boy oh fuckin boy. we finally got a 40K game that adequately captures a world bigger than snoozy bottle episode conflicts and positions its tonality closer to original intent than unironic fascism endorsement. remember this shit was supposed to be satirical? well,

landing on a new planet, having your lackeys introduce you rather than deign to do it yourself, and behaving like an all around prissy idiot is the vibe here. I know you could play as the emperor's lapdog or a chaotic evil heretic, but I'm always gonna be a condescending, drink swirling, eye rolling, "crime lord" brat if given the opportunity. I like to think when I align with any sorta dogma it's with a camera mugging wink. I'm JUST lying; I am literally always lying; I have no convictions outside of demented egoism. don't think there's an rpg in recent memory that more convincingly backs up your inherent desire to choose the best/funniest/optimal outcomes with a player character that's canonically shitty enough to do just that

it's all pretty much age-of-sail bullshit: show up, colonize, reap the benefits of your exploitation, manage your fucked up evil empire, engage in ship battles; that sorta thing. while I don't think it gets into being as much of a commentary as the material naturally lends itself toward (and was designed to be), it's certainly a game that's at its best when it understands just how awful you and your companions are and leans into it further. there's often an Aw Shucks do-gooder option, but it feels more like a genre vestige than a path worth pursuing; a consolation prize for those who don't mind how much it clashes with all the kidnapping and murder and backstabbing the game expects you to do. no one gonna convince me the "lawful good" bit works in this setting at all, let alone a game where the friendliest dialogue choice might involve threatening to execute someone on the spot, but sure

combat feels real good, real thick and chunky with gratuitous slo-mo and turning people into red goulash via all manner of awful implements. instead of being a fetish monument to baldur's gate (1/2) style prebuffing, RT's homebrewed ruleset focuses more on integrating that stuff directly into the general flow of things. you can make quite a few actions on a given turn, and a good portion's likely gonna be dedicated to setting up wild chains of buffs and debuffs so you can trigger a series of stacked bonuses or maluses — delicately setting up sequences in advance before seeing the plan snap together in a quick burst of catharsis

character progression works similarly: hypergranular in all the right ways to make tinkering fun; a slow roll snowball where you gradually build up passives and synergies with level ups. you never hit X level and get something like a fireball that gives you the popeye spinach all at once, it's more like minute, incremental improvements that inevitably add up to something fucked up down the line. balance is totally out the window, and it's easy to trivialize even harder difficulties with certain roles, but it's a joy to piece everything together and if you (understandably) want more control than something like 5E allows, this is the antidote to that. even before getting into the itemization and all the avenues it opens up, this is 100% math porno for build perverts

on the other hand the encounter design's a mixed bag. owlcat's always been studied devotees of the infinity engine, and these still feel like rtwp fights despite being designed from the ground up for a turn based system. it works on the basis of its core mechanics being (mostly) solid, but owlcat still seems uninterested or unable to take a more economical tack with these things for whatever reason

when its firing on all cylinder's it's fabulous; when some "electro-priest" (me when i listen to drexciya) drops from the ceiling and says something about the "motive force" I don't know what it means, but I know it's pretty sick. and when I parry them six times in a row and hit em with enough debuffs to make an SMT fan puke that's sick too. the bosses, setpieces, and event fights rule, and I'd put at least a handful up there with the best in recent memory, but you could cut out a solid quarter of the lesser fights and no one would complain a bit. trash mobs work in rtwp cos you can carve thru them like it's diablo, but when an equivalent fight take significantly longer and each turn requires 6-12~ actions, the approach starts to look a lot less sound

elsewhere we got the colony management stuff which isn't my favourite thing in the world. it's necessary and consonant with the themes and setting, but as a mechanical endeavor they drag it out in some unpleasant ways. i need a way to throw up Do Not Disturb on my shit. silent mode on my shit. every two seconds I'm getting phone calls. rogue trader, we hate to bother you, but we need your help. rogue trader, is the dress blue or gold? rogue trader, there's this girl I like...

buddy, I'm here to subjugate you. clearly I've made some sort of error if you think I'm going to solve your problems. worst bit is that you gotta warp on over to the colony and the choice will be something like GET AMBUSHED BY 100 DARK ELDAR CBT SHIPS or PAY ONE (1) PROFIT FACTOR. I'm feeling a lot like ricky every time these freaks roll up and it's exhausting

ship combat absolutely rules when you're not outnumbered to the point of losing before getting a turn though. nothing fancy, just the most cozy balmy breezy vibes. you don't know what satisfaction is until you get into a situation like this and I'd buy a standalone spinoff that iterated on this stuff no questions asked. I'd throw on a giant sweater, chug black coffee, and lose an entire winter plinking away at it, easy

but it's about time we get to the biggest issue by far: this game's buggy as fuck, ranging from cute little cosmetic nothings and wonky skills to full on softlocks and run enders. I've managed to avoid the real gamebreaking nightmare outcomes so far, but it'd be real disingenuous not to emphasize how raw it gets — especially when the tutorial's longer than a given 2h refund window

at first I thought the tactical knowledge skill was broken (didn't work at all) but then I realized it was broken (line of sight/tooltip bugs), and then I realized it was broken (obliterates game balance). there's a lot of stuff like this in here; stuff that either works incredibly well, doesn't work at all, works different than suggested, or a mix of the above

I've seen misaligned inventory grids that make entire rows of items inaccessible; t-posing, animation stutters and weird cosmetic glitches; fights that go down to an average of 5 fps on a 3060ti/i5-10400 pc; enemy turns idling for 30+ seconds; ships flying away from the battle and taking 20+ turns to catch up to; zone transitions and movement not working; keyboard disconnections; major fights where allies are stuck with 0AP; combat templates carrying over to the world map; fake cover; and a host of other issues I've forgotten by now — and that's without getting into how quirky line-of-sight and allied AI are on average. you have a better chance of winning the lottery than avoiding friendly NPCs mercilessly unloading full automatic bursts into your party members' spinal columns every turn. enemies WILL shoot you through walls with impunity out of nowhere from time to time and you're gonna have to suck it up when it happens

rogue trader is the most crpg crpg I've played in a long time. a sort of time capsule of busted rulesets, buggy launches, total freedom to break the game over your knee, and some truly great roleplaying and combat hindered by outsized ambitions and developers who might be a little bit too passionate for their own good

a throwback to a bygone era of black isles and troikas making messy masterpieces that sputter and clang and crackle with manic enthusiasm and strange and bizarre malfunctions while being the first 40K game to really nail the setting and show off just how interesting the worldbuilding and lore is when its not being constrained by narrow, unimaginative storytelling

for all its problems — many of which are severe and hard to pardon — it's a weird dream game for me. if owlcat can wrangle it into being a functional piece of software I'd bump the score in a heartbeat, even assuming everything else remains completely deranged. takes all the promise of the setting that I'd been dying to see properly realized in a game and blends it with classic crpg design at its most jittery and electric, proving further (as if there was any doubt) that this style of rpg isn't going anywhere, nor should it