Story beats aside, The Coil are the frankly ‘unique’ mechanic within Zero Company. All the other pieces are generally refinements on previous bits you’ve seen, even the frankly awesome backup mechanic (free assist on attacks). The Coil are both the primary antagonists, key difficulty choices, as well as a core piece of combat planning. I’ll ignore the lore bits.

At their base, The Coil are relatively simple humanoid NPCs – melee, ranged, captain and so on. With no buffs (more on that later), when you kill a member, they transmit ‘resonance’ to the nearest live Coil target. At 2 stacks, some will heal. At 3 stacks, they will heal and gain a semi-permanent buff – like they explode on death, or charge melee when hit. Once at 3, they won’t gain any more stacks. You really want to plan this out, as having multiple 3-stack Coil in a combat field is not a good thing. Noting, that if you knock them to their death, resonance does NOT transmit. Super useful info. There’s also a main story bit that adds a tweak to this system, no spoilers there, but it does dramatically reduce the enemy’s offence as a result.

The complicating matter in all this is that you will, at planned time intervals, be presented with a dilemma that will buff the Coil. The choice you make BLOCKS an upgrade, meaning the other will go through. Some of these are annoyances, some require thought, and some feel like a snowball-to-game-over.

For example, adding retaliation to weak droids is a nothing-burger, they die in 1 hit anyways. Adding resonance stacks when they take damage, that is a very bad thing. Increasing defence is a bad thing. Increasing their chance to hit is manageable, but stacking damage buff… you’ll end up with Coil Snipers taking out your entire squad from range.

The main issue with this system is that you are effectively blind to the impacts of a decision for the first 3-4 choices. You likely haven’t even seen that enemy type yet, or don’t quite understand how it all synergizes. I’ve played a ton of these games, and I needed to reload after my first choice because it was clear it was a very bad one. Functionally, this system acts as an incremental difficulty to the game as your own party gets stronger. I get that, and it saves having to add a bunch of new classes. I actually think it works! When you see 6 Coil reinforcements show up on a map in the later parts of the game, you will freak out. That’s cool!

What I really like about this system is that enemy progression is tied to player choice, rather than an arbitrary scale. XCOM2 has an enemy power scale that determines who you see based on the number of missions you’ve completed, so that bad luck runs can snowball easily into dead ends. Phoenix Point gives enemies evolution points per mission you complete, which impacts their enemy response. Zero Company instead presents a clear decision point, and assuming you understand the mechanics, you get to choose specifically how the difficulty increases. Maybe it’s more ranged damage, maybe you focus on supped up melee enemies. With that information, you are better equipped in the next mission. You can’t defer the choice either, so it’s extremely obvious that you’re entering a new challenge point.

Now, whether this added difficulty is actually difficult, is a separate matter. This relates more to overall balance, or I guess the pure imbalance that Cly and Jae bring to the table. Those two combined can take out 4-6 enemies a turn, if you build them moderately well.