Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - turn-based Warhammer 40k RPG from Owlcat Games - now with Void Shadows DLC

[ArchAngel]

How is the roleplaying in this game? Can I be an really evil asshole?

Yes, 2 out of 3 paths are evil asshole. LE or CE one. The last one is Chaotic Stupid.

Don't you dare implying being Dogmatic is Lawful Evil, heretic.
It's Lawful Neutral at worse.

Turning people into servitors for breaking endless stupid laws is nothing less than LE. Like forcing people to work 18+h each day.

 

[REhorror]

How is the roleplaying in this game? Can I be an really evil asshole?

Yes, 2 out of 3 paths are evil asshole. LE or CE one. The last one is Chaotic Stupid.

Don't you dare implying being Dogmatic is Lawful Evil, heretic.
It's Lawful Neutral at worse.

Turning people into servitors for breaking endless stupid laws is nothing less than LE. Like forcing people to work 18+h each day.

Punishing people for breaking the laws is perfectly within Lawful Neutral.

Now using the laws to fuck people up is Lawful Evil, certain parts of Imperium can be this, but the majority aren't. Not even in this game.

 

[ArchAngel]

How is the roleplaying in this game? Can I be an really evil asshole?

Yes, 2 out of 3 paths are evil asshole. LE or CE one. The last one is Chaotic Stupid.

Don't you dare implying being Dogmatic is Lawful Evil, heretic.
It's Lawful Neutral at worse.

Turning people into servitors for breaking endless stupid laws is nothing less than LE. Like forcing people to work 18+h each day.

Punishing people for breaking the laws is perfectly within Lawful Neutral.

Now using the laws to fuck people up is Lawful Evil, certain parts of Imperium can be this, but the majority aren't. Not even in this game.

If you lived in a society where there was a law that said jaywalking is punishable by a beating by 3 cops for 15 minutes it would be lawful but also evil.
Most of IoM is worse.
Unless you live in places like Footfall that have almost no laws which is another hell of its own.

 

[REhorror]

How is the roleplaying in this game? Can I be an really evil asshole?

Yes, 2 out of 3 paths are evil asshole. LE or CE one. The last one is Chaotic Stupid.

Don't you dare implying being Dogmatic is Lawful Evil, heretic.
It's Lawful Neutral at worse.

Turning people into servitors for breaking endless stupid laws is nothing less than LE. Like forcing people to work 18+h each day.

Punishing people for breaking the laws is perfectly within Lawful Neutral.

Now using the laws to fuck people up is Lawful Evil, certain parts of Imperium can be this, but the majority aren't. Not even in this game.

If you lived in a society where there was a law that said jaywalking is punishable by a beating by 3 cops for 15 minutes it would be lawful but also evil.
Most of IoM is worse.
Unless you live in places like Footfall that have almost no laws which is another hell of its own.

That is certainly laws making up to fuck up with people.

Fortunately, in-game and lore-wise, the Imperium isn't as stupid as this. This is why there are even Hive world in the first place.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I dunno, turning people into mindless cyborg slaves sounds pretty Evil to me.
I mean, Necromancy is Evil because of the whole binding souls to your will thing, so logically servitors would also be Evil.
But then again, Lawful Evil is more about using the Law for your own selfish reasons, so if the Law states that turning people into cyborgs is legal but you don't actually benefit from it directly, is it really Lawful Evil to enforce such a law?

 

[REhorror]

I dunno, turning people into mindless cyborg slaves sounds pretty Evil to me.
I mean, Necromancy is Evil because of the whole binding souls to your will thing, so logically servitors would also be Evil.
But then again, Lawful Evil is more about using the Law for your own selfish reasons, so if the Law states that turning people into cyborgs is legal but you don't actually benefit from it directly, is it really Lawful Evil to enforce such a law?

It depends on what you do with these slaves.
If you use them to do good, you are good.
And yadda yadda.

 

[ArchAngel]

I dunno, turning people into mindless cyborg slaves sounds pretty Evil to me.
I mean, Necromancy is Evil because of the whole binding souls to your will thing, so logically servitors would also be Evil.
But then again, Lawful Evil is more about using the Law for your own selfish reasons, so if the Law states that turning people into cyborgs is legal but you don't actually benefit from it directly, is it really Lawful Evil to enforce such a law?

In DnD LE can also be "good" people, or people that do not have limits to accomplish "greater good". Like kill 1000 to save 1000 000

 

[REhorror]

Here I am being a big freaking Eldar simp again.

Thanks god I have a spiritual liege to thanks for!

 

[ArchAngel]

I am currently playing Wk40k Inquisitor while waiting for patches here. A lot of Dark Eldar there like to also say Mon-keigh just seconds before they get hot plasma or a bolter to their face.

 

[REhorror]

I am currently playing Wk40k Inquisitor while waiting for patches here. A lot of Dark Eldar there like to also say Mon-keigh just seconds before they get hot plasma or a bolter to their face.

That game would be one of the best Diablo clones if not for the always online season crap.
I hope they finish game sometimes and just make it a static/single player game.

 

[ArchAngel]

I am currently playing Wk40k Inquisitor while waiting for patches here. A lot of Dark Eldar there like to also say Mon-keigh just seconds before they get hot plasma or a bolter to their face.

That game would be one of the best Diablo clones if not for the always online season crap.
I hope they finish game sometimes and just make it a static/single player game.

Always online is not bad but it is not a good diablo clone. You get access to all skills and major passives early and then game forces you to almost pointlessly grind for passive points that give minor benefits.
It is one of those spend 10-15h per class and you've seen everything it has to offer. And there are only 4 classes in this package.
And it has a bunch of strange design decisions around forcing you to play strange builds to unlock basic character building crap.. it is all just so artificial to force you to play more while gameplay itself is super same no matter what maps or enemies you are playing against.

 

[Zariusz]

Here I am being a big freaking Eldar simp again.

Its not worth it bro there are no eldar tiddies there, Yrliet is flat af and considering her behavior she is probably retarded as well.

 

[Owlcat_Eyler]

Abelard, tell the Owlcat_Eyler people that I want my patch now or they are going to be turned into servitors and be put to better use on lower decks of this ship.

Abelard, inform these people that the patch is awaited in the next couple of days at most

 

[Owlcat_Eyler]

I remember someone asking about space battle nerfing. No, there are no plans on nerfing it.

 

[Harthwain]

I start to think that armors look best when worn by psyker characters, their outfit details work very well with most pieces of equipment.

What is the name of the 3rd set of armour and helmet?

 

[Galdred]

I'm thinking about returning to the game after my current Chaos Gate playthrough.
Are there typically game system balance mods for owlcat games?

 

[Yosharian]

I remember someone asking about space battle nerfing. No, there are no plans on nerfing it.

How about removing it?

 

[user]

I remember someone asking about space battle nerfing. No, there are no plans on nerfing it.

How about removing it?

I love it, just wish it was more fleshed out and randomized.

 

[ArchAngel]

I remember someone asking about space battle nerfing. No, there are no plans on nerfing it.

How about removing it?

I love it, just wish it was more fleshed out and randomized.

It is better balanced then standard combat from mid game and beyond :D

 

[ArchAngel]

I'm thinking about returning to the game after my current Chaos Gate playthrough.
Are there typically game system balance mods for owlcat games?

Too early, go play something else and come back in 1 month.

 

[Zariusz]

I start to think that armors look best when worn by psyker characters, their outfit details work very well with most pieces of equipment.

What is the name of the 3d set of armour and helmet?

Its called Crusader Plate Armor, chest is a reward for max reputation with drusians (you get it from them during that last conversation with trade leaders on Footfall during Act 4). Helmet is called Arch Strategist's visor but im sure its probably bugged, those buffs and name completly dont fit that set for me (also i couldnt find that item anywhere), there is an item named Crusader Plate Helmet but that is just some astartes helmet. Also if you are interested in the rest of this set, gauntlets can be found on that ice planet with Halo Device boss, boots i have no idea but they forgot to name that item correctly so its just a blank space, maybe those arent even available in game.

 

[BrotherFrank]

What bothered me the most about space battles is the insanity of your tiny ass frigate ship going head to head with actual battleships, squadrons of dark eldar raiders and

Spoiler

necrons whose ships lore wise are so stupidly strong its considered a win for your side if you survive,let alone manage to cause actual damage

Can only assume the RT ship is an archeotech vessel from the DAOT that just happens to look like one of the most humble and smallest ship classes in the iom.

 

[Incendax]

Punishing people for breaking the laws is perfectly within Lawful Neutral.

Now using the laws to fuck people up is Lawful Evil, certain parts of Imperium can be this, but the majority aren't. Not even in this game.

There's actually a definition for Evil Laws, different from merely poorly written or unjust laws.

"Defined as law, which, if interpreted according to its best purpose, will enable intolerable harm (including atrocities) to the victims themselves."

That leads us to Necessary Evils, such as long term imprisonment or death of convicts.

 

[Dayyālu]

'k, managed to get some ideas in order.

Rogue Trader is essentially unfinished. I'd say it's almost malicious in its desperate frontloading, but I choose to believe the fact that they didn't bother to play-test or debug anything after Chapter 3 (where the debugging was done for free by useful idiots playing betas) is more due to the fact that they were rushing to dump it on the holiday season. Let's spoil this crap, it got long.

Spoiler

From the technical point of view, Rogue Trader is decent. The graphics are unremarkable and the soundtrack essentially non-existent (I struggle to remember a single piece, this ain't Mechanicus or Dawn of War 2 for sure, very derivative and boring). Some models are pretty even if quite low-quality, the bigger foes are nice, good for something that was a miniature game first, I guess. Soundscape is again decent, good weapon sounds, voice acting is adequate even if done on the cheap (it's completely random if a line will be voiced or not, but again Owlcat has proven to me they're cheapskates). I didn't dislike any voice actors, Ulfar is a bit ruined by the bad aftereffects and most of them are hamming it up, but it is how it is. Again, this ain't Dawn of War for good or bad. Ah, I forgot: loading screens. Tons and tons of loading screens, particularly bad on the Expanse layer, but again, cheapskate and not particularly proficient developers, I presume. Also the illustrations for the book events are neat.

Mechanically, you have the character builds, the ground combat, the space combat and the empire management. Let's start with the adequate: despite obviously missing big chunks of content (like most of the game) at least space combat is fun, despite being a lesser TB version of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada. It's of course completely retarded that you are given just a small dinky Sword Class, but effort is hard and modeling a Light Cruiser would have probably ballooned the budget. Still, it's a minigame and bugs are still rife (you want me to believe that no one checked that your non-controllable escort gets enemy barks from your crew when it's destroyed/hit?). Also I have the suspicion that not all ships work on your rules.

The Empire Management is between the travesty and the non-existence. It's again rather obvious you're missing.... well, probably you're missing the entire system. Everything is redundant, badly done, mostly useless, looks like a prototype done in Ren'py by teenagers: the events are all text and the events that require you to crawl back to your colony often have typos and are missing punctuation, further showing how much they cared. There's essentially no reason to bother with the colony part bar having fake numbers that mean nothing go up. Also tons of bugs, astounding for a system that does nothing.

Characters builds are... weird. I guess I'll take both the ground combat and the builds, the system is bizzarre. It's like someone took the FFG's Dark Heresy system (that's not perfect by any means) and built some kind of abomination that marries absurd bloat and D&D 3.X obtusity in an unholy marriage. The entire class/origin system is flat-out bizzarre, with characters suffering from identity crisis or having useless abilities tacked on, you can ignore them of course but with 50 levels of chaff to sit through.... the system still kinda works at lower levels, when its tabletop roots still attempt to give some kind of "balance" to the entire system, but it completely collapses by late Chapter 2. An Operative/Assassin can have 10-15 skills to sit through, every round. If this is done to avoid pre-buffing, give me back pre-buffing because this is hysterical. The encounter design was never stellar, but after a while it simply can't cope and they resort to breaking their own systems and HP bloat in a desperate attempt: how many bosses have free health refills in a desperate attempt to give them more time against utterly broken combos? I don't even know what could salvage this bar a complete rebuild and, I dunnow, cutting into half the levels, redoing the chargen, different classes....at this point redo the entire game.

Writing is .... well, it's simple and will not win any awards, but again at least it's not shitting wordswordswords like Wrath. It still has the usual OwlCat Beginning, but at least Chapter 1&2 have a coherent narrative (rebuild your ship, rebuild your reputation and rebuild your demesne). Bar your companions and not even then the game is surprisingly void of character, you interact with very few people, very few have any meaningful conversation with you and most of the writing is perfunctory. I shit you not, I can remember like three secondary characters for the entire game (the architect that got bugged killed by Incendia, Malice and the Harlequin) and not a single "memorable" quote or discussion. Very low effort and perfunctory.
But most of the effort went to the companions, no? Well, most of the companions are cardboard stereotypes and it's obvious good chunks of their characterization is missing: some companions quests are essentially laughable in how half-assed they are (Argenta, Ulfar). I liked some of them, Abelard, Pasqal and Cassia are almost functional, Cassia in particular keeps having stuff to say in conversations even in Chapter 4/5, when the game clearly stops giving a shit about anything, someone should truly have liked her. Argenta despite being a monster in combat is a utterly boring Paladin with no character and she killed Theodora and the game barely reacted (effort, I guess). The Inquisitor guy is functional: Ulfar Everlost at last gives me the reply to the age-old question "can an Astartes be a clueless pathetic loser?" and the Eldar are aggressively retarded. I mean, bar the Harlequin, all the Eldar in Rogue Trader are glue-sniffing retards that lost their Craftworld/get psychs in Commoragh/have the most stupid plans. The Dark Eldar is a Looney Tunes character: Yrliet is written to be so utterly stupid that you wonder if her writer wasn't hating her.
I need however to thank for the plentiful chances to kill companions: my only regret is that you're not given more chances to kill Jae after she escapes you the first time.

Regarding the overall plot, there's none. The game has no plot whatsoever. After Chapter 3, things happen almost randomly (Chapter 4 is you doing things while waiting for an appointment with the Inquisitor!). You interact with "major" characters at best 2-3 times before they're killed off, if you're lucky. The entire Chapter 5 comes out of nowhere and calling the events "contrived" is a compliment, they're random. Stuff happens because they had the assets.

That said, I will add my voice to the choir: it's a decent 40k RPG until Chapter 2, Chapter 3 if you're willing to endure some experimentation. Everything after? An insult, blatantly unfinished and fishing for that 90% of people that will never get there. Hope you're enjoying the money, Owlcat, because you have gained someone that will pirate all your games in the future.

After you patch them for two years, of course.

EDIT: Also give a prayer to the good people that made the Toybox. Made the fucking game playable, helped me with bugs an' shit. Having to use a cheat engine to make a game work was a novel experience.... at least, it has been like 20+ years since I needed something like that.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/warhammer-40000-rogue-trader-review

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader review: engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting​

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only More

In the festively grim universe of Warhammer 40,000, space is sometimes racked by Warp storms – terrible cyclones of Chaos energy that have a catastrophic effect on imperial communications. One such storm hits the Koronus Expanse during the events of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, erasing starcharts and obliging your character - a newly minted Rogue Trader, aka High Gothic Commander Shepard - to re-discover the systems and planets that make up your predecessor Theodora’s dominions, while gathering an entourage of indecently customisable warriors, and hunting down a series of badniks that include a mysterious Chaos cult.

Warp storms sometimes have relativistic consequences. Voidship crews may be stranded for decades in transit: you will meet characters in this vast, brooding RPG who arrived at their destinations to find the battles they were sent to fight already passed into legend, the people they were sent to meet long since dead or departed. Something similar has happened to this review, which was supposed to be published in early December. Did I dramatically underestimate the amount of playtime involved, despite being told months in advance by developers Owlcat that Rogue Trader is well over 100 hours long? Nonsense. It’s all because of those pesky Chaos disruptions, you see. It’s Chaos that’s to blame.

The Koronus Expanse is a fickle environment even without the Warp storms. Located on the grey fringes of the Imperium of Man, it’s a colonial melting pot of shifting allegiances and useful cynicism, where humans, xenos, mutants, heretics and true believers rub shoulders in the marketplace, and where noble dynasties plot with or against each other while their serfs prepare for revolution (often, but not always, with the discreet assistance of Chaos agents). Ranging from haunted space hulks through lush jungle planets to the crackling Tesla monasteries of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it’s a suppurating, amoral waterhole of a setting where you can strike deals with known pirates, hire Eldar rangers and openly describe yourself as a Chaos god’s anointed, without being struck down by a devouter party member – or at least, not for a good few hours of playtime.

Image credit: Owlcat Games/RockPaperShotgun

Come to it fresh from one of the less… talkative Warhammer videogames, and you may be surprised by the, whisper it, tolerance on show. Playing as a closet Chaos worshipper with a streak of Iconoclasm (the least murderous of the game’s three philosophical alignments, defined by sympathy towards underdogs and a dislike of needless suffering), it took me a while to grasp that I could get away with pretty much anything. 20 hours in, I fell into conversation with a fire-and-brimstone cleric who pressed me about my real sympathies. I decided to go for broke and declare that, yep, I’m Team Chaos, thanks. Instead of demanding my execution, the other character burst out laughing. “Well, at least you’re honest about it.” In fairness, Rogue Traders aren’t like regular folk: they have Emperor-given license to bend the rules, providing the overall result is to bring more worlds into the Imperium’s clutches. The appeal of playing one, then, is being able to simultaneously lord over and lose yourself within a setting that is typically only depicted in videogames from the perspectives of soldiers and generals.

The Koronus Expanse is an intriguing cross-section of Warhammer 40,000’s many silly extremist ideologies. The same is true of your entourage, who make the crew of the good ship Normandy look like a bunch of mild-mannered bureaucrats. Everybody in your gallant band is some kind of weirdo bigot with suppressed violent intentions towards one or more of the rest. Every character has an absurdly convoluted origin story that stretches back centuries, including a few loyalty-quest-defining terrible secrets that soon bubble to the surface. Everybody is a mixture of friend and enemy and ticking timebomb. If you thought Ashley vs Kaiden in Mass Effect was too much stress, just wait till you meet Idira, a Psyker who is doomed to gradually succumb to demonic possession, and Argenta, a zealous Sister of Battle – both are convinced from the outset that the other one is a traitor. Deeper in, there are murdery Dark Elves, slightly less murdery non-Dark Elves and genetically engineered werewolf Space Marines with an unbridled passion for song.

Oscillating between all these viciously opposed worldviews, including an overlapping social dynamic of rich vs poor, is the most enjoyable aspect of Rogue Trader’s story. It’s less enjoyable when you fixate on the main, chapter-based plot, which is incredibly long-winded, and follows a steady rhythm of landing on a planet, talking to a few people to unlock quest areas, then traipsing across a fundamentally linear map to a movie-of-the-week villain.

Individual scenarios can be gripping – all have multiple outcomes linked to your alignment, and some have a puzzle element, such as (to pick a very early example) identifying and tracking down the right ingredients for an alchemical spawning vat. The writing is as dense and exhausting as you’d expect from a Warhammer game, but it generally keeps things lively. In particular, I always loved bringing Idira and my three-eyed Navigator, Cassia, along to chinwags, because Idira can hear disembodied spirits while Cassia sees people as colours, which leads to occasional interjections like “this man’s soul is the colour of a sewage leak on a lazy Sunday afternoon in April, and by the way, the voices say he’s got a Melta launcher down his trousers”.

Image credit: Owlcat Games/RockPaperShotgun

There’s lots to digest, moment to moment. But where obvious rival Baldur's Gate 3 is an outright sandbox that almost handles like an immersive sim, Rogue Trader is fundamentally a march on the waypoint, for all its opulent wording and framing. While extravagantly built, to the point that you sometimes struggle to see your characters, the tabletop-style maps harbour few exciting secrets beyond caches of loot, traps and incidental lore pop-ups. You’ll want to make a point of gathering the loot regardless, because gifting it to other factions is how you’ll raise your overall Profit Factor as Rogue Trader and gain access to juicier options from merchants.

One reason Rogue Trader is so long is that you’ll spend a lot of time playing another game within it, a game I like to call “Find The Buff”. The character customisation sees you choosing a social background, world of origin, core stats, and guiding myths and nightmares together with an “archetype” or class – a big fat Wheel O’ Unlocks with Warhammer-brand pointy bits. You gain access to one of three secondary archetypes at level 17, with a final “exemplar” archetype unlocked past level 36. In the course of filling out these archetypes, you will pile on dozens upon dozens of active and passive abilities and modifiers, a feast of options that propels Rogue Trader well beyond the XCOM reskin initially suggested by grid-based layouts of full or half-shield cover.

The range of things that can happen based on any single character action can be absolutely wild. My Eldar ranger Yrliet, for example, has unlocked an ability that causes her next shot to drive the target a few squares out of cover while inflicting reduced damage. This might shunt the target into the gaze of my Navigator, who has a passive that reduces the dodge and hit chance of any enemy she can see, making her a great partner to Yrliet.

Image credit: Owlcat Games/RockPaperShotgun

It might also trigger a reaction attack from Idira, who I’ve transformed from a backline support into a kind of magic assassin. If the reaction attack kills the target, and one of my strutting noble characters has decreed that Idira is their Servant for this battle, it might power that noble character up in various ways. But given that Idira is wielding a cursed sword, the reaction attack might also destabilise the veil between mortal and Chaos realms, summoning a demon such as a Bloodletter, just when I thought I had the enemy on the ropes. All this, because my stupid sniper couldn’t be arsed to shoot through cover.

If you love optimising the hell out of a party and chaining their capabilities to moderately break the base systems and stat balancing, Rogue Trader is practically a class-A narcotic. One thing I especially love doing is stacking abilities that confer extra turns, movement points and action points, so as to turn one party member into a sadistic timegod, “stunlocking” the enemy team behind an infinite cascade of moves within moves within moves. Very infrequently, you can have an appropriately overclocked party member clear out a whole room before the slowest of their allies takes a single turn.

I also love the Grand Strategist archetype, who applies different buffs to certain areas and mods terrain – there’s a GS ability that gives characters a free move toward a specific patch of ground, for bonus blitzkrieg. More immediately, I get a real kick out of alternating attack types as the Arch-Militant so as to earn “versatility” and increase their Weapon and Ballistic stats.

Image credit: Owlcat Games/RockPaperShotgun

Each battle and every turn in Rogue Trader is, in short, a frightfully complex energy transaction between characters, enemies, the terrain and the systems - a work of calculation that can be immensely gratifying but also, a real headache to follow. That’s partly inevitable when you have this many variables in play, but the presentation also obscures many of the moving parts – hence, “Find The Buff”.

Status effects are shown on a vertigo-inducing right-click character sheet, with mouse-over pop-ups that don’t quite explain enough. These pop-ups only display the initial, non-upgraded form of each unlockable trait, for example, so if you want to properly assess all the modifications you’ve made before committing to an action, you’ll need to retrace your steps through the archetype screens. The combat log, similarly, can be frustratingly recalcitrant on why, for instance, a character has just earned an extra turn or suffered Warp damage out of nowhere. I feel bad about criticising Rogue Trader’s UI designers, given how much Videogame they have to distil and express, but I would point to Darkest Dungeon 2’s system of status tokens as evidence that readability doesn’t have to be at odds with indecent tactical depth.

Rogue Trader expects you to put the work in to understand these things. It also expects you to be good at visualising scenarios based on arcane maths equations. Each unlock slot on the archetype wheel corresponds to several tabbed lists of generic and specialised abilities or traits, together with weapon or equipment proficiencies and basic stat buffs.

Image credit: Owlcat Games/RockPaperShotgun

As I noted in my write-up for embargo, picturing them in action takes a lot of effort. You’ll peer at the descriptive text like a novice monk practising their Latin, and gradually realise that ah, what this basically does is punish an enemy for moving or being moved. It can be a fun challenge, but again, a touch more transparency would have made a big difference: in particular, presenting all the level-up options as tabbed lists makes them feel interchangeable, with too little visual variation between icons. As it is, while I did enjoy wrestling with the intricacies, I’ve never played an RPG in which the sight of a level-up notification made me quit more often than Rogue Trader. I’ve also played few RPGs that are as hard to pick up after an extended absence: you have to spend at least a session remembering what all your characters do.

The difficulty memorising the specifics is exacerbated by the fact that many of the game’s battles are filler, particularly on Normal difficulty – there are lots of granular difficulty options to fiddle with, but to understand how they affect the game, you’ll need to play a couple dozen hours on a default setting. Boss fights against demons and the like with very specialised quirks and super-moves are a delight to figure out. Scraps with Cutthroat Rebel and his many, many associates are just there to slow you down. This is a charge I would sadly level against much of Rogue Trader, including the space battles featuring your private voidship, which are simplified turn-based skirmishes with the additional problem of inertia and turning circles.

Had I tried to write up Rogue Trader for embargo, I suspect I would have disliked it a lot more. Much as I try to distance myself from pressures cultivated by review conditions, having a game this gigantic lobbed at your calendar inevitably leads to burnout and impatience. Rogue Trader is a lot more entertaining when you can dip in as you please, providing you keep copious notes, but even then, there will be moments when you feel overwhelmed. The game’s appetite for the pomp and pageantry of Warhammer 40,000 is at once its best and worst quality. Sometimes, it’s a gorgeously Gothic gateaux noir that teems with strange and different flavours, such that you can spend hours guessing at the ingredients. But sometimes the flavours obliterate each other, and you just feel like you’re trying to swallow a cathedral.