Star Wars Zero Company preserves the long-lived XCOM tradition of killing your units to teach you a lesson. Aurelio’s sad fate is a template example of this practice.
Why losing characters during the tutorial is normal
Strategy games tend to have tutorials where you control units who won’t make it past their first mission, as the devs decided killing them off was the best way to teach you about positioning and, in some cases, permadeath.
First, it was Firaxis sending your squad to die in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Then it was poor Ana Ramirez being forced into an exposed position and getting shot in XCOM 2.
Now that a lot of their senior devs founded Bit Reactor, they are forcing Aurelio into reckless positions in Star Wars Zero Company.
Injury System explained: the Extraction Sequence
During the first minutes of your playthrough, Aurelio, a Rodian who is part of Zero Company, is used in the tutorial to show you how to revive a fallen Operator in the middle of combat.
He starts the tutorial with 1 injury, and after that small lesson he’s left with 2. If an Operator reaches 3 injuries, they are lost for good.
Fast forward to the end of the tutorial: you have to clear a landing port for your ship to perform an extraction. The problem is that it’s being blocked by a crane and, apparently, only Aurelio can run up to the console and activate it without even waiting for you to clear all the enemies.
Sadly, this is a move you are forced to make and it’s with a heavy heart that I tell you there’s no way of saving Aurelio.
Even if you turn off permadeath in your settings, the game requires Aurelio to die to better demonstrate how the injury system works and what the consequences are of being reckless or careless with your actions.
The Memorial at The Den
Once you unlock The Memorial as part of your base, The Den, you can see Aurelio’s depiction through a hologram mentioning where and how he died. The only data that can change is how many enemies he took down during his short stint at Zero Company.
If you’re playing with permadeath enabled, The Memorial is where you’ll be able to see all your fallen comrades joining Aurelio.
