Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader is a thrilling, colorful journey into the heart of grim-darkness

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SHOULD I PLAY WARHAMMER 40K: ROGUE TRADER?

Absolutely play this game if you’re a Warhammer 40K fan or you’re chasing the high of Baldur’s Gate 3’s crunchy tactical battles. Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader isn’t as visually lavish as Larian’s magnum opus, but it’s packed with all the Warhammer 40K goodness a fan could ever want, and it’s set in a wild and unpredictable landscape of frontier worlds that provide some much-needed variety to the usual buffet of cookie-cutter space marines.

TIME PLAYED

I played six hours of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, which is barely scratching the surface of this massive RPG. After taking on the mantle of a legendary Rogue Trader, I managed to steer my stricken voidship out of an attempted coup in the warp and set foot on my first planet. Since this is Warhammer 40K, things were definitely not chill there at all, and I immediately had to start fighting my way through a massive rebellion in order to make my way to the planet’s governor, hot on the trail of a missing inquisitor. I picked up four companions, including a valorous sister of battle, a warp-crazed psyker, my loyal sergeant-at-arms, and an inscrutable tech-priest, each of whom had their own skills and character traits to customize as they gained levels.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT WARHAMMER 40K: ROGUE TRADER?

• The Black Library, brought to life. Yeah, Warhammer 40K is about rolling lots of dice and moving squads of awesome painted models around on big tables, but there’s also a bunch of surprisingly good fiction set in its universe. Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader continues this tradition, adding light and color to what’s often regarded as a relentlessly grim setting. The story quickly gets underway, and instead of spending lots of time explaining each weird 40K concept, Rogue Trader let me simply hover my mouse cursor over key terms to pull up a quick tooltip that provided the necessary background info. That means players who aren’t familiar with concepts like the Adeptus Mechanicus or the Imperium of Man will easily be able to keep up without the story ever getting bogged down in bloated exposition.

• Loads of customization options. I picked one of Rogue Trader’s pre-built characters—a retired imperial commissar who reminded me of Ibram Gaunt—but I could just as easily have built my player character from scratch, choosing their appearance, background, and specializations on my own. Each character who joined my party had a detailed backstory, and every character also has a set of convictions that color their view of the world, and which can change depending on how things play out. Each time they leveled up, I could pick out new ranks and traits, bolstering their existing abilities or giving them new skills and bonuses. There was tons of room for buildcrafting, and I’m excited to see how my band of warriors ends up.

• Challenging tactical battles. After the introductory fights aboard my flagship, combat got quite a bit more difficult planetside on Rykad Minoris, where rebels armed with flamers and swords regularly ambushed my party in the ruined city streets. The turn-based combat system rewarded me for planning out my turns, stacking character abilities and timing things to make sure I maintained the advantage.

When I failed to think things through, my party was punished severely—such as the one time my psyker reached too deeply into the warp and accidentally manifested a bile demon behind us as we were fighting off a rebel ambush. I won’t make that mistake again!

• It’s big. In six hours, I only made a start on the first planet in the first system of the Koronus Expanse, and there’s a lot more to see out there in deep space. I had my choice of where I wanted to begin, though: I could also have tried looking for the missing Inquisitor on a local prison planet or checked out an unidentified voidship circling another planet in the region. Once I get my own flagship repaired, I’ll have even more places to explore.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT WARHAMMER 40K: ROGUE TRADER?

• Information overload. Rogue Trader does an admirable job at making sense out of the chaos of Warhammer 40K lore, but it’s also introducing a whole new complex roleplaying system. I found this a bit fiddly in places, such as when I first went to level my characters up. It took me a few minutes of futile clicking to understand that I got to pick from a specific segment of each character’s “wheel” of potential traits, and once I did, there were a boatload of new stats and characteristics to try to make sense of. That’s often part of the fun of a new RPG, but there are places where I think Rogue Trader could have made things a bit clearer.

• Character positioning. This is a minor gripe, but it came up a lot: Some squares are just hard to click on in combat. I’m not sure why the movement cursor seemed to dance around them, but it was weirdly difficult sometimes to get my characters into the positions I wanted them during combat from time to time.

• Bile demons. Get these guys out of here, they’re a health hazard!

PLATFORM TESTED

PC, via Steam