In 2023, the Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader video game, by Owlcat Games, was released. I'd previously backed Owlcat's Pathfinder: Kingmaker RPG and enjoyed the result, so I didn't hesitate to buy Rogue Trader. This is a mostly spoiler-free review, but if you want absolutely no spoilers for a game that's been out for several years, then the short version is that it's a great game, a phenomenal Warhammer 40,000 game, and a stunningly expansive CRPG.
An interesting thing about Warhammer 40,000 is that its original source book seems to suggest that it's an RPG about a title character type known as a rogue trader. Or at least, the title (Rogue Trader) of the book does. Reading the book from cover to cover, there's no directive in the book telling you to play as a rogue trader. The book covers a lot of playable character types in addition to rogue traders, including the Adeptus Mechanicus, space marines, halflings, squats, ogryns, the eldar, and many other xenos races and warp creatures. But the sample adventure in the book plays a lot more like a wargame than an RPG, and it features space marines and orks, with no mention of rogue traders whatsoever. You'd be forgiven for feeling that for the wealth of material the book provided, the rogue trader part of Rogue Trader was oddly sparse.
As Warhammer 40,000 developed, 2 things became clear. First, it was fun to play super soldiers like space marines, or chaotic monsters like orks and daemons. Secondly, there's a lot to choose from within the 40k universe, and basically no single character type can possibly emerge triumphant. Sure, space marines are the most iconic characters from 40k, and they may sell better than anything else, but you can't underestimate the passion fans have for "their" faction. Games Workshop recognises this and handles it well, I think. There are books and animated series covering basically every faction. And through the magic of licensing, 35 years after the introduction of the setting, a computer RPG delivers on the implied promise of brave merchants in space.
The premise of Rogue Trader is established in the first "chapter" of the game. You're a citizen of the Imperium of Man, and you more or less find out that your long lost relative, Theodora von Valancius is a successful rogue trader with a full Warrant of Trade. Von Valancius has invited a few of her relatives on board her flagship to learn the family business, in the event of her untimely demise. And then she, untimedly, demises.
The rest of the game is all about you, the new CEO of the Von Valancius business, and what kind of space adventures you choose to take on. You can follow the righteous path of a Dogmatic follower of the Golden Throne, or you can be an Iconoclast, or explore your Heretical side. You're not locked into one path, of course, and there's about as much freedom in the game as there can be in a CRPG.
I've not come across anything in the game that's not meticulously accurate to 40k lore. If you read about it in the game, you can probably go to a Warhammer store in real life talk knowledgeably about it. Are you fascinated by Argenta, the Adepta Sororitas warrior? You can go buy a box of Battle Sisters and a codex, and you'll get exactly what you expect. Hecata is a great introduction to Astra Militarum, and Abelard is the very model of a modern voidsmen-at-arms. You'll come to understand the true nature of the Warp through Idira, you'll learn why Navigators are dangerous from Cassia, you'll meet xenos and chaos space marines, and on and on. It's not exactly a crash course in Warhammer 40,000 because it can spend hundreds of hours in it, but it's a very thorough course in Warhammer 40,000. If you learn best by playing, then Rogue Trader is nearly everything you need to learn the 40k universe.
The fascinating thing about the game isn't just its story or its insight into the lore, it's how it lets you embody the lore yourself. As a distant relative in the Von Valancius line, you're a noble in the 41st millennium. You can lean into that as much or as little as you want, but the setting comes with not just a few presumptions that determine how NPCs want to interact with you.
An easy example is Abelard, your seneschal. In real life, I'm not of noble descent so I have no idea what a seneschal even is. But in Rogue Trader Abelard expects to handle formal introductions and to intercede when someone unworthy of your attention attempts to interact with you. I guess that's what a seneschal would do. If you like it, you can reinforce that behaviour by speaking to Abelard instead of directly to NPCs who approach you. If you dislike it, you can bypass your seneschal and interact with commoners directly—wait, did I just write "commoners"? Well, that's the kind of thing the game does to you. It so casually places you into the shoes of a noble that you don't notice you've assumed an alternate identity in the game. You start to think you really are a noble, and that all aliens are out for human blood (to be fair, they mostly are), and that witches are dangerous (to be fair, they mostly are), that you end up roleplaying harder than you've ever roleplayed before. It's shockingly effective, and superbly satisfying.
Rogue Trader isn't the deepest I've ventured into Warhammer 40,000 roleplay, but it's the deepest I've ventured into roleplaying as a rogue trader. Blackstone Fortress does a good job of characterising Janus Draik, but it's just a book and a few short stories, and you mostly only see him in some pretty specific situations. You can spend A LOT of time in Rogue Trader, doing administrative busy work, pleasant socializing, business negotiations, and fighting for your life. This video game gets you into role of a rogue trader, and you can take its lessons with you to your Warhammer 40,000 board games, wargames, and roleplaying games.
The game does a good job of keeping you informed about what effect your character build choices have on gameplay. When you're leveling up a character, it tells you what a skill, like Athletics or Strength or Weapon Skill or Logic, has in the game. There have been times when I've started to upgrade, for example, a character's Agility only to realise from reading the skill description that I really want to upgrade Toughness. It's relatively transparent about how the back-end is structured.
It doesn't give you direct insight into dice rolls or anything like that, and I guess in the long run it wouldn't make sense to expose that anyway. This isn't the tabletop Warhammer 40,000 wargame or any of the pen-and-paper RPGs. This is a CRPG, and percentages and probability is subject to not only your choices but to the game script. You can roll a critical success while negotiating to de-escalate the rage of a cult leader, but if the story requires a boss battle then that's what's happening.
In real life, the tabletop Warhammer 40,000 wargame is a D6 system with well-established character profiles. If you're a player of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame, then many character attributes are familiar to you. Your Rogue Trader characters have Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, and Toughness, but they also have Logic and Agility, Athletics, Lore knowledge, and so on. Don't expect all rules to translate from your head to a video game. This annoyed by a little, until I remembered that I wasn't always a tabletop wargame player myself. At one time, I was just a Blackstone Fortress player, and before that just a Black Library reader. I have friends who are just Imperium Maledictum players. The kinds of Warhammer 40,000 players are as numerous as the worlds in the Imperium itself, and sometimes you just have to settle for translations of the same general ideas into many different formats. It all makes sense in the end, at least as much as a universe about a dead psychic Emperor defending the human race by consuming 1000 human souls a day can make sense.
In the grim dark 41st millennium, there is only war, so in Rogue Trader you spend a good amount of time in combat. There are some encounters where you can avoid combat through skillful conversation, but I think they're outnumbered by ambushes and insurrections (or maybe I'm just not a skilled negotiator.) The good news is that Rogue Trader is CRPG done right. You're controlling an entire party of allies, so you get to make lots of attacks based on many different archetypes. This is proper turn-based strategic combat, with an initiative order and lots of tactical choices for you to make.
Each character has a number of Action Points (or AP, which is a confusing abbreviation if you're used to the wargame, where AP stands for Armour Penetration), which you can spend to move, fight in melee or at range, or on special abilities (such as a specialist military technique, or a Warp-based spell, or a technological trick, and so on). It's so smooth that I wish the official 40k app would use it as a model for its army builder. Can you imagine playing a tabletop wargame and seeing all of a model's abilities as buttons on your phone, and getting alerts when a special ability triggers some new rule or reaction? It would be so easy to remember special rules, that way.
The only "negative" is that a lot of the battlefields are huge, and it can be easy to get disoriented by the camera angles and cuts that happen when the enemy forces takes their turns. I don't know that there's an elegant solution to that, and in practice it rarely seems to matter. Usually if the computer has to scroll several screens just to show you that a unit is advancing toward you, then none of your weapons or abilities can target it yet anyway. Then again, running toward the threat is a valid tactical choice, and with no easy way to get a quick overview of the battlefield, it can be difficult to know where to send your team.
All in all, the combat system in Rogue Trader is a lot like the combat in Mechanicus, which is to say it's a perfect CRPG combat system.
What I hadn't expected was really great turn-based battleship combat. Once you get to the point of commanding your own ship, you start to explore the galaxy, which you do through a combination of warp jumps and tours of local systems. Warp jumping from one system to another is dangerous because the warp is a dangerous place. A good navigator helps by getting to your destination expediently, but failing proper navigational insight it's not uncommon for crew members to go insane and rise up against you. Once you reach a system, you can fly from planet to planet, and then scan for resources and new adventure hooks. Sometimes you run into pirates or xenos, though.
And then you're in ship combat. It's an interesting game mode that's from skirmish combat but similar enough that there's not too much new to learn. Of course you have to move on every turn because you're in a voidship. The size of your vessel influences what kind of piloting options you have, so movement is a real strategy just as much as in skirmish combat. Your gun loadout influences what offensive options you have each turn, but even this is related to movement because what you can shoot depends on what side of your ship a specific weapon is located.
Ship combat retains the isometric view of the rest of the game, but objects fly right "through" each other because there's a strict acknowledgment that space is 3D and vast. This isn't a space dogfight, nor submarine combat in spaaaaace. This is actual (well, pretend "actual") space combat with rules that make sense for far future encounters in the void.
The Rogue Trader video game is a very good way to tour the 40k universe, and it's as good a story as all the other great CRPGs out there. For me, Rogue Trader is another great game, following in the footsteps of the Shadowrun trilogy from Harebrained or Divinity Original Sin 2 from Larian. If you enjoy a good CRPG, or you're a fan of, or you're interested in, the Warhammer 40,000 setting, then you should play it. I played it on my Steam Deck and it ran great. The only warning is that you're in for a lot of game, so set aside time to play.