Leave this one to the Daemons
If you listen to the podcast, you know that I talk about the Warhammer 40K universe a lot. I am a fan of the multitude of video games in the series, and was intrigued when I heard about, he latest game Rogue Trader. In Warhammer Rogue Trader, players will create their own character who will take on the titular role. What made me curious about this game though was the fact that it is a cRPG, much like industry darling Baldur’s Gate 3. Elevator pitch for Rogue Trader is just that, take on the huge world building and choices of BG3 only do it in the grimdark 40K universe; which honestly was enough for me to dive head first into this one.
MSRP: $49.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $39.99
Warhammer Rogue Trader was developed by Owlcat games who is best known for the Pathfinder cRPG games. Just like that series gameplay in Rogue Trader happens from an isometric view and has a grand narrative to tell. Being that I only really know the Space Marine parts of the 40K universe, I had no idea what a ‘Rogue Trader’ was but it honestly is a great role for a video game. Rogue Traders are given an enormous ship with lots of crew and sent out among the stars to explore and find new planets for the Imperium. With this comes special privileges, which allows the player to get involved in a lot of issues and make decisions that would get ordinary citizens killed. Unlike most Bioware games who have a kind of light/dark morality system in Rogue Trader there are actually three different ways players choices can land them. There are the usual light/dark by way of Iconoclast/Chaos or players can choose a 3rd and that is to follow the rule of the Imperium and become a zealot.
The narrative of the game sees the Rogue Trader sent to remap an area of space that has had their warp routes messed up due to space storms. And if that doesn’t just sound like a crazy sci-fi story set up I don’t know what does. The good thing is that this allows for players to genuinely explore the map, requiring a navigator to move from point to point. As players move through space, they will be treated to text only kind of mini adventures that can lead to some fun and not so fun side effects based on choices.
I wish I could say that Rogue Trader was on par with BG3, especially coming directly from that game to this one. Sadly, Rogue Trader is no where as polished as BG3, I ran across T-posing enemies in combat, missing sound effects, missing animations and good ole crashes. If the technical issues weren’t bad enough the systems in place in Rogue Trader just feel needlessly complicated. That may be due to me just being used to the easier D&D system but I just felt so overwhelmed when it came to leveling up my characters. One of the surprises though was that this game includes space combat, much like the Battlefleet games.
Combat encounters has players move their characters around the field and choosing an attack or ability to use. All of this happens thru turn based attacks, similar to a session of Dungeons and Dragons. Players can move and act based on ability points. If you are familiar with cRPGs then this is going to be nothing new, what might be new is having abilities and attacks not trigger when you click them. Or various debuffs not be reflected when they should be, it just leads to even combat feeling frustrating, again something that BG3 did wonderfully.
I really wanted to love Rogue Trader, especially with how much I love the universe but more so because I had just come down from the high that is Baldur’s Gate 3. And perhaps this is unfair but the majority of my playtime was me grumbling because what is 1 step in BG3 was 5 or 6 in Rogue Trader. I do realize that both games are built on different rule sets but I just didn’t have fun playing with the one in Rogue Trader despite how much I love the universe. All of the bugs and issues I ran into didn’t help anything either, if you are interested in this one, I would suggest waiting for a few patches before really digging in.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
