IMPORTANT: This review will contain some mild spoilers for the beginning of the story.

Rogue Trader is a classical RPG set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It has all of the classical elements of an RPG, from a multi-character party, over round-based combat straight to the fact that there’s a lot of dialogue to read.

I played the game on Linux on my Radeon RX 580 without any issue.

To put a long story short: If you’re not entirely opposed to the Warhammer 40k setting, I can very warmly recommend the game. It happily scratches any RPG itch you might feel.

Overall, it took me 141 hours to finish the game. I didn’t skip anything, although some of my decisions might have cut me out of an hour or two of story here or there.

I know art is subjective, but I found Rogue Trader’s art absolutely stunning, especially the backgrounds:

And I could post half a dozen additional screenshots of locations which look similarly gorgeous.

The story

Another spoiler warning: This sections will contain a few spoilers for the beginning of the story, the general setting and the general shape of the overall campaign.

I find the overall setting of Rogue Trader quite refreshing. In all too many RPGs, you start out as a simple peasant/blacksmith/guards soldier and then work your way up to being the hero of the hour, ending up with a dukedom under your rule and a highborn spouse on your arm. In Rogue Trader, you start out as the heir of a Rogue Trader dynasty. In the setting, Rogue Traders carry a Warrant of Trade, bearing the God Emperor’s personal signature. This warrant turns them into immensely powerful individuals, standing right outside many of the Imperium’s laws. And within the first hour of gameplay, you will succeed Theodora von Valancius to the warrant. With that, you inherit her immense wealth, hundreds of worlds as well as her flagship, which will be both, the party hub and the location of many an interesting quest.

I found it an interesting change of pace to see people scrape and bow to you right from the start for a change.

Once your unfortunate predecessor has gone to meet Him on Earth, you are thrust into the world of the Koronus Expanse as one of its most powerful individuals. You have a powerful starship at your disposal, crewed by tens of thousands of (mostly…) loyal subjects, quite a bit of wealth, a few initial companions, and a very comfortably full book of quests and rumors to look into. After looking for repairs for your voidship after the attack which killed your predecessor, you get into a star system with, unsurprisingly, an ongoing chaos cult uprising. Once you get through that, you will be dumped onto the star map, which initiates the free movement phase of the game.

Your charge here is to check on the most important worlds of the von Valancius protectorate and fix problems on each of them, from Xenos invasions to, you guessed it, more chaos cults.

I don’t want to go any further here, as there’s much chance I’d spoiler things. So just let me state rather generally that after the long free phase comes a quite interesting linear phase where you’re stripped of your power, ship and equipment for a while, followed by another free phase and then the end game.

One important point to me is that in the free phase, there isn’t any time pressure. So you can’t make any “wrong” choices about the order you do the quests. And important changes, e.g. points of no return before the end of the free phases, are nicely goalposted ingame, so it’s pretty hard to miss them and miss out on content.

The Koronus Expanse as an area was colonized relatively recently (by Imperium standards…) and Imperial control, as in control by the Imperial bureaucracy, is still relatively weak. At the same time, the warp routes from the rest of the Imperium have been impassable for a long time when the game starts. That serves as a convenient explanation of why there aren’t a few Imperial Guard regiments or Astartes chapters showing up once things go pear-shape.

You will be fighting nearly every enemy the Imperium has, besides the Tau and the Orks.

Renaming things

One amusing thing I’d like to point out: In the Warhammer universe, many things have their own names. For example, the Space Marines aren’t Space Marines anymore, but rather the Adeptus Astartes. The Dark Eldar aren’t the Dark Eldar anymore, but the Drukhari.

What tripped me up for the first 20 hours of gameplay though: “Wounds” are what’s called health in other RPGs. So if the game tells you that some effect only occurs when the enemy is at 50% wounds, it means 50% health. But the game also has an injuries mechanic, for longer-lasting debuffs after you got roughed up a bit too much. And for the longest time, I though wounds are just another word for injuries - not for health. 🤦

The interesting impact of a setting on morality

While playing Rogue Trader, I had an interesting realization. I was suddenly able to kill the innocent in job lots.

Let me explain a bit. In the past, I’ve always had quite a problem with playing the “evil” alignment. Part of that was of course that many game studios only knew how to write “stupid evil” or “arsehole evil” until rather recently. One vivid example of how much of a wuss I am was Neverwinter Nights 2. It had the warlock as a class, but under D&D rules (at the time), those could not be lawful good. But I wanted to play one, so I made an attempt at playing as lawful evil. I failed at the very first tavern. If I remember correctly, there is a widow who had lost her husband and asks you for a bit of money? Or she asks you to do a task and then tells you she can’t pay you for it? And obviously, the evil alignment answer is to intimidate that poor widow into giving you money. I could never make myself do that.

Similarly for Mass Effect’s Renegade alignment. Gave up on that playthrough pretty quickly as well.

But then along comes Rogue Trader. It also has alignments, three of them. The first one, which I decided to play, is Dogmatic. You’re basically a massive Emperor-botherer, following the Imperial Creed to the letter. Then there’s Iconoclasts, who are basically still following the Creed, but not rigidly. E.g. they might grant mercy to a young Planetary Defense Forces soldier who lost his nerve when faced by a squad of Traitor Marines.

And finally there is Heretic. They’re the ones who have turned away entirely from the light of the Golden Throne and follow one or more of the Ruinous Powers.

As a Dogmatic follower, I got my first taste of what I’d signed up for during the prologue. A planet had irredeemably fallen to Chaos. And it had a gigantic old fusion reactor. And as a dogmatic follower of the Creed, I condemned the entire world to Exterminatus by hitting that reactor with my flagship’s guns.

Similarly, there are many occasions where you’ve got some foot soldier of a Chaos cult in front of you and the game gives you a choice of what to do with them. The Creed is clear on that, and so they invariably get the firing squad.

So the only thing it seemingly needed was for the setting to say that these actions are actually okay. Perhaps even required of me. And suddenly I was not at all squeamish. If I hadn’t annihilated the planet, it would just have become a Chaos outpost. The surviving citizens might not have died by Exterminatus, but they would instead have died by our guns once their Chaos masters drove them into our defenses. They would be dead either way.

The fact of this rather radical change in my approach to RPGs and morals, just by the way actions are presented and how the setting is explained made me genuinely think about the real world and the power of indoctrination. Or just repeating the same lie often enough. Or growing up with a lie and never knowing anything else.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let me just say: I hadn’t heard of Owlcat before playing Rogue Trader. But they’re now on my list of studios I will actively follow.

I really enjoyed the game. If you like the Warhammer 40k setting and classical RPGs, you won’t regret it.

For my next game, I will stay in the Warhammer 40k setting and play Inquisitor: Martyr, an action RPG. Last time I played one of those was somewhere during lockdown, where I decided to finally play through Sacred 2.