It's as fun as your love for Warhammer 40K.

Its a great RPG at heart, but its pacing and gameplay frustrations make it exhausting to play. If you have the patience to endure long battles, excessive waiting, and a half useless abilities, the incredible writing and characters might be worth it. But for many, the grind will overshadow the brilliance of its story.

This is my first Owlcat game.
I want to like it so much, but it's not enjoyable.
Story and "RP" elements are perfectly fine.
The 40k scenery and feeling is great.
Your choices seem to have impact.

But the combat is extremely bland and repetitive.
Skills are convoluted and don't do much at all. This is the only game where I felt leveling up was a chore and not an exciting thing.
Applying skills is so tedious that you feel it's not worth the effort pressing buttons for their effect.

All the time you sit there and think to yourself, Mechanicus or XCOM does it so much better.

As you get jumped left and right, combat is a major part of the game.
I stopped after Act I, bc it felt more like work than joy.

There's some good content here but after 80 hours the good outweighs the bad. This game is a dream come true for diehard tabletop fans but, even for someone who's been playing Warhammer video games since Dawn of War 1's launch, this was a frustrating experience. The combat isn't fun, the skill system is convoluted, and leveling up is a chore. While the writing is excellent, there's literally hundreds of Black Library books you could read for cheaper than this that don't involve engaging with tabletop game systems.

The Prologue and Chapter 1 set up your MC and main party members' position in the universe, then Chapter 2 opens up the gameplay with plenty of exploration, colony management, and new companions. Even though the combat is really rough at the start, it gets better about 15 hours in once you unlock more support skills for multiple attacks and moves per turn. The problems really start in Chapter 3 where the devs pulled the handbrake on both the gameplay and the storytelling, only to time skip at the start of Chapter 4 (time skips are always bad). Chapter 4 wraps up the story and still gives you some freedom for growth and exploration but the game keeps going for some reason, only to rush the ending with exposition dumps and a bevvy of sudden "choose your ending" options.

The main issue that kept me from really enjoying this game was the skill system. Good GW games are existing games with a Warhammer skin slapped on them, like the Dawn of War series, Vermintide and Darktide series, and the Total War: Warhammer series. Bad GW games are essentially digital tabletop games, and don't make enough concessions for a good video game experience. Even the most simple-to-use skills are needlessly wordy... Here's an example of one of the early skills for Soldier: "Run and Gun: Cost -1AP, Personal, Cooldown Rounds 1. The Soldier gains +X MP (where X is (2+AGI bonus/2). Their next attack costs -1 AP less and does not count toward the attack limit per turn. Until the end of the next turn, the Soldier becomes winded. While winded, the Soldier suffers a -10 penalty to Ballistic Skill and cannot use Run and Gun." If you really want to keep skills like this 1:1 in the game, add a simplified explanation that can be expanded for a deeper look at the systems. In layman's terms, this skill simply gives you bonus movement (which can be used after attacking), an extra attack at reduced cost, and then debuffs you with winded (which should be a tooltip). Again, this is one of the most simple skills in the game and doesn't account for more complex skills that literally require PEMDAS knowledge to solve like "Precise Attack".

The combat itself isn't enjoyable because it's basically convoluted XCOM: Enemy Unknown, with all its frustrating accuracy issues, in addition to a tabletop system on top. You can look forward to burst attacks having 60% accuracy at best for most of the game, with accuracy buffs and equipment being very rare. The initiative system is the worst I've ever seen; Rounds involve friendly and enemy teams taking turns based off of initiative dice rolls that are based off of multiple stat calculations. This makes all characters turn order randomized and makes some battles come down to restarting the fight in hopes of a good turn order. Whenever a hard battle comes up, the main solution to beating it on forums is to simply not engage with the combat system by ensuring a character that gives free turns can always act first.

The combat balance is generally good but there's some obvious offenders that made me want to drop the game. I admittedly got filtered for an hour or two on a few fights but I was able to "solve" them and continue forward... until Chapter 4. There's a pivotal battle where you're in a circular area against four CSMs, a psyker that shoots chain lightning across the map, and a Chaos boss who hands out free turns and buffs to his CSMs. Going into this game blind without looking up builds or guides meant I had the "wrong build" on a certain character and my only options to finishing the chapter were to reload a previous save and fully respec that character or to turn down the difficulty. Certain fights throughout the game seem tuned to require exploits, while most of the random encounters are complete facerolls even without outside help.

Rogue Trader had long, five hour stretches of good and bad content, but it got worse near the end of the game. If you just want to purchase this for the free exploration of Chapter 2, colonizing and expanding your influence across the system, you'll get a good 40-60 hours out of this. However, actually finishing the game is a chore and seems frustrating for any build you might bring. It's not terrible, but the bad outweighs the good too much to recommend. There's still issues with bugs, ranging from silly broken animations to some quests just not working, and the gameplay just isn't fun most of the time. Not recommended because there's so many other good GW games out there. Even though the combat and systems are much more simple, I'd rather play Mechanius a third time than touch this again.

This game is just great.

I'm a cRPG fan. I had very little idea of WH40K lore before playing Rogue Trader, yet the game made me look up the lore to learn more than basics. It encapsulates the spirit of Baldur's Gate 3 and the beat and tempo of a well-written, movie. Each and every quest propels you to the final destination, not to a tangent. This type of story line doesn't fit into anything other than a lore-rich setting. So, it's quite rare to see an ambitious and grandiose cRPG every so often. WH40K universe fits to this game like a glove. Choices, options, dialogues are beautiful and well-written. Some of the dialogues are Disco Elysium-like. Which is also a plus.

Overall, Rogue Trader's genre of cRPG is quite niché, yet everything else from gameplay to story appeals to a broad audience. The game hits the balance of niché and mainstream at the same time.

love the game, just waiting for the second dlc that comes with the season pass, hopefully it will come soon :)

Haven't delved into the Warhammer universe much, but this is a great introduction. Love the story. Basically, you're in service to the God Emperor to explore unknown lands in his name-- seeking resources and adventure. The characters are interesting, and I actually enjoy their banter when we're walking to various locations. Also, I love the leveling system; it's very streamlined. Cool graphics and style. And it's fun! Hard to keep my attention these days, so it's a rare game that immerses me in its world. Additionally, the writing and voice acting is excellent. Overall, would recommend. I'd probably give it a 8.5/10. Maybe 9. Doesn't seem woke.

Despite the lack of VA(s), it's still enjoyable experience that soon after made me rather invested in Turn-based RPGs.
For a Warhammer 40k fan it's a nice change of pace to go from fast action packed game into slower, tactical approach.

Great game and worthwhile investment with some flaws and complexity that might not be as inviting to more casual players.

Combat:
A strong point of this game, there is no lack of enemy variety and new curve-balls you are expected to overcome. Fights aren't always just as simple as kill the guy in front of you. If you are a fan of XCOM-like games you will feel right at home here. There are abilities that are absolutely broken, and others that i found myself never using. Expose weakness is probably the most broken thing against beefy bosses in the late game as it somehow ends up taking hundreds of health points off more than other main attacks even do.

Characters:
Another strong point of the game, i loved all the characters in this game, except Idira who i ended up dealing with once i learned about her unsanctioned psycher passive. You are really given a lot of dynamic with all your party members, whenever you want you can kick people off your ship (if you want i guess), there are romance options and i found myself feeling close to these characters. They are sold very well and fit right in in the 40k universe.

Interface/Menus/inventory:
It is difficult to group these as separate entities as the menus and party management are a huge part of this game. Personally I love how in depth the management is for your retinue, items don't tend to just have simple property boosts like in other RPGs (i.e. Defense +1) but it will change the properties of abilities, add stats, or have several different properties like making you fireproof. The issue is that you end up with hundreds (and i mean hundreds) of unique items in your inventory, which is unlimited. Clutter was a real issue i had to deal with in the management of my party. In addition, you also have uniques for certain members of your party that are useless for others,

In a similar vein the leveling up system in this game is extremely complex. This was actually a deterrent for my wife picking up the game because she got overwhelmed by how many options you need to read through in order to increase your ability and have good synergy. These abilities are all in a single list, which can be filtered to different types, that is very long. Early on you may need to read 50 or more descriptions of abilities to determine what you want to level up... every time you level up. Speaking of leveling up though, i do appreciate that everyone in your party levels together, meaning you don't need to worry about grinding up party members or leaving others behind.

All this being said, the game is pretty forgiving at least on the difficulty i was playing on, if you pick an ability or item that doesn't mesh well with your build it inst game ending, just try and remember what you want the next time.

Gripes:
I didn't have many of these but there were some soft lock things that happened and others that made me save scum to correct simple mistakes. The worst of this manifest itself in the map system. For this game you get a limited amount of points to navigate the warp and travel where you want. This gets better as the game goes on, but the first time i played it i tried to make all the paths safe and ended up spending all my points, not realizing that in order to progress eventually i needed to have saved up points to create new paths. I had to load my save back several dozen hours and basically restart the game because of this.

I don't know how much it is worth mentioning here but the difficulty scaling seems to spike around 60% of the way through the game then gets easy again. I am not sure why the game is designed this way, and i am not sure if its just because of needing to refocus my levels, but things that had chance tied to them for interactions all of a sudden all had about a 30% chance of happening where i would normally expect 80-100% chance. After this particular section everything went back up to that 80-100% chance so i think for some reason they just designed this particular level to be very hard.

Overall i would give this game a solid 8/10, it is definitely a more complicated RPG but the controls are easy and you can take your time beating it. My estimated time on my complete play-through was just shy of 150 hours (with some idle time)

innnntriguinnnng!