Cyprus-based Owlcat Games forged itself a reputation for sprawling CRPG adventures with lengthy narrative branches to explore, but that have a tendency to strain under the weight of the interlocking systems. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader trades fantasy crusades for spacefaring ones, but still cleaves to the house style, for better or worse.
Though about as much has changed as stayed the same, to Owlcat’s credit it feels more like a confident iteration on their preferred systems rather than simply running out of ideas. What remains is a solid scaffold to explore some of the less common themes and locales of the Warhammer setting, while what has changed feels very deliberate.
For starters, while Kingmaker was real-time with pause and Wrath of the Righteous could switch on the fly, Rogue Trader is purely turn-based. While some may miss having the option to switch, focusing on the one type lets Owlcat build on that more structured system with grid-based movement and special abilities that give you extra turns or movement points. Ranged combat also becomes something of a priority with the introduction of XCOM-style cover and hit percentages. Though in the early hours at least I still found my melee characters dominating the field, often cutting down most foes before my guns could land a hit. It mostly works out to be a solid, if slow, combat system that lacks the polish and snappy feel of those more dedicated grid-based combat games like the Firaxis XCOM‘s or even Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters.
The classes are an interesting spread too, despite being limited to four base options down from the nearly hundred offered in the Pathfinder titles. They’re more flexible and varied than you’d think too, with the Operative having options to specialize into more of a supportive debuffer or a stationary sniper. Compare that to the similarly ranged-focused Soldier class, which instead brings movement, survivability, and close range, area-of-effect attacks to the table. I chose to specialize my trader as an Officer, giving allies more chances to shoot or even entire extra turns at will, with later class options letting me direct all my companions to fire at a target at once. My only real gripe is it would have been nice to see Owlcat branch out from the Pathfinder-style feats and proficiencies system we’re so used to. I’m not familiar enough with the (many) 40k TTRPG systems to know if Rogue Trader is built on one like the Pathfinder games, but it would be nice to see a progression system that doesn’t require scrolling through a list of feats the length of a major religious text next time.
The game itself also felt more stable than a some of Owlcat’s previous outings, at least at launch. I had only a single crash over the time i played the opening act twice and some of the first planet, with the only real jank or errors on display were mostly graphical. Soldiers on a bridge would step out on to thin air to get a better shot, or laser beams shot wide would still somehow cause a cultist to spontaneously bisect, that sort of thing. What was more concerning was the enemy AI, which would frequently group its units together for protection, only to then scythe them down with its own guns for a chance at hitting my party. If this were intentional, I’d say it was grimly accurate to the setting, but something tells me it’s more of a behaviour oversight.
As for the story, while it’s too early to see how things pan out or how reactive the game will be to your choices, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader does do a good job of letting you establish your kind of character early. Whether you intend to play a willing pawn of the dark powers or a conceited space nobleman, there are plenty of chances even early on to make faustian pacts or scoff at orphans, rather than locking those options behind alignment levels. The companions, too, are varied and distinct with only Abelard the seneschal being less than immediately interesting. That said I’ve not gotten to his character quests yet, I just hope he ends up more Alistair Theirin or Atton Rand than Carth Onasi, to borrow from Bioware for comparisons. The return of tooltips on important phrases also goes a long way to helping newcomers to the setting make sense of all these pseudo-latin Proper Nouns.
In all, though Rogue Trader isn’t exactly boldly treading new ground, where it does go it goes confidently. If it can avoid the pitfalls of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the flimsy final act, the game will likely be another hundred-hour timesink for anyone who loves CRPG’s, Warhammer, or both. If not, it will probably still get there, but it might need a year or two of patching.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is immediately available on the PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
