Rogue Trader's Pretty Good

Owlcat Games did a good job making me feel immersed in the Warhammer 40K universe. I felt like a true Rogue Trader. The game and its systems have some flaws that become more apparent the longer you play, but they're solid enough overall that I've enjoyed my time with it. This game strikes a good middle ground between something like Baldur's Gate and XCOM. The combat is more like XCOM, where positioning is the biggest factor to consider. It also features more RPG elements, exploration of locations, and interactions and relationships.

After playing several turn-based strategy games, this one felt a bit easy. I still enjoyed the playthrough quite a bit, but most fights didn't feel like a challenge. They felt more like a chore. I've started a second playthrough on the hardest difficulty, and I'm just getting to the point where it starts to feel challenging. I'm liking this second playthrough, with different decisions and building on what I learned the first time. I enjoy games like this where you have loads of options for building out your characters. There's a lot to choose from in this one.

Balance is a bit off with weapons and abilities in general. You can scale up to 200-300 damage per strike with a certain sword while your other characters are still doing 7-15 damage with a shot. If you restricted your equipment and purposefully built around more interesting strategies, you could increase the difficulty quite a bit. Not me though. I'll keep smacking things for 2,000 damage a turn. It might be off-balance, but it's still fun to theorycraft and try out different builds with everyone in your entourage. It's a lot to digest at first. I beat the game, and I'm still spending loads of time in my second playthrough reading passive abilities and figuring out how to stack and scale my characters properly. Quite a few of the hours I've logged are just me rerolling my characters to optimize how I allocate their points.

One of the best things about this game is the atmosphere. The sound team did great work. Very apt choices for music and sound effects. It's just badass. Things feel impactful. It sounds and feels good to blast five enemies with a shotgun. You know what im talking about! Headphones recommended for the full experience. The writing is done rather well. There's lots to read in the game, and I think I read most of it, whereas I normally skip or skim. Characters are written well. Everyone is kind of a pain in the ass, but also badass in their own way.

Decisions are impactful, and you get different benefits and consequences based on what you decide to do. This engages you in considering your options carefully. Every part of the game plays a role in your potential power level and largely determines the situations you encounter.

Now I have to point out some areas where it falls short. I mentioned the balance issues, and tied to that are the latter stages. In the final chapters, it feels a bit rushed. It almost transitions from a novel experience to a movie trying to smash several books into a 1.5-hour romp. It's still a great game. It just almost feels like it should have wrapped up earlier or had more to offer later. If that makes sense? I was still several levels under max when I finished it the first time through, so I never actually managed to push my team to its full potential. I'm hoping it will be different on max difficulty. That's kind of one of the weird things about the game: it's a very long game, sort of too long, but also feels like it's cut short at the same time. I think I would have loved it to be even longer if it was just the main story and missions. There's just too much tedium mixed in, which gets old late into the game and makes me a bit glad it wrapped up. Things like the warp-traveling system to system are fine at first, but at the end its just ridiculous traveling across the map one system at a time.

All considered, the few shortfalls don't overwhelm me during play. I notice them, but I still enjoy it. Some things don't make perfect sense, but it's got enough going for it to still be enjoyable! It quickly became one of my top-played games hour-wise, so it's doing plenty right. Worth it for the atmosphere and story alone, but if you like a challenge, pick one of the top two difficulties.

For fans of Warhammer 40K, it's worth giving this game a chance. If you're curious, just do it.