Star Wars Zero Company Is Not A Good Experience on the Steam Deck

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A copy was provided by EA for review. Thank you! Look forward to our full review coming soon.

From the moment I saw it, I was very excited for Star Wars Zero Company. The combination of XCOM-like strategy with the Star Wars universe just looks like such a good fit. After playing it a bit for myself, I can say that it definitely is. I’m having a blast playing so far, and I can’t wait to dive deeper into it. However, if you’re looking forward to playing this on the Steam Deck, you might wind up feeling quite disappointed.

The game is already quite demanding, as shown by its minimum system requirements. Because of that, it’s not surprising that it has a lot of trouble running on the Steam Deck. There’s just no way to get it working to a playable state as it stands right now.

With the lowest possible settings, the game will struggle to hit 30 FPS, and we average around 18-22 when in combat and walking around the hub. On top of that, because we’re on the lowest settings, it looks awful. There was nothing I could do to improve it, since the settings were already at the lowest. It’s just too demanding a game to enjoy on the Deck.

There’s also no salvaging it with external tools. Out of curiosity, I decided to try lossless scaling frame generation, both the Decky-lsfg and Mako versions, and it felt awful. The base frame rate is too low, and the game uses too many resources to effectively use frame generation. This keeps the game feeling stuttery; the input lag is terrible, and it’s an overall poor experience.

At the end of the day, Star Wars Zero Company is not going to be enjoyable on the Steam Deck. There’s nothing we can do to make it playable, especially when it’s already performing so poorly on the lowest possible settings (which look awful). And since we can’t use tech like frame generation, there’s really no way to get it working well on the handheld. It’s a great game, but not one to take on the Deck.

Star Wars Zero Company can be purchased for $49.99 on Steam.

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