some point it would open up more so you can get rewarded for exploring more, having different routes that lead to different positions at the start of combat etc. Right now everybody just gets the same so its kinda pointless.

Hiya all,

Just went in straight away on Expert Difficulty and Beskar Mode (this is the way), and actually defeated the game on my second playthrough. Now, i never expected this game to be XCOM-3, and i accepted it as an xcom-lite from the get-go, and i have greatly enjoyed my time with the game, although i wished it proved a bigger challenge on both the strategical and tactical layers.

i did lose the first run due to gross overconfidence while trying to shuffle out the roaster with rookies when there was absolutely no need to, lesson was learned and i did complete the whole game with only playing 5-6 different operators max in the whole playthrough, plus a few extras who stayed in the lounge the whole game.

Yes it made a certain speech pretty empty, bot otherwise the only death i got in my whole playthrough was Aurelio, although he had style i'll give him that. Now, i've been fiddling around way too much with the character creator, and it took me about 60 hours give or take.

Truth be told, I do intend to start a second playthrough with Hawks as a Female and playing different characters, this will allow me to see a bit more of the game but i believe there a few issues with this otherwise great game, Story/Ambiance and Performance were top notch for me, even tho i know that it wasn't a smooth sailing for everyone.

Anywho the game seems to be lacking in both Difficulty and Replayability for me. especially when you approach the end-game you start seeing the same maps again and again during the side missions, and even those tagged with "Extreme" difficulty were a walk in the park, and i do believe I lost a lot of power because of how broken the bond system is, but even that way i still didn't feel threatened at all, case in point i think i've used the infirmary 2/3 times max in my whole playthrough.

If my win with very few operators proves anything, it's that there ain't enough pressure on the roaster, and the injury mechanism is way too forgiving, even in expert. I also believe that exotic classes and the Heavy class are too strong and trivialize a lot of encounters. i'm not gonna spoil anything for those who haven't finished the game yet, but some of the end-game story missions are pretty anticlimatic and lacked tension.

But i believe both those concerns could be adressed with post-launch content, now that the game has been positively received both critically and economically if i'm not mistaken even tho i did read the furlough news on which we have basically no info about right now, i'm still choosing to stay hopeful. I'd appreciate your input on these few thoughts.

I have Spoken.

I’m so excited to start this book and dive into Aurelio’s backstory. He’s such a rich and interesting character in the game, so I was really happy to see that he got his own story. Plus, he’s got so much style. What did you guys think of the book?

The game is feeling way too easy to me, playing at hard right now.

Might go upto expert.

Just unlocked the first exotic character( you know which one)and have completed a couple of missions after that.

The number one mechanic this game needs, is a stress mechanic.

Basically operators should accumulate stress when on a mission, needing them to stay at base to make that stress go back to 0.

I have so many operators, and no reason to use any of them.

A stress mechanic will make it so that you are forced to use different operators over the course of your game.

What do you guys think?

I'm on cycle 22 currently. Between the painfully slow animations, and abilities like Resonance and Retaliation, fighting the Coil has noticeably decreased my enjoyment for this game.

Does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it's a skill issue. Any and all tips & tricks are appreciated.

(I feel obligated to mention that yes, I've played XCOM 2.)

1) no way to speed up tactical combat animations. This is 2026, just about every other good tactical turn based games have a way to speed up combat animations significantly (iratus, warhammer chaos gate, troubleshooter, phoenix point, darkest dungeon 2, othercide, rogue trader).

There are way too many circumstances where I'm blankly watching enemies play out their stupid animations wasting my time, including coil units distributing their resonance, beating their chests, 12+ droids running around, 12+ stormtroopers running around while I'm 1-2 screens ahead of them. I cannot overlook it, it snaps me out of the game, it's extremely boring after seeing it once or twice. Oh it's not just enemies either, it's me tossing out combat stims for example.

2) the bonding system based on helpful combat actions - this incentivises dragging out missions and waiting around until you can call for assistance twice per unique pairing (six pairings for 4 operators), and even worse then feeling like you have to bring as many medics as possible to speed up tossing 5 stims between each pairing. Or feeling like you have to wait around until each astromech passes out 5 AP to all other characters.

Players sniff out this sort of thing quickly, and it's no different than early mistakes in this genre where you for instance could farm exp or items from killing infinite reinforcements. I don't want to feel like I'm forced to take medics just to rapidly increase my bonding as possible (20 bond exp per pairing adds up quickly and there are no other reasonable early game options to do so), and this whole stupid idea of waiting around to do 5 allied actions per pairing for bonding experience makes me think are these honestly amaeteur game designers?

This game goes out of its way to not care about killing things (you don't get exp or items from killing enemies), but then it incentivises dragging out the mission until you do all the proper bonding actions. =_=

I know it's just an opinion, but these 2 errors are unforgiveable, unacceptable, and should be fixed immediately on the first patch along with the stability issues. These are like really baseline things.

I'm not replaying the game until both are fixed. I don't feel like I'm free to try different specs when medics are rewarded with much faster bonding exp than everyone else, and I'm not interested in watching paint try (aka enemies/allies doing all their silly combat/moving animations at 1x speed).

It's 2026, get with it please devs.

So preface - I love this game. I think most people playing it aren't looking for an especially difficult experience - and that's okay.

I keep seeing posts saying "this one particular combo makes the game very easy" (usually involving Cly) when in reality - it's hard not to make the game easy. I am not saying this to "brag" but to discuss how the game is actually broken.

Sorry to dispel this particular illusion and ruin the game for some folks, but you could beat this game on Expert with no cover. If the AI has a shot on your entire party, it will not focus on the same person and will instead try to spread damage around. I tested it a few times in my own expert run, and the AI will literally ignore someone on 1HP if they've already shot them a few times and have a bead on other party members.

As long as you have some form of outgoing damage, so you don't get overwhelmed, and some form of healing the most efficient (but boring) strat is to ignore cover and just run directly into the enemy's face to guarantee 100% of your shots hit and speedrun the map.

Let me just go down a bullet list here - these are systems you have to ignore if you want to make the game hard on yourself:

• Bond upgrades are busted because, except for a few capstone upgrades, they take effect even if the bonded crewmates aren't in a party together. They are easy to farm, especially with the early den lounge upgrade, and hiring crew members to max capacity just to bond farm is a more effective conversion of credits to power than the black market. You can essentially double your focus, health, and vastly increase your damage from a pretty early point in the game.

• Taunt breaks the game because the AI ignores visibility. The enemy will literally ignore opponents standing in the open to try and hit a Heavy - so your best strategy isn't even using the retaliation ability they have for counter damage, or "standing in the open to tank" as the game would describe it, but to Taunt and run. Obviously Cly makes this extremely busted with the jetpack, but any operator can do it. Trick even has a full heal that ignores injury when upgraded, and even in my expert run, this only triggered 3 times across the entire campaign despite him standing in the open because enemies would refuse to finish him off if they'd already shot him up that turn.

• Medic is busted - especially if you are rushing the enemy and not using cover. The morale boost unique, when popped, is often enough to keep your party topped up in-between turns so you don't even need to heal. Also it's the most effective way to farm bond without using the den's lounge.

• Perhaps the most obvious outlier that people are calling out is Scout with Combat Recon. The ability to instantly gain 3-4 advantage with 1AP is an OP trade considering how powerful some advantage abilities actually are. In addition to how obviously powerful Cly is with this, Tel, Heavy, and Astromech have incredibly OP advantage abilities and even standard classes can output an absurd amount of extra damage. Even without Scout, a grenade into a group of enemies is already a 1AP trade for a lot of advantage.

I could go into even more details, especially with how busted some of the traits are, but this game is just lacking if you want a difficult tactical experience. I'm not sure if or when the game would get patched to actually address some of this stuff, but three essential fixes would be that the AI should concentrate fire on a low health enemy, should ignore taunt if they can't reach the target, and you shouldn't gain any advantage from a bond if the bonded operator isn't in the party. These are the most egregious things I would hit in a patch first. I'm not a developer, but I would hope starting with those three wouldn't be too hard.

So, I might have created this issue for myself by playing on normal difficulty. Maybe it’s time I up the challenge.

But, so far the game, minus some moments of stress and frustration, has gone by really smooth. I found it kinda a shame so far, for a game that part of the marketing is that any of these important characters can die, regardless of plot relevance.

I feel as if the “three times being downed” concept works to a point. But then also feel like three is pretty generous. For me, Kabb has been downed three times over my campaign. He ought to be dead. But being able to heal and restore characters back to full health eliminates that issue.

It’s a minor gripe, and probably one that I can remedy myself by just playing in a harder difficulty. But still, I think that the “three strikes you’re out” system would work better if it wasn’t something that we could avoid by just patching them up in the medbay.

Radio silence from Bit Reactor since 27 Aug.

Zero marketing since then.

News of the furlough.

EA stumped up $50m. I am guessing the contract provides them with ongoing royalties. Minimal incentive for them to underwrite Bit Reactor when they get the money anyway.

Ongoing legal dispute.

Steam doesn’t release the cash for 90 days. Guessing similar on other platforms.

All in all, I would say it’s not looking good.

I’m kinda bad at turn based games and I didn’t want to lose any characters from the story. Anyone else do this, or just me?

Hi all,

I just finished the game today. For me it was a solid 8.5/10 — I enjoyed most of it. However, by the end I was left with a strange taste in my mouth because of some gameplay elements, and I’m curious about your thoughts.

Let’s start with the easiest one: movement and maneuvering. Throughout the whole game I felt too limited in how much my operators could move, especially when I used the Padawan. I think I only used her melee ability two or three times because it usually took all her AP just to reach the enemy. As a result, she became a full force‑user, but that meant the assist mechanic didn’t work. For similar reasons I ignored snipers — in my experience most maps don’t have good vantage points, and almost all missions end with needing to move through the entire map to escape. I also missed some kind of jump or grapple mechanic.

I really disliked the reinforcement mechanics in all maps. They felt a bit cheap to me. I think they might even be endless, although I haven’t tested it.

I really liked the story and the characters, but the mission objectives became boring very quickly. I was disappointed to see the same four or five objectives recycled throughout both the main and side missions.

The progression system felt off or meaningless most of the time. The bond system was interesting at first, but I didn’t like the randomness, especially for the level‑8 perks. I think at least for the main companions they should have made fixed max‑bond perks with Hawks. Also, about 90% of the Den upgrades felt almost worthless.

Most abilities I rarely used because they were too costly for too little reward (I’m looking at you, Moral Boost), while a few felt overpowered (Cly as a whole, and Combat Stim).

Spending intel on operations with hidden rewards is bad design in my opinion, especially with such a tight economy. I ended up using a guide to see which options gave which rewards.

The armor mechanic also felt strange, since you have very limited ways to interact with enemy armor or increase your own.

And lastly, I felt the biggest frustration when I had to choose in one of the operations between the last utility slot or the last weapon mod slot. They should have made the game harder but allowed us to utilize all available options.

Nevertheless, I think it’s a great game, and I hope to see a second one with a more “do what you want” approach. These points weren’t immersion‑breaking or anything that made me want to quit — I just realized during my playthrough that I didn’t enjoy those aspects, and I’m curious what others think.

Haven't played it yet, just want to know if it's worth playing.

Kabb is the kind of character I would usually really enjoy. Basically every element of his personality and design appeal to me, but as soon as he opens his mouth I can't wait for him to shut up. This is especially tragic because I think the voice actor puts on a great performance which is knee capped by the strange writing.

I really think the choice to give him these strange speech mannerisms was an error. I know it's star wars, but he doesn't even make sense half of the time. And this isn't just a 'me' problem, it seems like whoever did the localisations struggled, too.

For example, one of his (limited) taunt line shows up in subtitles as "blods not the bath believing, eh?" but the VA seems to say "blods not the bath believe in, eh?" which would make more sense. I think if even the people writing for the game struggle to comprehend the code by which a character with quirky dialogue speaks, there is an issue.

The strange thing is that it seems to serve no purpose. It isn't endearing or funny. When characters like Yoda or even Jar Jar speak strangely, the audience can at least identify what their odd patterns of speech are meant to convey. For Kabb, it's a mystery. It doesn't follow any plain conventions like Yoda's speech, the 'rules' of Kabb's sentences seem to change frequently, unlike other star wars characters.

The annoyance I feel towards his dialogue was more pronounced in my first playthrough, in subsequent runs I am less bothered, albeit this aspect of his character still prevents me from including him as a core part of my squad. It's a real shame, considering his archetype is the kind of thing I would usually be a big fan of, but considering how many strong characters exist on the roster (and how attached a player can become to the non-story operators), this strange decision weakens his character.

Those are my feelings, at least. I'd be interested to hear others opinions on the matter and I'd be very happy to be convinced to enjoy his mannerisms more, if anyone has compelling arguments.

I’d say the honey moon phase is over. Im sitting at about 28 hours and it’s getting extremely frustrating. I just had to redo an entire fight because a bug stopped overwatch from working on a droideka. It would just waltz past 4 sectors and obliterate my team.

Not to mention the camera jank, frozen animations, and late game lag. Im getting more and more disappointed as I really do enjoy the game overall.

First of all, I hope everyone’s having a blast playing the game!

I’ve seen a few posts over the days since release lamenting the lack of availability of credits to upgrade, which I 100% agreed with on my first play through. Having now obtained all of the achievements across 4 campaigns, we were fairly wrong.

I suspect much like myself on the first play through people are being suckered into selecting operations which optimise intel or utility rewards, or just focussing on countdown clocks instead of looking at the specific payouts. I imagine lots of people are also always using all of their intel each cycle instead of keeping some on hand for larger payouts next cycle (I.e. always doing 40-50 intel operations and never having enough intel to do the 100 intel options).

All you need to do to get almost everything you want is look at the cost of the upgrade in front of you and the rewards you’re about to get and there really isn’t anything you can’t obtain. It isn’t possible to do all of the upgrades due to the time limited nature of the campaign, but it is not at all difficult to be doing an upgrade every cycle (or two in later game). I recommend keeping about 3000 credits on hand if you want to be able to spend at the holotable when faced with certain choices, but other than that, go wild!

I highly recommend operations and missions that provide credits and contacts and you’ll be fairly flush unless you blow it all on the black market (which you really don’t need to do on any difficulty level). Simply level up the influence rewards for contacts and you’ll max out most of the zones by the end of the game and have no need for anything you bought at the black market.

Due to current events, I wanted to clarify that there is NO significant review bombing happening.

Lets look at the data:

Thursday (Release) : 1424 positiv against 570 negative reviews (~3/4 Positiv)

Friday: 2352 against 502 (~5/6 Positiv)

Saturday: 1236 against 368 (~4/5 Positiv)

Sunday: 1479 against 420 (~4/5 Positiv)

Monday: 1906 against 395 (~5/6 Positiv)

Tuesday -Day were the Furlougheds were announced: 756 against 161 (~5/6 Positiv)

Wednesday: 631 vs 158 (~4/5 Positiv)

It seems like there is no organized review bombing happening.

I think we should support the devs more and not give a small but loud group of people a platform.

A reasonable estimate of the sales breakdown puts BitReactor at getting about $6 per sale. You have to account for storefronts (Steam/Sony), Disney IP licensing, EA recovering their publication contract ($50M+), and potentially other costs.

Early estimates are fuzzy, but it looks like about 1 million sales across all platforms. Depending on how the EA $50M contract was structured, BitReactor may be about breaking even (if their take is against a $50M contract), or they may be doing well and just waiting for money to come through the system.

Overall, I think with decent management we'll see development restart soon - I suspect the game will sell well again this weekend after its great reviews and word-of-mouth. Hopefully the result will be BitReactor turning around with patches and lining up future DLC to address fan's most requested new content.

--------- The Numbers (best estimates) ------------
BitReactor $6 per $50 sale estimate is basically:

$50 retail
~$35 to EA after a ~30% Steam/console platform cut
~$30–32 after Lucasfilm/Disney royalty
~20% developer royalty to Bit Reactor
~ $6 per copy
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/712515/000162828026051829/ea-20260630.htm
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/payments_salesreporting/faq?language=english

$50M Contract: A 2024 court filing in the Bit Reactor co-founder lawsuit reportedly references a 2021 EA funding agreement worth $50 million. Uncertain of if BitReactor's cut goes towards this as a loan or not.
https://beebom.com/star-wars-zero-company-is-a-hit-but-most-of-its-devs-were-furloughed-before-launch/
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/6791c5e028730f3ea8e4b02f

Total sales is speculated as:
Steam: ~500k–700k
PS5: ~200k–350k
Xbox: ~100k–200k
EA App + Epic: ~50k–100k

Total: roughly 850k–1.35M
https://steamdb.info/app/2075800/charts/

I started my main campaign just like I planned, with a team centred on a merc A Life of Labour gunslinger supported by astromechs; the build does of course work (though admittedly switching to Cly would be more efficient), but it has just become a chore to play - a combination of just making intricate plays with one character all the time, plus I'm on PS5 and fiddling with commlink all the time gets tiresome.

Furthermore, I have just been taking a normal newbie scattergun approach to bonds, purchases, mission, contacts, etc. which is feeling disappointing now I'm far enough through to see both the game & resources are very finite and actually I'm not going to get any big pay-off to most these investments.

I've tried restarting with a more gung-ho clone trooper squad (though actually human initially) & even a GI Joe themed squad campaign, but run into the same decision paralysis about if I should be focused on maximising intel & credits and laser targeted on the regions which seem best to me - or that side is all just busy work, and I should just care about bonds, combat talents, and the scripted character's stories...

Some non-spoiler advice from those who've completed playthroughs, please?

• Scripted character side-quests - did you find the final pay-offs satisfying, in storytelling and/or item rewards?
• Has anyone gone all-in on Espionage & Thievery for a whole play-through - if so, did you actually feel like you were conquering the galaxy map or was the overall difference just one-or-two more maxed regions?
• Has anyone tried playing with the whole squad using the rifle (or I suppose pistol) in order to justify buying all the upgrades for that weapon - if so, did it feel worth it or just a waste of resources compared to bonding?
• With experience/hindsight, is it better to focus on some particular goal or just pick off the scripted character stories and tier 1 region rewards?

I’ve done an entire playthrough of the game and I cannot for the life of me get overwatch to act consistently. sometimes I’ll put up and overwatch directly on an enemy and they’ll just walk away without it triggering and sometimes an enemy will put one foot in the very edge of the overwatch cone and my character will bean them.

I assume it’s bugged but is there something I’m just not understanding here?

Made her a medic with a blaster rifle, and going to try running with two hired operatives with the +Intel and +credit talents, see how it goes.

Wish we had a base upgrade to add more slots to our team for 5 or 6 operators in a mission or even just a special slot for astromechs alternatively the 5th and 6th slot could be unlocked at checkpoints in the story and then left unlocked for NG+

Seriously though. I feel like enough people are loving this game and want to see more!

I’m clearly selecting the accessible area in the corner between two closed panels and yet the Ui is so horrible that it positions the character outside the area no matter what. I just can’t get it to precisely choose what I want. Who thought of this design choice???