i don't really know how to start a review for this game. i think it would be as bloated as the game is. or maybe i should not start one, because i don't think the game is actually finished as is

but all of that being said, i figure plenty of people have already talked about how buggy and broken it is (sometimes in a fun way, sometimes not) but i feel what really irked me was the story, the characterization, things that really can't be patched out. i like 40k, not too invested in it, but i like the lore, i love reading articles or listening to podcasts about it, but i could not muster any interesting in the thousands and thousands of words being written here. everything felt flat, uninteresting, i just skipped everything. could not care less about the koronus expanse and everyone living it. i would just skip everything till the next slaughterfest of a battle, level up my dudes and change equipment

i liked a lot of it, but damn, there's a lot to not like it too

I'll enjoy basically any mid-budget or above party crpg, but I think this is the most playable of owlcat's endearing attempts at making an rpg. The writing is kinda bad, the levels are kinda bad, the combat is kinda bad, but if you want to play a crpg as a whole everything works pretty well!

In contrast to owlcat's last two games this one isn't completely impossibly difficult. I think this is a consequence of the rule system (designed by owlcat I think?) being simple enough to be trivial to break, vs the prior games being pathfinder which requires some kind of a super dork phd to keep up with the power curve of absurdly min-maxed enemies.

I finished another game at long last! It's true! And it only took me three whole months :)

I had a lot of fun with this. As someone who's historically not really a strategy game player of any stripe it was a little touch and go to begin with but once I got the hang of it the combat system became quite enjoyable. The default difficulty is probably... a little too easy, to be honest, especially by the end (and especially if you build certain characters extremely brokenly. Looking at you, Yrliet) but the difficulty being very customizable is quite nice. I didn't tune it up during my playthrough even though I definitely could have but also I'm going to be playing this again for certain so I'll mess around with that when I do.

Enjoyed as a story experience too! My entire breadth of knowledge of Warhammer prior to engaging with this came from playing a bit of Darktide and spending a long time listening to my friends who were obsessed with it tell me stuff about the lore. It should be noted that part of the reason this took me some time to finish is that between starting it and now, I did also start reading the novels, and now I have an incurable brainsickness related to that- I consider this to be something that this game should take as positive though. In retrospect, it's not a terrible introduction to 40K, just due to the sheer scope of things it covers. At least 10+ factions from the 'verse are represented to some degree here so you really do get a good idea of what the setting is like. Still heavily Imperium-focused but you know what, that's just fine.

Also, and this is an addendum I feel compelled to add just because it's directly responsible for me wanting to play this game in the first place, has one of the most batshit insane romance subplots in a game I've ever experienced. Dunno how VG romances after this are going to stack up to Evil Torture Elf who is your pet cat :J

This is the first game I have ever played where I dreaded when my characters had enough exp to level. My, God, the leveling was so tedious that sometimes I would walk around for an hour before I would go through the painful process of choosing skills, etc. Character personality is almost as bad as leveling. Is it so hard to write an interesting villain? Sometimes, I would encounter a villain that would say, 'We meet again, Rogue Trader' and I would be like, 'Are you sure, cause you are so boring that I don't remember our first meeting.' That retort was better that the combat I would have to endure to kill the boring villain.

As a fan of Warhammer 40k and CRPGs, I enjoyed Rogue Trader. It was the first Owlcat game I actually finished, but I just can't recommend it to anyone. Because this game is a mess. Here are my thoughts right after reaching the end for the second time.

Let's start with presentation. I wasn't paying attention to the game during Beta stage, but it feels like Owlcat created "just enough" content to push it to release, and this feeling of "just enoughness" never left me. There's lack of... everything, really:
-GFX assets
What's the difference between several unique Medium Armor sets you have? They share the same icon - you have to check the tooltip.
Most of the talents either have no picture at all or share the same one - once again, you gotta check the tooltips.
-Voiceover
In-battle barks are reused so often they became memes inside the community.
Party banter is just... there, existing in a vacuum.
Most dialogues are silent until they are suddenly not. This one hurts because VAs did a pretty good job (especially with Cassia and Argenta), but the amount of spoken lines is so small one can't help but wonder why Owlcat even bothered.
-Polish
Goofy animations, a-posing, interface bugs are so prominent you will learn to ignore them.

It's not like those are game-breaking critical issues, but this really sets the tone of the game.

Let's get to the design.
-It's overwhelming, but also simplistic
The amount of archetypes is ridiculously small. For a good chunk of a game you will have 2 or 3 core abilities to rely upon, but they are surrounded by a plethora of talents to choose from. Talents bombard you with numbers and complex modifiers, making early leveling a chore with unobvious payoff. But that does not matter, because...
-Balance is non-existent
You will eventually pick up 90% of all available talents and start clearing rooms before Turn 1 is concluded. The game tries to counter it by introducing fatter enemies with bullshit abilities.

Story.
-Vastness of a sea, depth of a puddle
There're lots of things happening on the background during your journey and everything neatly ties up in the end, but the way the plot is presented is kinda messy and disjointed.
Your companions' character arcs happen in their own little bubbles and abruptly end without any satisfactory closure.
Reactivity withers up and dies during act 2. World type? Previous Career? Triumph? Darkest Hour? Most of the decisions? Previous events? Rarely (if ever) brought up until the ending slides begin to roll.

It seems that Owlcat had some interesting ideas, but in attempts to make them work they ran out of money and/or time. Still, I think their recreation of Warhammer universe was pretty spot-on, even if some enemies were just too ridiculous for a mere human Rogue Trader. Locations were small, but packed with little things and were pleasant to look at. Sound design was also great. But the rest is... yeah.

40K was always a universe I appreciated from afar but never enjoyed while engaging with it. This holds true for this game too, the needlessly wordy and tiresome writing and terminology made this slow going but enjoyable enough. The combat was fun as well with some decent choices and tactics. I put this game down mostly because of the perks/class system. I found myself scrolling through menus and reading dozens of uninteresting perks for 15+ minutes every time one or more characters leveled up. I didn't stick with it long enough to fully flesh this system out so I can't attest to possible evolution that I didn't get to. But wow this dragged the games pace to a crawl that frustrated me to no end. So unfortunately, I think this is where my playthrough ends for now.

This just has too many points of frustration to feel rewarding to the large time investment this genre of game asks of the player.

Mechanically: This is an adaptation of a tabletop game and it's very held back by the tabletop game just not being very good. There's not a big variety of character builds, and in reality combat revolves around a handful of very narrow and predefined roles, with one class acting as the damage lynchpin and every other class acting as a support for that one character. There's many, many character-building options but most feel underpowered or irrelevant compared to the main 'spine' of each character archetype.

Character building feels overly linear for most characters, but 'psykers' (the 40k setting's version of wizards) feel tremendously easy to mis-build, especially with a custom player character.

Owlcat's adaptation doesn't do enough to make this system readable or easy to navigate, either, although as long as you stumble on the one subclass that will carry your damage through the midgame and beyond, the combat will feel fairly easy on normal difficulty (more so than Wrath of the Righteous, for example).

While combat is easy, it also feels sluggish. Character turns are overall much longer in this game than in Pathfinder, with an 'action point' system that causes characters to take more actions per turn, and a whole theme of breaking the action economy in various ways to take even more actions per turn.

This is the sole thing that's satisfying about combat in this game, but it's held back by the completely broken balance. Only one archetype really gets to do it, and all others are just... casting about aimlessly for something meaningful to do with their action points, because in reality their role in combat doesn't overly matter.

There are other mechanical issues, too. Wrath of the Righteous featured some obscure puzzles, but those were generally optional; this game makes greater use of puzzles and puts them in the critical path without improving on either the puzzle design or the affordances for implementing puzzles. At one point there's a literal twisty-little-passages-style maze you have to navigate; each maze node is its own map, with loading screens in between. That was kind of my limit with this game.

This was already a noticeable technical issue with Wrath; that game just has too many loading screens and they're surprisingly slow. But here it's exacerbated even more.

On a story level, this is also hamstrung by the material it's adapting. 40k is just... inimical to good storytelling, and it's a particularly poor fit for the genre of party-based CRPG. When everyone in your setting is a turbofascist whose response to anything new or strange is to shoot it, it's kind of hard to write an ensemble cast of interesting characters who can play off each other.

Owlcat's solve for this is to just... grindingly ignore setting pillars in service of the plot and characters. I don't know that I would have done better, honestly, but it just creates this constant drag on the story where characters have to constantly remind you that they're all somewhere on the insufferable-hateful spectrum, but those beliefs never really have plot consequences... except in a few prominent cases that, to me, felt mostly unearned.

I think there's a few things that are nice here. The voice acting, music, and audio are as good as they've ever been for an Owlcat game, which is already a pretty high bar. The art does a phenomenal job of capturing the aesthetic of the setting. I think the colony management and space battles are also a significant step up from the crusade management and army battles in Wrath of the Righteous.

Ultimately though, I just hope Owlcat get to do another game and that they get to go back to Pathfinder; or, even better, that they get to do something entirely new. This is a miss, for me.