Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader Review | A Class Of Its Own (PC)

Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader is an experience best left to the player to decide as it can be incredibly hard or easy depending on your play style. With a general story revolving around becoming the Lord commander of a void ship, you join the ranks of the iconic Rogue Traders. This is a concept that dates back to the conception of Warhammer 40k itself and harkens the player to build a unique and powerful squad. In that regard, you’ll be treated to nearly everything the imperium has to offer from sisters of battle and space Marines to imperial guardsmen and eldari allies. Each has its powerful list of abilities meant to bring you closer to victory.

In this story of the Grimdark future, loss is inevitable as you’ll try again and again to defeat the demonic hordes centered around the Break of Dawn. Fortunately to any seasoned Warhammer fan, this game can prove a breath of fresh air in the realm of character customization. The cosmetics come from items you pick up, making your build more dynamic as you go along. However, the stats, abilities, and items you carry completely depend on the thick customization options available. You can easily spend your time building one of the best support commanders available, or equally a tank on the battlefield. Truly if you enjoy squad-based turn-style combat, Rogue Trader is for you!

Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader is available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4 & 5, and Xbox One & Series X|S on December 7th!

A Story Of Faith and Heresy

While being a strategy game with plenty of depth in terms of what you can accomplish, Rogue Trader acts just as much as a competent roleplaying game. With three different ideologies to go down, dogmatic, heretical, and iconoclast; there’s limitless potential to the characters you build. Each will impact your character by unlocking different abilities and being able to use specific equipment. Overall, however, you will be attempting to help or destroy the Break of Dawn as it tries to warp reality. From the start, you will be tasked with becoming an aspiring rogue trader, by outliving your predecessor. After this point, this story is about assembling your crew and preparing for the mounting battles to come.

Every ounce of the lore used for these stories comes right out of the various factions portrayed. With a heavy focus on the imperial guard, adeptus mechanicus, eldar, and chaos; you’ll find very few space Marines at first. Overall you can treat yourself to a mixture of loyalist and heretical forces that have their own end goals in mind. By using your authority as a rogue trader many doors can be opened, but also thrusts you into the turbulent landscape of their politics. For this, you will have to keep your ship supplied, and ready for combat by collecting resources along the journey. Will you choose to be a part of the New Dawn, or stand firm as a proud member of the Imperium of Man?

Tactically Assertive Gameplay

While Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader may be another member of its squad-based franchise, it goes about these mechanics differently. One of the most notable ways this changes things up is by focusing on the individual beyond the squad. The way this is accomplished is by giving each character an important set of abilities that can better flavor them in combat. For the most part, you can make them however you want to be, with a few minor restrictions. Because of this, the characters you create and train can often be some of the most play-style specialized choices you’ll come across. Along with this, you can choose countless weapons and equipment that better suit these features.

Deep and complex character creation options!

The way you’ll play the game is simple enough through navigating your squad up until you reach combat. Once this takes place, you’ll be on a grid-based map with turn-oriented combat that works surprisingly well on the surface. Through actions, features, and special abilities you can greatly increase this combat potential. Outside of this, you’ll have to maintain your void ship as it traverses through the warp, and enters combat with other vessels. Finally, you will have to maintain your reputation and resources through collecting and trading with other factions. Because of this, you are expected to have a high level of neutrality favoring only your story path decisions. With that in mind, this creates a lot of replayability you wouldn’t otherwise have in most Warhammer 40k RPG games. 

Decent Aesthetics And Graphics

Several aspects of Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader make the game memorable including unique character design and great environmental sculpting. The developers put a lot of time into creating the world and characters you interact with, as they all work to come to life inside the setting. For once we get to see more than churches and battlefields in a franchise that often holds more just beneath the surface. On top of this, you get to notice the small innate features of the world from the eyes of something other than a walking battle tank. It adds more depth of scope to the cover system and makes exploring the dark imperium all that much more foreboding. 

All of these are good, but there are a few gripes to be had in the cartoonishly created demons and some of the characters. While Warhammer 40k is a series that prides itself on this cartoonish aesthetic for the tabletop, it feels out of place compared to the rest of the story. Consistently the demons lose their subtle menacing appeal when they are just goofy-looking bullet sponges. This is followed by the fact that the main antagonist looks incredibly cartoonish, and the entire Grimdark horrors aspect of demons goes away. The main issue of this comes from the fact the demons aren’t properly shaded, and thus just look like bright pink chunky flesh things. Besides this, the game’s weapons, armor, and characters have a well-polished and true-to-fantasy design. 

Turn-based Combat in Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader

Astounding Voice Acting And Audio

Taking time to get voice actors to narrate parts of your story can be a major selling point for most roleplaying game fans, and Rogue Trader does this well. With each main character and plot device having at least a few pieces of verbal dialogue it makes the game much more immersive. Following this and the excellent music creates a requirement for more attention from the player. This lends well to a strategy-based combat game and helps drive the story along. Using a mixture of suspenseful and mournful tones in the classical music gives it a similar sound to other games in the franchise. Because of this, veteran Warhammer 40k players may feel right at home around this style of individual-based combat.

Outside of this, the only real complaint that could be made is that more of the story should be narrated. There are parts of the side story, or even just dialogue with lesser NPCs that feel washed over because of the fact they’re missing dialogue to begin with. If you’re paying attention and being careful this becomes a non-issue, but leaves the story to be weighed down by reading speed. An argument could be made by narrating the whole title, Rogue Trader could have a quicker or slower run time while maintaining the immersion of their story. This comes with the fact that a lot of the dialogue in Rogue Trader is heavy, maybe paragraphs per speech bubble. So with proper narration, it could make this hurdle a lot easier in the long run.

Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader was played on PC with a key provided by UberStrategist!