Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Review
Dec. 8, 2023Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Review
In thisWarhammer 40,000 Rogue Traderreview, I’m sharing my experience with the game, having played about 20 or 30 hours.
While I haven’t completed the entire game, it’s substantial, and I wanted to provide my impressions of the full version. I aim to help you understand what I think of it so far and whether it’s worth picking up, especially if you’re a CRPG fan.
Let’s start with the positive aspects of the game. One thing I truly love about Rogue Trader is its world-building and the fantasticlore. The game excels in making players feel fully immersed in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The attention to detail is remarkable, and the developers have successfully captured the essence of 40K.
The world-building is outstanding, creating an immersive experience that resonates with fans of the 40K lore. The game incorporates numerous references and background exposition, making it accessible even for players who may not be hardcore 40K enthusiasts. The inclusion of pop-out text providing background lore and definitions enhances the understanding of the story, especially for those less familiar with the 40K universe.
OwlCat has done an excellent job of presenting the lore in a way that caters to both 40K fans and newcomers, making the overall experience more enjoyable.
Moving on to the combat system, I find the turn-based approach in Rogue Trader to be a positive departure from the Real-Time with Pause system. OwlCat has successfully implemented turn-based combat, a shift from their previous Real Time with Pause approach seen inPathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. This change aligns well with the game’s dynamics and enhances the overall gaming experience.
When you see the combat of the game, there’s no way that it could be tactical the way that it is if you don’t do a turn-based. The combat feels a little bit like a combination of maybe turn-based Pathfinder and something like XCOM or Phoenix Point, something like that where you have a cover system. You’re using half and full cover to protect yourself from ranged attacks while you’re also moving up melee units to attack. You’re using positioning on the battlefield based on whereenemyunits are to try and not get surrounded and flanked, and there’s a lot of tactical positioning.
One thing that I love that they’ve done in combat is unless you’ve been ambushed, you get to place your characters at the beginning of combat. This is kind of a sore point with isometric RPGs, especially ones that are turn-based and party-based.
Sometimes, when you go into combat, even if it’s real-time, if your formation is not perfect and depending on who aggro is what first, you can be out of formation, and you have a bad start to combat. That doesn’t happen hardly ever in this game, again, like I said, unless you’ve been ambushed. In that particular case, you get to set up your characters where it makes the most sense for them to be, and you don’t have to worry about your formation.
Another thing that I love about Rogue Trader is the character progression. It feels really good in this game, coming from Boulders Gate where the progression felt kind of slow, and you didn’t have too many decisions to make in the upgrade process. Sometimes you’d find gear and it would benefit you or not. I like the way they’ve done it here.
You level up much more frequently, and there are more choices to be made in the level-up process, kind of like Pathfinder, to be frank, and it just feels better. You feel like you have more control of your character, and you’re more engaged with the development of your character.
Ultimately, this leads to characters that feel very unique, in my opinion, because there are things like being a psyker that’s not attached to the class of the character. You can have all different types of psykers in the game, and you can have all different sorts of combat based on theweaponsthat you’re using. Even the weapon type that you’re using and the weaponskillsthat a character is using can change their strategy in combat. Then you mix and match that with the different classes and advanced classes of the game.
It’s very, very fun, and I think players who are fans of having more control over their character, like historic traditional RPGs, will appreciate that in this game.
TheCompanionsare also really well done in this game. Anyone who’s played an OwlCat game will know their companions are phenomenal; this shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone. The storylines are good, their personalities are good, and their voice acting is fantastic. I wished more of the game was voice-acted. One of my pet peeves about this game is that it’s not fully voice-acted. OwlCat absolutely doesn’t have to do it, but I feel like if OwlCat’s going to take it to the next level and push for that AAA quality at some point, they’re going to have to voice everything, and that’s tough to do, admittedly.
There is a lot of dialogue in this game and a lot of reading, and it would be very hard for them to weave the narratives that they do in their games fully through voice acting. But if they could ever do that, it would be a monumental, phenomenal feat.
Another thing about the game is its size. This should not be shocking to people. The game is probably 100-plus hours long from what I’ve seen so far, and this is kind of par for the course with the Pathfinder games, which were about the same size as this. You are not going to have a very short experience in this game; it’s very, very long. So you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck in terms of gameplay hours out of it, especially if you replay it with different alignments, like if you went dogmatic or heretical, and see different outcomes, etc. And then last
Another thing that I really love is the co-op. This game supports up to six players in co-op. I have not messed around much with the co-op, admittedly; I’ve only done it two-player, and that was pretty fun. But the fact that you can play this game with up to six players is incredible. There are no games out there that support this many players in co-op, and just the fact that you can play a CRPG co-op— the only people who have done it to date are pretty much Larian.
So that’s nice, and if you want to get some extra mileage out of your game, then co-op is going to push you even further.
So now let’s talk about some of the things I don’t like about the game. You’re almost too immersed in the game if you’re not a 40K nerd if you’re not somebody who’s up on your 40K lore. Like me, for instance, I am a fan, but I don’t know all the definitions and all the gods and all the factions. It can be a lot, particularly at the beginning when you’re just overwhelmed and bombarded by all this stuff.
Now, I don’t mind; I read a lot of fantasy and a lot of sci-fi, so it’s not a big deal for me. But a lot of players might feel that it’s too much for them, even players that are fans of CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity that have a lot of reading might feel that this might even be too much for them.
I just want to throw it out there that there’s a bit of a learning curve at the beginning and even on into the game you’re going to have to take the time to look at the definitions of things if you want to understand what’s happening.
Another thing about the game, and this is going to sound like a silly complaint because it’s almost not a complaint, is that there is a lot ofcombatin this game, a lot. I love combat in turn-based games, so this isn’t necessarily a complaint, but there is borderline too much combat, even for me.
Every encounter is rather large; it feels like not all of them, but they take time. Turn-based combat takes time; it’s probably the biggest downside of turn-based combat—the amount of time it takes to get through a combat. A lot of encounters, particularly at the beginning of the game, first 10 to 20 hours or so, are not overly difficult, but they’re lengthy.
So you don’t feel like you’re particularly being challenged necessarily, but they’re drawn out. So your progress in the game sometimes feels like you played an hour and you did two fights, and they weren’t particularly fights you were going to lose; it just took you that long to get through the fights. There’s maybe borderline too much combat in this game, or it just could be that the way the combat is designed, there are a lot of enemies on the screen that are almost cannon fodder. It would be more interesting to see more advanced combat mechanics earlier on in the game. There are more advanced characters later on in the game, but near the beginning, it can kind of get a little bit repetitive because it just feels like you’re wading through a bunch of cannon fodder.
You’re not going to die that easily unless you’re just really, really bad. You’re not likely to die in these scenarios. If you do die, though, that’s even more time you spend in combat. For one combat, I made a mistake at the very end of like a 30-minute combat, and then I had to do the whole encounter over again because I didn’t save mid-fight, and then 30 more minutes that I wasn’t going to die, I just made a mistake right at the end and had to do it all over again. So there is a lot of combat in this game that could be a real plus for you or a minus for you depending on how much combat you like in your game.
And the next point is that there’s a lot of reading in this game. There is a lot, and if you’re coming from something likeBaldur’s Gate 3where you can read or watch the dialogue unfold because everything is voiced, it can be a bit jarring. And I don’t mean like, you know, “Oh, it’s a CRPG; there’s reading, duh.” It’s like there’s a lot, even for a CRPG, and it can kind of disrupt the flow of the game when you have to just read a lot of stuff.
This kind of piggybacks off the point I made earlier, and I don’t know how much everyone is going to appreciate that. Some people, you know, a lot of people who play RPGs, particularly CRPGs, love dialogue and exposition and lore and all that. It’s not going to be a problem for a lot of people, particularly a lot of fans of this series and genre.
But there are some players, maybe coming from Baldur’s Gate 3, that are looking for another CRPG to play that might get overloaded with the amount of reading that they have to do. So I just want to throw that out there.
All in all, I’ve enjoyed my time with the game. With Rogue Trader, it’s one of those games where it’s just a great combination of storytelling, companions, and character progression. I dig the combat and the setting of the game. They’re all fantastic, and I enjoy my time playing them. But I would say that sometimes I just need to take a break. Sometimes it’s like reading a novel, and a combat just took two hours. I need to get up and go do something else for a little bit, come back.
It doesn’t flow completely smoothly when I play these long gameplay sessions of like 10 to 12 hours, which I do in other CRPGs as I did inPillars of Eternitylike I did in Pathfinder like I did in Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity, etc., where you just sit and play all day, and the next thing you know, it’s like 4 in the morning. I couldn’t do that with this game so far. I have to take breaks because there’s just a lot being thrown at me, and sometimes I just need to decompress from it.
That said, I would highly recommend this game for people who like tactical combat, who enjoy sci-fi, and who are fans of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Those are the individuals that this game is truly made for. If you don’t have an issue with reading a substantial amount of lore and information, and you are willing to learn about aspects you might not be familiar with, then this game is great.
Additionally, if you have a couple of friends to play with, it becomes even better. However, if you prefer a more traditional RPG with clearer explanations, less reading, and particularly less exposure to unfamiliar lore, this might not be the game for you.
Another consideration is the platform; I’ve played this on PC, and while I haven’t tried it on console, it seems like it could be quite challenging. The load times might be significant, especially on older consoles like PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Playing on PC or, at the very least, on newer consoles is recommended to enhance the overall experience.
In conclusion, I believe that if you’re a CRPG fan, especially one who enjoys sci-fi and turn-based combat, you’ll likely love this game. On the other hand, if you prefer real-time combat, dislike extensive reading, or are not a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, this game may not be your cup of tea. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you been playing it? Did you try the co-op mode earlier this year? Share your opinions in the comments below.
Auberon
Writer at Fextralife. I really like vanilla ice cream.
