Trading Mostly Bullets – A Review of Warhammer 40 000: Rogue Trader

Rogue Trader inserts you into the Koronus Expanse, uncharted space home to numerous cosmic anomalies and horrors. After inheriting the titular Rogue Trader certificate, you are given certain liberties that other people would most likely be executed for, which includes consorting with aliens (or more commonly grouped as “xenos”), pirates, or even heretics. Together with companions ranging from mostly human to very non-human, you can slaughter enemies and debate whether your actions have any meaning or not. Sometimes it is enjoyable to see interactions between individuals such as Argenta, the righteous Sister of Battle, and Yrliet, an Aeldari (space elf) outcast, although often these boil down to Argenta wanting to execute Yrliet while Yrliet states in some form or another the lack of intelligence in humans.

The classes and turn-based combat have an imposing and harsh nature, with iconic franchise weapons such as bolters having a properly devastating soundscape attached to them. Building your character happens through three tiers of classes: a starting class, a secondary advanced class, which is somehow related to your starting class, and the final shared tier which has powerful abilities for everyone.

Starting as a support class Officer, I quickly realized that my persuasive main character was a very fine choice for a leader. Every turn, each character is allowed to take one and only one attack action, which feels very balanced in the beginning. The Officer, however, quickly allows you to grant more turns and attacks to your party members. Even though you have characters taking turns in rounds, most encounters later on were practically finished as soon as my Officer took action. This approach trivialized most of the fights, and if you asked me which fight had the coolest mechanics, I honestly could not answer since I barely saw any. But hopefully, someone else will get to enjoy whatever the encounter designer had intended!

The developer is infamous for inserting odd minigames into their titles, and this time we have space battles that exist in the form of a turn-based minigame, in which you fly your silly little ship and tear through multiple, massive cruisers and fleets. It’s a very tacked-on component, which brings almost nothing interesting to the table. Since Rogue Traders may also govern planets, a colony management minigame is required as well. The development options can range from slaughtering entire populations of mutated individuals to letting them work on the colony, allowing it to thrive if only to become conduits to chaotic powers and bring ruin to the colony. Ultimately just a chore, but maybe this is how people would start to look in this type of setting, especially in a world that has class hierarchies to the extreme.

I did enjoy playing Rogue Trader, mostly due to the setting and oddly tuned combat system. Topping Argenta with all manners of buffs and having her unload bolter magazines into a group of enemies empowered my sense of technological advancement as the enemy turned into giblets. Anyone looking for realistic roleplaying experiences should probably look elsewhere since this game might feel confusing and downright silly to anyone not fascinated by the over-the-top lore of Warhammer 40000.

Publisher: Owlcat Games
Developer: Owlcat Games
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
Release Date: December 2023
Genres: Adventure, RPG, Strategy
PEGI: 16

Photos: Screenshots from Warhammer 40000: Rogue Trader, taken by the author

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