Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader review – A very faithful, yet complex RPG

Rogue Trader perfectly represents the 40k setting and offers a sprawling narrative filled with rich tactical combat, although a few bugs and poor performance hold it back.

“Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader” is a game that I have been looking forward to for a long time. This isn’t the first 40k video game I dreamed of – it was the Primarch fighting game my friends and I dreamed of when we were 11 – but ever since spending my youth going “Wow, cool Space Marines” “After the stage, I already wanted a 40k game that really reflected the details of the scene.

The Empire, the form that human society takes in the harsh darkness of the distant future, is by far the best thing in 40k – but it’s often confused. 40k adaptations tend to either go all out with action or stick to the tabletop game’s warfare and advanced strategy. More than anything, I suspect Games Workshop’s need to market to children conflicts with how terrible the Empire truly is. After all, it’s a lot easier to get little Timmy’s mom to spend money on toy soldiers when they are portrayed as heroic defenders of humanity rather than actual brainwashed fascist enforcers. As a result, 40k’s darkly satirical elements are often buried in novels and other ancillary media, making it easy to take them at face value.

It should come as no surprise that Owlcat Games’ Rogue Trader is based on the 2009 pen-and-paper role-playing game of the same name; the studio made a name for itself by adapting the Pathfinder role-playing game. If you’ve played Kingmaker or Rogue Trader, the general flow of Rogue Trader will be immediately familiar: it’s a team-based CRPG that closely integrates the pen-and-paper original, combining a massive narrative with depth. Combining turn-based tactics with combat. After creating your character, you’ll play an introductory section before being thrust into a position of power – a place where it’s easy to make agonizing decisions while navigating the adventure. The biggest difference this time is scale. After all, 40k is all about minimalism. Everything is bigger, badder, and defined by the desire for more.

Rogue Trader – Release Trailer

At the same time, the status of rogue merchants was unique within the Empire, with freedoms unavailable to the broad masses in its strict theocratic society. As the name suggests, they were merchant princes with the power to do anything in the name of generating profits and expanding the empire’s borders, a bit like Del Boy Trotter who was in charge of the East India Trading Company. Your role in Rogue Trader, then, is not that of a novice adventurer; Instead, the origin you choose will make you a high-ranking military officer, crime boss, or noble, someone who is already accomplished and important. Not only that, but you’re the potential heir to Von Valentius’ dynasty of rogue merchants. (Spoiler: You’ll get the job soon.)

As a result, your character isn’t just wandering around in a fantasy of France or something; Instead, you have an entire galaxy to explore, and your decisions will change the fate of planets inhabited by millions of people. You have a crew of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people aboard your ship, an entire clan of serfs who were born, lived, worked and died on the ship, having never seen more than a deck or two, let alone off the ship. You’ll engage in space battles, manage colonies, and command massive planetary assaults. But it’s still essentially a team-based tactics game. Most of the time is spent traversing dungeon-like environments and shooting a lot of people in the face.

And, boy, are these some crunchy face shots that will have you sinking your teeth into them. At its best, Rogue Trader’s combat is an intricate, brutal brainteaser where the solution is to knock out your opponent before you’re overwhelmed by fire – though this can take some time to get into.

Owlcat’s Pathfinder adaptation has been dizzying at times, but the d100-based rules around which Rogue Trader revolves are arguably far more complex. From the moment your character is created, you need to select talents and skills with text such as “For the next attack by a target affected by the vulnerability, the target’s cover effectiveness will be reduced by -(5 + (PER Reward x Number of Stacks )vulnerability))%. This attack will have a +(5 + PER reward – x vulnerability stack)% hit rate”. Even after hundreds of hours of playing the game, understanding this kind of tooltip is still a struggle. The result is that I often choose things based solely on what makes the numbers go up.

Thankfully, the combat itself is easier on your head. Acting in a random initiative order, your six party members will each gain a set number of movement points and action points to use each turn. You can move and use skills as needed, but attacking prevents you from moving further, and you can only attack once per turn. Or at least you have to start. Much of the fun is figuring out how to use various characters’ abilities to break these rules and deal with death and destruction as efficiently as possible.

Abilities that enable this, especially those from the officer archetype, focus on empowering other party members and providing them with additional opportunities for action. I’ve played through entire encounters with two characters, a soldier who’s built around doing as many attacks as possible each turn, and an officer who can happily give them three or four turns in a round. This is a good thing indeed, as your characters tend to be quite fragile and often horribly outnumbered, with even super tough bosses accompanied by hordes of minions. Everything looks and sounds exactly as you’d expect, adding to its appeal to 40k fans. Shredding hordes of cultists with a heavy bolter is just as satisfying the hundredth time as the first.

This kind of flawless representation of the setting is everywhere in Rogue Trader, especially when it comes to RPG morality. Certain dialogue choices will lead you down one of three different paths: dogmatically following the Imperial party line, heretical worship of the God of Chaos, or unconventional attempts to become a decent human being. The default behavior here is to do terrible things in the name of the Empire, committing heinous acts to ensure humanity survives one more day in a hostile universe. When some of your people inevitably leave because you’re too heretical, it’s not because you did something evil, it’s because you did it for the wrong reasons. Trying to be a hero is possible, but never easy.

It would have been easy for Rogue Trader to turn the grimness and darkness of 40k into a bunch of annoying characters and general misery, but Owlcat manages to make both the personal struggles of the NPCs you encounter and the overarching story (which could easily last over 100 hour) is profound and compelling. The difficult and inevitably terrible decisions that are made feel narratively justified but never excused, and you’re always aware of them without being punished for playing the game the way it’s intended.

Unfortunately, the game is let down by some poor performance and a ton of bugs. I played the game on PS5 (not my favorite platform, but it’s more or less usable) and encountered all kinds of bugs, crashes, and at one point, a patch made existing saves completely unplayable until it was fixed . . Possibly the most egregious for an RPG are the bugs that ruined entire quest lines, especially those surrounding the companion story. There’s nothing worse than spending dozens of hours getting to know a character, maybe even falling into a little romance, only to have them suddenly forget it ever happened, or decide they actually hate you. Talking to friends who play games on PC and looking around the wider community, performance on even high-end PCs isn’t much better.

It’s a shame that releasing games in a decidedly immature state has also become a hallmark of Owlcat, as the studio has historically done a pretty good job of fixing them given enough time. The complexity of combat is surmountable, and the overall gloominess of the dystopian setting is part of 40k’s charm, so technical issues are Rogue Trader’s only real sticking point. Owlcat has been working hard to address these issues, and regular patches have been released that have eliminated larger bugs. It’s still worth taking a few extra months, but if you can’t wait, there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from having a great time. Rogue Trader is bloated, cumbersome, mysterious, and overwrought. In short, this is a perfect 40k game.

A copy of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was independently obtained by Eurogamer for the purpose of review.