Tldr: Great game, amazing start and middle sections but really falls off towards the end. Also extremely buggy to the point of frustration. Buy if bugs get fixed (give it a year)

I love this game and I want to recommend it. But I honestly cannot in its current state. At least not to people not super into Warhammer or CRPGs

But first, the good:

Rogue trader utilizes the Lore of Warhammer 40K really well. If you are a fan of the Setting, you get to experience an angle you don't get to see from most other media. You will be facing the criminal underbelly, have to engage in power struggles with those of your own station and those below it, choosing whether to exploit or be benevolent.

The gameplay is easy to understand for people who are not familiar with CRPGs, it eases you in by limiting the amount of characters you have in the beginning, allowing you to get a feel for how to utilize them and for the basics of CRPG gameplay. This does not mean it is easy by any means, I got my ass handed to me in Chapter 1 multiple times and every boss fight has me finish it with my healing gone and half my group unconscious.

Speaking of the group, your followers are all useful and bring unique perks with them that let you build them into multiple fun builds that you can swap at a whim (with two exceptions) making team composition really fun. They also all have unique interactions with one or more main quest locations, encouraging you to swap them frequently and adjust the rest of your group accordingly. This has the added benefit of seeing some of their fun banter. Although I would have liked to see more inter-party conflict with choices on how to handle it.

They are also useful outside of combat and their unique interactions as their skills take place of your own if it is higher. So your character can be as dumb as a rock as long as you have a smart guy along. This means you are not locked into a charisma build just so you can actually suceed at social interactions.

The companions are also well written with believable goals and (mostly) god quests attached to them. Some (like Abelards) are pretty small, but others basically span the whole game. Their Voice acting, while not done for 100% of the text, is exemplary, some of the best work I have seen in a while.

The side quests are also fun and doing them can have an impact on future side quests or even main quests. This includes the fact that there is a small level of colony building and space combat as side content.


The bad:

As we were talking about sidequests, let us stay on that topic. The game is heavily frontloading optional content. You can do about 90% of the sidequests by Chapter 2, leading you to be pretty sidequest-starved towards the end of the game. This is doubly bad as the game does not tell you about this fact, neither through game design or just outright. I assumed that, since chapter 1 is seperate from the others, it would be the same for chapter 2 etc. Therefore I did all of the side-content to not get locked out from it, leaving me with crumbs in the late game.

The game in general takes a pretty steep drop-off in quality towards the end. Everything from the God-awful ending to Argentas quest to things of a more spoilery nature feel rushed, unfinished and frankly uninspired. This feels like Exec-meddling or perhaps budget constraints, as some other parts in the endgame retain that amazing level of quality.

But perhaps the biggest problem, the bugs. This game is absolutely riddled with bugs, big and small, more than half a year after release.

We are talking small things like problems with aiming and text errors, middle sized things like completely missing textures on a type of enemy, to massive things like not being able to interact with some icons while on Keyboard and mouse to get more info about a perk or enemy abilities, quests not being marked as complete, the game crashing, dialogues sometimes not being clickable and so much more. It is constant and infuriating. I know not everyone has these issues but they have severely knocked down my enjoyment of the game to the point I barely want to finish it, nervermind replay it.

I do believe that these issues, the bugs of course, but also the quality of the latter part of the game can absolutely be fixed by the devs. They have proven they can make a great game and I hope whatever impedement has caused them to drop the ball, be it money, time, execs or creative burnout gets resolved and they can make this game as awesome as it can be.

So yeah, I love this game and as much as it pains me to give it a negative review, if I were you, I would wait a while before buying it.

A tour de force of Warhammer 40k. A LOT of reading but WOW. Amazing game for those who love turn based RPG and Strategy games alike. I mean... Ship combat, resource building and stretches through so many conceptual levels of 40K. Not Baldurs Gate 3 but damn good! Even better if you love Warhammer!

I finally finished this game. At 180 hours for my first playthrough, it has to be one of the longest RPGs I've played. The game world doesn't seem huge (like Skyrim), and the maps are fairly linear (unlike Baldur's Gate 3), so where does the length come from? I'd say a lot of that time is due to the amount of text, and it's pretty dense text too. There's also a lot of time spent on level-up screens trying to decide how to build or even re-build a character, and battles, particularly boss battles, can easily become an all day affair (let's just say that on the Hard difficulty, you're spending a lot of time looking at that reload screen questioning if it's even possible to win). The graphics are tame, which honestly, I'm happy with because the game setting is so dark that I'd rather not have to see the gratuitous dismemberment in any level of detail. The gameplay feels great. It's similar to the Shadowrun CRPGs in that there's both melee and shooting and ample use of environmental cover. Machine guns go brrrr in a very satisfying manner. But combat can feel unbalanced at times. The enemies tend to come in two varieties: trash mobs, or characters that can wipe half your party in one turn. You end up having to build your team in ways that feels like you're trying to break the game... such as by trying to take out as many enemies in the first round as you can before they can act, but if you don't build your team this way, you just get stomped. Overall, even with these flaws, you get a very satisfying package that keeps you interested up until the final credit roll. There's ample decision points to role play either a dogmatic, iconoclast, or heretic character, and the game keeps you guessing as to which path has the best/worst outcomes.