Spoiled by the detailed world and complex mechanics of Baldur’s Gate 3, we spent a long time searching for a solid replacement. As huge fans of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, we kept a close eye on the announcement and release of Owlcat Games‘ latest title. For a while, Rogue Trader slipped through our fingers, and we just couldn’t seem to dive into its rich universe of sci-fi plotting. We are genuinely glad that has changed. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader meets all our expectations, offering a deeply detailed world from the studio best known for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.
A Long Game Packed with a Great Story, Charming Characters, and Deep Mechanics
Right from the start, before you even begin a new campaign, you are met with a massive number of choices. After deciding whether to activate a DLC for your main playthrough (more on that later!), you can pick from five difficulty levels. Many settings aren’t set in stone. If you want, you can easily tweak different percentages—like how good enemies are at dodging, how long status effects last, or how tough the space battles are. For those who want the ultimate test, there is the Grim Darkness option.
You can start with one of three pre-made characters (Hecata, Darrius, or Bahardor). While they are well-crafted and unique, we highly recommend making a cup of coffee, taking your time, and building a brand-new character worthy of your name. The character creation process is long and highly detailed. You will often find yourself stuck on what to pick—not because it’s confusing, but because there are so many good options and you want a little bit of everything. You choose your homeworld, background, a major past victory, a dark moment from your past, your class (archetype), stats, and your spaceship. Each choice changes your skills and lets you play the game exactly how you want.
A Mountain of Text to Read
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader places a heavy focus on giving you the tools to create your own personal story. Characters react differently depending on the dialogue choices you make. You’ll quickly learn that a small, seemingly harmless decision can come back later like a boomerang, hitting you with unexpected consequences. A lot of care went into the story, both in planning the plot twists and deepening character interactions. By offering rich dialogue and clear descriptions, the game turns into a treasure trove of well-written text, deep relationships, and meaningful choices.
You play the game like a classic RPG. You left-click to move your character or interact with people and objects. The maps are beautifully designed and packed with Warhammer details. By clicking around, you are fed extra information about your location and what people are doing there. The game constantly builds its world through these massive text clues.
The Child of Pathfinder and XCOM
Combat uses a standard turn-based system. When a fight kicks off, a grid appears on the map. You and your allies take turns moving, attacking, and using abilities based on your remaining action and movement points.
During fights, you can hide behind cover, wipe out groups of enemies with big attacks, or apply buffs to your team. The battlefield is a chaotic spectacle. In one fight, an enemy bullet went right through our teammate and hit another enemy standing behind them. In another, we loved watching our AI-controlled allies freeze, burn, and slice their way through enemies like a coordinated pack of predators.
Every battle feels different depending on who is in your squad, what weapons you equip, and what skills you use. If there’s one thing this game has plenty of, it’s a huge arsenal of those three things. Because of this, you can tackle fights in hundreds of ways, forcing you to think and use smart tactics to clear the room.
Good positioning, the right gear, and your character build give you the best chance to win. Certain skills also help you miss less often and land critical hits more frequently. When you mix this with the unique abilities of your enemies, along with weapons that act differently depending on where the enemy is standing, you get combat that is always unpredictable and fun.
All the attacks and kills look great, featuring brutal visual effects and slow-motion moments that make the combat feel heavy and real. To pull you in even more, the deep RPG system lets you experiment and mix classes to create entirely unique builds. Add in solid professional voice acting and a soundtrack that perfectly fits the Warhammer 40,000 vibe, and you get a top-tier RPG that you can replay over and over.
We aren’t stopping there, either. The companions are incredibly well-written and well-acted, each with their own traits and detailed backstories. Professional actors handle the voices in a lot of situations. While we tried to tell ourselves we didn’t mind the silent text boxes, we honestly wished the entire game had voice acting. Often, you just have to read the text and wait for the voices to return during major scenes. Be prepared to read a lot to fully enjoy the game and understand its complex world.
This slower pace also carries over into combat. Fights against large groups of enemies can take a long time, especially when your team is spread out across a big map. Thankfully, the co-op mode ensures you don’t have to play the 100-hour campaign alone. You can team up with up to five other players, sharing the dialogue choices and mixing your skills together in combat.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader – The Infinite Museion
Just when you finish the main campaign and find yourself wanting more, there are a lot of meaty DLCs that blend right into the base game, adding plenty of extra hours of content. They bring fresh storylines, new companions, and new areas to explore.
The Infinite Museion, the third story expansion for the game, gives more than a few new guns and a simple dungeon map. This DLC opens its doors and welcomes you into the sprawling collection of Trazyn the Infinite. Sure, the Necron exhibits are visually stunning, but what really impressed us were the highly dangerous cybernetic toys. More on how much of your organic body you are willing to part with to win the next firefight after the trailer jump!
Trading Flesh for Metal
The new augmentation system is the clear focus of this expansion. After you gain access to a new voidship compartment, you can fulfill your dream of carefully replacing your crew’s organic parts with bionics. What, just us?
And before you think to yourself: “great, more ways for statistical boosting,” there are over 100 of these augments scattered around the game, and most of them, if not all, give us entirely new ways to build our team in ways that the base game never allowed. Example no.1: There are dedicated slots for the head, torso, eyes, hands, and legs. As a result, it’s impossible not to totally rethink the frontline fighters, and you start thinking how great of an idea it would be to put a specialized tool in the main hand and turn the offhand into pure utility. Example 2: Mechanicus characters get even more slots. These make it possible to actively shift a character’s main role right in the middle of a playthrough. When you see these things in action, you realize the huge potential that has been unlocked, and Rogue Trader becomes something that we didn’t think was possible: better.
Glass Cannon?
Understandably, augments are a massive power boost. But try to fly too close to the sun and you will be slapped with a new vulnerability mechanic called the Ferrum Sanctum.
Every piece of metal attached to a character raises this stat. So, a higher Ferrum Sanctum would make certain tech abilities much stronger, but that character takes a lot more damage from electricity and EMP attacks. If there’s one thing the new Necron enemies love, it’s constantly using EMPs. So, you’re always torn on how to balance your soldiers, thinking constantly about that risk and reward system. It changes how fights play out by making them a lot more fragile and tense. It’s not just important to focus on dealing damage, it’s also important to carefully protect the glaring weaknesses we intentionally gave our own team.
Galvanization is another interesting mechanic that acts like an overdrive of sorts. If you equip a specific augment outside of combat, when a fight starts, you can trigger it to gain a massive advantage for one round. However, every coin has two sides, and so does galvanization. You’re a badass on that first round, but on the second, that same character suffers severe penalties. Hey, you gotta add to the stressful system. Nothing is freely given. If you’re a bit like us, you will spend more time in the pause limbo, thinking and overthinking about when the best time to use it would be.
Keeping all of this in mind, please know that it’s easy to accidentally create a character that can break the math of an encounter. Patience is a virtue, and you need shovels of it here, along with a willingness to experiment until you hit that sweet spot and fully enjoy systems this deep.
A New Face and Hidden Secrets
To somewhat combat these potentially fragile states and to survive the new challenges, the DLC introduces Eogunn Februs. He’s not your typical Tech-Priest Manipulus. Instead of the usual cold logic, which is a trademark for his faction, we found him to be surprisingly passionate, albeit deeply obsessed with some unsettling experiments. As a crucial support specialist, he provides unique shields and technological buffs. They pair perfectly with the new augmentation mechanics. His lightning gun is also incredibly helpful, especially when it comes to taking down mechanical enemies. Some might find his methods a bit creepy. We found him charmingly endearing and were very glad to have him around.
Risk and Reward
Rogue Trader is a different game with The Infinite Museion. It gives you an abundance of options to make your experience feel fresh by fundamentally changing the combat. The new systems and mechanics, especially the upsides and downsides, rewrite the manual for building and leading your team. That’s a huge thing, and no amount of technical hiccups or performance drops in the later chapters can change that. The devs showed sheer creativity with the gameplay, making the expansion hard to put down. It’s up to you to come back to this amazing RPG and to make the ultimate decision: to keep your humanity or to do whatever it takes to survive the fight.
We give it a 9/10
Once again, the devs at Owlcat Games have really outdone themselves, delivering an amazing experience filled with great storytelling, memorable characters, and complex mechanics that will keep you playing for countless hours.
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