Posted on: October 25, 2025
jl_1299
Verified ownerGames: 955 Reviews: 10
Fun overall WH40K RPG Experience
It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea in the RPG community, but it does enough things well to be an ultimately satisfying, if flawed, experience. I played the base game with no DLCs for around 100 hours. Pros: - Storytelling and worldbuilding - WH games can be pretty hit and miss with engaging the player with a decent story and keeping dialogues immersive and informative without seeming overly dense or hokey. Owlcat did a good job here of treading a careful line between providing detail and lore dumping. There are some factions that are well-defined and a good number of character motivations that are believable and nuanced, generally. It's enough to hook you and keep you interested in how things play out. Your teammates aren't exactly the most unique characters ever penned, but they do align with certain types of personalities in WH40K / SciFi gaming and some have enjoyable commentary in places. - Turn Based Combat - Unlike their previous outings, Owlcat fully embraces TB combat in this release and the results are impressive. Good base settings and various options that can be tweaked to your heart's content make it approachable for most RPG gamers. There are a few interesting mechanics employed by various mobs throughout the game that must be effectively countered, but nothing too obnoxious to make you wonder if you spent your XP incorrectly some 20 hours ago. - UI / Stability - Aside from the Level Up screen and mechanics, the UI is also an improvement from Owlcat's prior games (and those had a pretty good UI already). The game ran well with minor hiccups every now and again, and seems to be a bit more resource-intensive than the resulting graphical fidelity would suggest. I experienced a minor bug or two in the early releases, but never had a crash or a corrupted save. Not so good: - Choices & Consequences - while there are certainly some aspects of the story that can be melded in a different direction depending on your choices, there are parts that are unnecessarily railroaded, and not merely to advance the story in the way Owlcat intended. There are some differences to your ending slideshow if you go one path vs another, but not as many IN-GAME differences for your decisions as there could be, particularly the further you advance in the game. Which brings us to: - Inconsistency - Most Rogue Trader players rightfully complain about the decline in quality, variety, and overall impressiveness of the later game content, and my experience reflects this. The first two chapters are very lengthy (especially if you are seeking out opportunities to explore the space map in Ch 2 whenever you can), but this gets derailed in Ch 3, and once you overcome the baddies in Ch 3, the remainder of the game becomes a mop-up slog comparatively. Lots of copy-paste mobs and settings, and some half-hearted companion quests really stand out as flat compared to the care and intricacy often on display in Owlcat's constructing of the earlier acts of the game. - Player Builds - The builds are fairly on rails aside from the base class traits, no doubt about it. Some have gone into greater detail than I will about that. There are fairly limited options to make your character's abilities and traits more distinct and specialized. Yes, there are CHOICES, but said choices with where to spend your XP are more window dressing than they are difference makers, for the most part. I'm not a min-max gamer, personally, but even I was a bit disappointed, and people who loved to tweak the hell out of their builds in games like the previous Owlcat games, Underrail, and Age of Decadence are going to be very irritated by the limitations. Overall: 4/5 for being a fun ride overall, especially at the start of the game, and for delivering on some excellent combat and dialogue moments, if not consistently throughout the entire run of the game.
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