Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader Review

I grew up loosely interacting with the Warhammer universe. It was mainly done through reading the White Dwarf magazine because the cost of entry for a starter set of plastic figurines was prohibitively high. The stories in there centered around Forever War. Cosmic battles where nothing ever got better only more brutal. Like another British peer – 2000AD – there was a tendency towards excessive violence and satire.

The universe of 40K is one that is a heavy metal album brought to life. Humanity has dedicated itself to a God-Emperor, a person that has sat decaying on a throne for thousands of years. All the while they obsess over cleansing each planet of alien ‘threats’. The parallel to modern religious zealotry and fascism was something that a lot of people playing the game miss. Something easy to overlook when you are staring at cool, towering, murder machines. Some fans have even gone the other way, revelling in the fantasy, and seeing the hardcore Right Wing world as aspirational.

As a result, Games Workshop had to release a statement to clarify their stance on the universe. It is a solid piece of writing, but the problem is simple – the games don’t explicitly support this in their mechanics. The objective is to blow things up and kill stuff and players are rewarded for doing it well.  This is a problem that extends to the video game versions. Necromunda: Hired Gun was a game that I enjoyed a lot, but it was a game that was mainly about doing sweet wall runs and making enemies get deaded. Space Marine, the 2013 release, has some allusions to the mess that is the human empire, but it devolves into cutting orcs apart with an awesome chainsword.

Essentially no one has had enough fun pointing out how comically villainous everything is in Warhammer 40k. This stems from that the games are too busy looking at the sweet armour and putting orchestral metal over the top of it.

Well, I am happy to say that Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader is so tongue in cheek with its narrative that I suspect that the tongue has ground a hole through the cheek and is now poking out of the side in a gross, gory way.

The player starts off by creating a character, dumping a bunch of time into stats and background. The character is a blood relative to a Rogue Trader – a demigod that is tied into a giant space cruiser with thousands of people living on it. It is a floating, rotting, space coffin full of living people.

The tutorial does a great job of setting up the world – the gameplay switches between real time exploration into turn-based combat when enemies appear. The basic setup is like X-Com, where players move and then shoot or melee in their turn. Where it differs is that movement points and action points are independent from each other, which allows for buffs and specials to be cast to support attacks and still move. At least, it will eventually. In the tutorial I spent most of time missing shots that had a 75% chance to hit while my AI companions reduced all the enemies to ash.

While it was frustrating to see my shots fly past harmlessly – it did setup that the people around me were absolutely badass, including the Rogue Trader who seemed untouchable.

Big twist – by the end of the tutorial, the Rogue Trader and her cohort are found dead, and it becomes the player character’s responsibility to step up and take control. As predictable as it is, there is a great sense of weight to the responsibility. I could barely reload my gun and now I am expected to take control of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

This should be a solemn moment. But Owlcat Games, the developers, see this as an opportunity to have a giggle.

As I was about to sit in the throne and assume my position, the dialogue options pointed to one: “Actually, I’ve changed my mind..” Delighted, I picked this option, and my second in command – a man who had only just come to terms with his previous ruler dying and had me foisted on him – is described as being ‘visibly embarrassed’.

This happened over and over again in Rogue Trader. My retinue of followers expanded pretty quickly and included Argenta, a murder-obsessed battle sister. She approached me to let me know that the fight that killed the other Rogue Trader also orphaned a lot of children. My choices are – put on a little parade, be humbled (a bit), or just ignore the request.

I gave a big speech about how great I was, and one orphan stands up to tell me that I am a blowhard that has left him parentless. My choices (and I am paraphrasing):

• You should be honored that your parents died for the God-Emperor
• Seems like you are using your dead parents as a crutch, you need to pull yourself up by your orphan bootstraps
• I don’t need to listen to this, get back in your hole

I had to put my controller down and have a good laugh. Owlcat have nailed the absurdity of the world. No one I know would be able to choose these options without thinking they were all bad. The most ardent of ‘extreme centrists’ would struggle to find a choice that didn’t make them uncomfortable.

I do not want to get into the events, but I have consistently made some choices that have upset everyone in my party. Because the Overton window in this game is so far removed from the ‘Pet the Kitten’ or ‘Kick the Kitten’ of the Mass Effect universe, it means I am choosing between ‘Electrocute the Kitten to prove your power’, or ‘Electrocute the Kitten to death because everything is bad and you should have some fun while you can’.

It is a shame that the combat is not as strong as the story. That is not to say that it is weak, there is just a lot of research and proper nouns that the game gives no context to. I’ve been playing this game for 50 hours and I could not tell you what Momentum is about, nor could I tell you how to figure out some of the equations for how certain abilities affect the course of battle. Otherwise, it is pretty standard X-Com where your team gets to ‘cheat’ a lot. Each character in the posse has absolutely devastating abilities, that can charge up a hero meter that allows some players to give teammates extra stat bonuses, or even extra turns. It is not unusual for one action to result in multiple deaths.  

There is a counterbalance to this – some of the most powerful abilities tear at the fabric of reality. Used too much and the battlefield will start to manifest ghostly walkers, and eventually demons from across the warp will invade and start attacking. It is a neat feature that the further the player gets into any campaign the closer they will find themselves to tempting chaos.

Unfortunately, Rogue Trader has a lot of moving parts, so many outcomes, and dialogue choices that can change the path of the game, that this leads to a lot of numerous, but infuriating bugs.

One was a poorly explained tutorial – an issue that I had to go to the official discord to ask for help and was politely told to describe what I was ‘doing wrong.’ Another was just very bad camera handling when trying to deal with verticality in the game. Further, smaller, issues plague weird moments of the game in a way that never ruins the experience but does just cause more aggravation than needed.

Another glaring omission is promised features that feel sorely missing – the Co-Op. The PC version has 6 player Co-Op, with drop-in/drop-out. Console versions have it as ‘coming soon’. This is very much a title that would benefit from having others to laugh at the ridiculous choices or exchange ideas for tactics.

Rogue Trader is the first game I’ve played from the 40K universe that really understands the absurdity of its source material. It has no qualms in making the world look stupid.

This Game laughs at Nazis. That should be on the cover art.

Conclusion

Rogue Trader is a fantastic narrative embracing the satire, the self-importance, and the pompousness of the Warhammer 40K world. The turn-based combat is not quite a fully fledged but that doesn’t take away from it being a must play.