I've Tried Star Wars Zero Company on Five Different PCs, and It's Been a Nightmare

We got off to such a great start this year, with a ton of PC games that looked great and still ran well on pretty much any hardware. One of the common themes among games like Crimson Desert , Resident Evil Requiem, and Forza Horizon 6 was that none of them were running on Unreal Engine 5. And just like Halo: Campaign Evolved last month , Star Wars: Zero Company is a great example of why I'd love it if developers simply abandoned Epic's engine altogether.

I've spent about five hours in Zero Company so far, and while that means I'm still pretty early in the otherwise fantastic game, I've still run into more than my fair share of technical issues, across all types of hardware. When the game isn't bugging out in some way, I've been having a blast with it, and it's important to note that our reviewer Dan Stapleton hasn't had nearly the same depth of issues that I've had.

What's funny is that the technical problems are different on each of the systems I've tried the game on.

I was on vacation last week, so the first laptop I tried the game on was my Razer Blade 16 , with an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It got a decent average frame rate at 1600p, but it was plagued with microstutters, especially in cutscenes. I started getting driver crashes, where the game would just make my laptop restart whenever I tried to load the game up — something that doesn't happen with any other game right now.

I also spent some time playing the game on the Lenovo Legion Go 2 , which I've installed Bazzite on. Anyone that's ever tried to play an Unreal Engine 5 game on a handheld probably won't be surprised, but it didn't run super well. In order to get a playable frame rate, I had to lower the resolution to 800p with the lowest settings, and I was still only getting about 25–30fps. But that by itself isn't necessarily a deal breaker with this type of game. It's turn based, so I can absolutely live with a 30fps experience here.

For some reason, the game loves to crash right at the end of a mission. The system will lock up, forcing me to do a hard restart, and lose all my progress. This happened a good four times before I just gave up. That one likely comes down to Linux. I had a similar problem on the Steam Machine, where the game would crash on the same level, only the Steam Machine actually gave me an error report that I could send to the developer.

Once I got home a couple of days ago, I had to see what would happen on a top-end rig with an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D , 32GB of RAM ,and an RTX 5090. The performance, even with that level of hardware, wasn't great . I was only getting 70–80fps at 4K with Ultra settings with DLSS set to Quality and frame generation disabled. That's still very playable, mind you, but halfway through my first mission on that desktop, the game just froze in the middle of a turn.

Bit Reactor has already come out with a day-zero patch that fixes some problems, but even after installing it, I continue to run into crashes, freezes, and frame drops constantly. I have to imagine that the game will get to a more stable point eventually, and I'm looking forward to it. After all, Zero Company, along with Galactic Racer have been two of my most anticipated games this year.

I'm going to keep trudging along with Zero Company despite all my trials and tribulations with it. There's just something about the prequel era of Star Wars that just ensnares me, and the story definitely has its hooks in me. I just wish sitting down and playing the game wasn't such a recipe for headaches right now. Maybe some day.

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra