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.