The grimdark universe of Warhammer 40,000 is no stranger to video game adaptations, but CRPGs are a fairly new entry to the franchise. That is, until the initial release of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in 2023. Owlcat Games have now taken on the mammoth task of converting the adaptation of the tabletop phenomena to more dice roles and extensive dialogue, bringing all of that to Nintendo’s newest hybrid beast. Let’s see if the Rogue Trader can barter a good port, shall we? 

Would it be 40K without a chainsword?

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader throws you right into the deep end when it comes to the story: you’re one of a few descendants of a famous Rogue Trader, and she has brought you all together to choose a successor. Since this is Warhammer, this doesn’t go quite to plan, with a grand scheme of assassination and a pesky Chaos outbreak seeing your character being thrust into the role of Rogue Trader, trying to solve the mystery around the assassination of your predecessor, seemingly solve every issue in the known universe and keep the forces of Chaos at bay. All in a day’s work for the Emperor’s chosen Trader! 

I’m not going to sit here and go all through the Warhammer 40,000 lore to try and get everyone up to speed – as someone who has a passing interest with the franchise from the games and has read a few books, I’d suggest watching a few lore videos on YouTube, as well as a deep dive into the encyclopaedia that you can access in-game to help you out with any terms and knowing the who’s who of the franchise. God forbid you commit some vile heresy by not knowing the correct number of primachs. 

What Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader does a fantastic job of is putting together engaging smaller narratives together for you to work through that slowly bleed into the much grander scheme of things. Given how the Rogue Trader is vastly responsible for maintaining the Emperor’s reach, you’ll come across all aspects of life, Xeno worshippers and planets that have had their faith waned – you’ll slowly build into the much bigger story of what set this story in place throughout the roughly 80 hours of brilliantly written stories and interactions with your surly party members. 

The dark beauty of the grimdark.

Since this is in a grimdark setting, there is never an outright “good” action, just various degrees of grey and dark. Your choices influence the story and how your party will act towards you. It is an interesting spin on the CRPG genre, one that usually offers a “good” or “honest” character path, whereas in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, there are just various degrees of screwing someone over at some point for the gain of yourself and the glory of the God Emperor. Yes, you may discover a planet of people who don’t know any better but you won’t get the chance to rehabilitate them, just different degrees of how you will punish them for their heresy, and Owlcat have absolutely hit it out of the park with the way these events play out. 

The gameplay of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, as mentioned several times, is that of a CRPG. Think titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Owlcat’s other major title Pathfinder. You’ll spend many, many, many hours speaking to NPCs, reading giant lore drops, rolling invisible dice of chance, and, more often than not, having to throw hands to defend the good name of our God Emperor. 

You’ve got red on you.

The game is presented from an isometric viewpoint, fortunately with a little bit of freedom with the angles. You directly control your party leader, who you can choose to designate – it works well enough but there are occasional pathfinding issues and bits of the environment to get stuck on, seemingly more in this port of the game than when I played through the PC version of the game a few years back. Keep that in mind as it is going to come up quite a few more times going forward. 

The general gameplay loop revolves around you taking your ship across a giant universe map to various galaxies that have planets with story quests attached to them. There are plenty of side quests to discover on the way, and even some happening in your giant city-sized ship. You’re free to choose which story quest you do, in which order, and when they are all done, you’ll get funnelled into a quest that ties up that chapter, leading into the next one. 

What is massively deceptive is just how large the chapters can be, especially if you are adventuring other planets you come across. Some allow full exploration, whereas others have a “choose your own adventure” section, where what you pick in the story decides the outcome, bad, worst or catastrophic. These are genuinely really well-written, and while it’s a shame some of them aren’t fully playable quests, they are still very much worth discovering. 

Textures are an act of heresy.

Combat is of the turn-based strategy flavour; you have a certain amount of action and movement points to allow you to get in the best position to dispense the glorious currency of death, there are cover mechanics which affect how effective your shots are and a mix of ranged and melee combat, there are even techniques where it can backfire tremendously and instead of dealing a deadly blow to a foe you instead summon a force of Chaos and add to what can often be a hefty enemy count. 

At the start of the game, it’s fairly common for fights to drag on and keep you sweating as you miss your shots and come across enemies with huge health pools. While this starts to balance out toward the middle of the game, by the last couple of chapters you end up far too overpowered and battles just feel like filler and an annoyance, rather than a strategic battle for life and limb. It’s a fun combat system, sure, but doesn’t really do much to differentiate it from its peers.

There is also space combat to keep you going on as well. Again, that’s a strategic turn-based affair, where you’ll be dogfighting other ships in the vast void of space; your party members are all designated to specific aspects of your ship, and it’s down to your Captain skills to keep your shields up, shots on target and live to trade another day. While far from the complexities of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, it is still a fun bonus and a very welcome addition to really bring the world of Rogue Trader to the video game crowd who don’t have a big enough table to set up the Table Top experience. 

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is not only an outstanding game, but an excellent representation of the franchise put into a much beloved genre. I would love nothing more than to just conclude my review with that and we can all sit eagerly playing this while waiting for Dark Heresy, but unfortunately, this is the Nintendo Switch 2 port review we’re talking about, and for every great thing the game does, this port does that painful Switch thing of performing in the absolute worst way. 

Plenty of customisation at least!

I wish I could sit here and gush about the gothic, sci-fi, alien art direction with engrossing biomes, fountains of the red stuff and so many spikes and skulls even Cradle of Filth would ask them to dial it back, but all of the presentation is ruined by poor resolution which makes the game look like someone flash banged you before you booted it up, and you’re trying to work through the side effect of having burnt corneas. 

Cogs of war and corpses rolling around in pain, engines whirring, flames roaring as bullets pierce the worn torn sky, all ruined by the 20 to 24fps framerate stuttering and struggling to show just about anything going on, running about as smooth as the tracks left by a tank track, rarely was there a consistent section which coupled with the dodgy visuals really started to commit some wild heresy.

I got to see plenty of my Home screen on my Switch 2, which was reassuring that it was still there – the game would just crash at random times, my play sessions were cut down because I wasn’t sure if it was a memory leak or something so would save often and quit out and start again. It served me well until Chapter 4, where I am still stuck awaiting any kind of a patch as a Main Quest will not progress without an error flashing and my home screen just staring at me wondering if I’m lost. 

Story time!

I would highly recommend Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader, just on PC. I’ve no idea how the other console versions perform but sadly the Switch 2 version takes what is an amazing game, charges full whack for it, doesn’t include any of the DLC (because of course why would they?!), and then riddles it full of poor performance and crashing issues. It’s an absolute affront to the God Emperor and should be cast into the depths of the void. Hopefully Owlcat can work magic down the line and patch the game to a reasonable standard, but for the Switch 2’s debut Warhammer game, it seems the franchise curse of janky, messy games continues on for another generation.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is available now on PC, Playstation 5, X Box, Mac and Nintendo Switch 2 

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader was provided by the publisher.