Let me give my space commander a silly voice, cowards

I have played Star Wars: Zero Company for about three hours total, and approaching a quarter of that time was spent in the character creator. This is fairly common. If I have any aspiration to spend time with a game that is equipped with a character creation tool - if I have any commitment beyond vague tourism - then I consider it essential to pick though all the options and craft something that, invariably, makes me laugh. 

I would do this even if the character’s appearance is limited to a 32x32 headshot at the bottom of a stats chart, because vibe is important to me and sometimes the vibe demands an eyepatch, or high-piled set of dreadlocks, or a truly hideous jacket colour. The more serious the game, the more important this becomes: there is no text exchange about crop rotation or galactic diplomacy that cannot be improved by my character staring implacably ahead while looking like they were dressed by a five-year-old picking from the most cursed remnant rail in TK Maxx. 

Sometimes I will play it straight and come up with something conventionally attractive, as long as it’s not a boring white man - I get to be that in real life, thanks - but if a developer has gone to the effort of giving me a suite of character creation sliders, I am going to pick through every option and give some real thought as to how to combine them all. This is the agency that games give us; we must seize the moment, and the baffling mostly-shaved haircut that would be considered outre even by the most unmoored TikTok influencers.

The model here is Saints Row 2, which was an early pioneer of giving you a huge array of in-game dress-up options and then using your character model for all the cinematics, resulting in straight-faced negotiations between off-the-peg gang henchmen and whatever nightmarish figure in a hot-dog costume you were able to cook up beforehand. This has been embraced to varying degrees by a variety of other games since - Street Fighter 6’s World Tour Mode was a recent highlight - but it still seems to remain a relative rarity for a game to relinquish its grip on the narrative in favour of letting the player mess around. 

I must therefore commend Zero Company for its inclusion, although I take issue with the decision to make it something you can change at any time. This is objectively correct but thematically wrong, in a game that’s notionally like XCOM. XCOM games are about permadeth and living with the consequences of your actions, and that should start with picking a dazzlingly tasteless tribal tattoo, finishing it in neon green, and then having to endure that for every time you see the character between finalising their appearance and the credits rolling. 

In Zero Company, this seems to be a lot of times. It’s one of many ways in which the game departs - so far - from the Star Wars-but-XCOM it’s been described as. There are moments of genuine 3D traversal between encounters, like an old-school third-person action game, and an abundance of character-based cinematics. My ski bum is a person in the world, although early signs suggest not a very interesting one: the handful of cutscenes I’ve seen so far are sub-Firefly team-building although I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve spent more time with it. I get to see his hideous jumpsuit and matching goggles in-world, that’s the important thing.

Unfortunately, this is spoiled thanks to the voice options. There are only two, male and female, and while the game is commendably open to you assigning either regardless of what the character looks like, they’re both Plucky Action Voices; Chris Pratt or Brie Larson. This means for all that he’s dressed like a disgraced instructor from Space Val d’Isere, my guy cannot help but be a stoic, deep-voiced hero and bold leader to his crew of renegades. This is to be expected for something labouring under the Star Wars licence, and I'm sure it's the right choice for a story that many people have laboured over, but it denies me the extremely unsophisticated comedy I crave.

I have a simple solution, if not for this game then for any others brave enough for me to craft a leisurewear-clad homonculus. I’m not demanding the bother and expense of recording multiple different voice tracks, particularly in these straightened times but a simple pitch slider that enabled me to set him to helium-addled chipmunk or Barry White rumble would really enable me to put my own mark on the galaxy. C’mon, game developers. Give the power of ludonarrative dissonance to the player.