Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader Xbox Series Review

As developers go, Owlcat Games are nothing if not consistent. Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader sees them take their established CRPG formula – think sprawling choice-driven campaigns, deep gameplay systems, and detailed isometric worlds – and apply it to the brutal, chaotic, and mostly nonsensical world of Warhammer 40K.

It’s a smart fit as the basic premise, in which the protagonist takes up the mantle of a “Rogue Trader” working for the Imperium of Man, provides the player more flexibility when it comes to their playstyle, decision-making, and choice of unsavoury companions. However, a combination of dense mechanics, cluttered menus, and pure turn-based combat, make for a difficult transition to gamepad.

If you’ve played either of their Pathfinder games, it should come as no surprise Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader offers a massive campaign – and not just with regards to the number of worlds you explore and battle through.

If anything, travelling throughout the Koronus Expanse in your Voidship, to planets, moons, or space stations, actually feels more segmented and compact than many locations in Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous. Rather, it’s yet another campaign where you’ll only leave the first system after 15-20 hours and maybe 12 character levels (out of 50), only to discover you’ve only scratched the surface of what’s on offer.

It makes sense to start off discussing what you do most, which is conversing with your crew, companions, members of a half dozen different factions, and even the antagonists from time to time. As a Rogue Trader with a “Warrant of Trade” relic, your character wields a massive amount of power over Imperial citizens and governors, but they also have to deal with two other Rogue Traders vying for power and profit, and the arrival of an Inquisitor with absolute authority.

When you throw in possible possession by a warp entity, it’s the perfect set-up for a game that tracks your decisions – many minor, some literally world-changing – with key points that let pick a dogmatic, heretical, or iconoclastic outcome. You can be an unflinching murderous loyalist, an unhinged murderous heretic, or – in what could only be novel in the Warhammer 40K universe – attempt to be reasonable and strike a middle ground with significantly less murder.

It all starts with your character background, class, and subsequent development, which ditches the Pathfinder branch of the Dungeon & Dragons ruleset for a bespoke but still familiar system that uses 100-side die. Warriors focus on resilience and close-range death-dealing, Soldiers can master ranged combat with a myriad of light and heavy weapons; Operatives are best for sniping and debuffing enemies; while Officers are a jack-of-all-trades class with a focus on bolstering their companions.

There are 9 core “characteristics” that modify rolls and bonuses for a massive list of skills that cover combat abilities, skill checks for dialogue confrontations, and general exploration and trade benefits. On top of that is the usual assortment of armour pieces and weapon types, with the common trade-off between overall protection and damage, or more situational bonuses that can go both ways. It’s a lot to take in with plenty of scope to mess up your build, but there is, mercifully, a way to reset and rebuild your character on the Voidship command deck hub.

When you’re not navigating dialogue trees, using logic or skill checks to influence the outcome or gain an upper hand, or making major end-of-chapter decisions, you’ll be going up against everything from hordes of human heretics and warp demons, to Dark Eldar pirates and eventually Necrons.

Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader shifts entirely to turn-based combat – with a strong focus on positioning, using XCOM-style half- or full-cover, and working with limited movement and action points. On top of that, you have a “battle momentum” meter that allows access to heroic skills and, should Psyker’s use too many powers, the veil between the warp can thin leading to warp backlash effects.

Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader features fewer battles as a result, but every encounter feels more significant and potentially deadly, and you’ll gain character levels and new gear more frequently (well, at least if you explore each location thoroughly and use the appropriate items, skill-checks, or logic). The game is not afraid to overwhelm you early on and battles can drag, often punishing you for poor positioning or reckless play in the early rounds.

A common issue is how melee characters can make attacks of opportunity at adjacent targets, yet ranged characters have no “overwatch” ability and are all but useless until you push them forward into danger. Thankfully, you can tweak dozens of difficulty parameters to your heart’s content, but it’s still a much slower-paced game without any real-time-with-pause option.

You still spend a ridiculous amount of time questing when, in theory, you should have underlings to do that for you, but Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader still offers up several less-developed but no less important mechanics that draw on the leadership elements of Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous.

As a “trader”, you can hoover up excess items and valuables on the battlefield, then sell them to different factions to raise your reputation and access new equipment; you can upgrade your Voidship systems and assign crew to better survive grid-based space battles; and you can reclaim colonies for your protectorate, invest in development or resource extraction projects, and make key decisions that influence the fate of each world as each chapter passes.

All of which brings me back to my opening paragraph. Starting with the good, Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader doesn’t feel as stable as it should at launch, though it looks good and runs smoothly on both Xbox Series S and X consoles.

The biggest problem is navigating multi-layered menus, the dense combat UI, and simply snapping to the right combat grid using a gamepad. It’s not unplayable by any means, but it makes the already slow-paced battles take longer still, and there are just some weird decisions like the lack of compact item- or skill descriptions for quick comparisons. Using a gamepad, you spend too much time just selecting skills and targets during battles, and even more time awkwardly navigating and often accidentally cancelling out of menus.

As it stands – and maybe patches will improve it over time – Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader is a mixed bag on a console. On one hand, you’re getting a lengthy, complex, and reactive CRPG that encourages and rewards player choice – something you rarely see on consoles.

On the other hand, you have to deal with gamepad support that doesn’t feel like it’s keeping on top of all those mechanical systems. That said, for those who were thinking of picking this up on PC, it’s much easier to recommend without the control-based caveats and should satisfy those who enjoyed Owlcat Game’s previous titles.