It's like BG3 but with guns. This game has probably some of the most interesting companions since Fallout: New Vegas. To give a brief sampler on some of the party members you can recruit:
- Abelard, grandpa can still throw hands
- Idra, "the spirits, Jamaican me crazy"
- Argentina, bible camp's angriest camper
- Heinrix, the fed
- Pascal, give this man a plasma rifle
- Ulfar, no he doesn't die in SM2
- SPOILERS, the edgy one

10/10, the final boss almost melted my processor

It was good overall. 7-8/10
The leveling system is too much for me.
There was a ton of hours just sitting there reading all the descriptions, going back to already-read talents to make they synergize, etc. It was an overwhelming leveling system to say the least.
BUT
Story was sick, the characters were interesting and cool, combat was pretty fun and kinda easy. It was nice being confident going into every fight, I REALLY dislike replaying battles in these gaymes if I lose the first time.
Also the characters were interesting and cool
Also the characters were cool...

Rogue Trader is not a game I expected to like. I'm not especially fond of 40k, I'm easily irritated by grimdark settings, and I am not particularly inclined towards games that center on the absurd levels of power the main characters is able to wield. Furthermore, I'm one of the relatively few people who quite disliked Wrath of the Righteous, Owlcat's most recent game prior to RT. Rogue Trader is a game that managed to surprise me at every turn though, and I'm happy to say that it persuaded me on every point. I think it's a fantastic game and could easily be one of the best RPGs of the decade when we look back on it one day.

Rogue Trader is the first game Owlcat has put out where I think the gameplay is on the whole actually pretty fun. I don't have the ability to compare it against its tabletop source, but I think that as a video game its AP driven turn based system is a blast once characters' kits are online. While it doesn't offer as much guidance through the system as Owlcat's Pathfinder games and some game terms may be a bit unintuitive (Wounds as the HP metric is a personal least favorite), the fluidity that it allows in builds allows for very rewarding and personal exploration. Lower game difficulties are also considerably less overwhelming than in Wrath of the Righteous and it's easy to experiment without being punished for not looking things up or not already knowing the system. The game has no pre-buffing and resources are restored between combats, so unlike the PF games RT is very focused on moment to moment in battle tactics rather than advance prep for encounters. I feel that the resulting system is a lot more satisfying and less frustrating in many ways thanks to this focus. Manipulating AP, attack rate, and movement are all important aspects of the system and just make you feel Extremely Cool in play. On the more mixed side, relative power of builds can be all over the place and especially if you have the Void Shadows DLC it's easy to flat out break the game on lower difficulties. The early game can be so easy that it makes for an extremely boring first chapter, worsened by the fact that builds don't really come online until characters have their second tier archetype and finally start to have a broad kit of tools to play with. The game can be clunky, slow, and dull up until that point.

Because it is Owlcat, there is also a subsystem that is a part of game progression. There are two, in fact- both spiritual successors to aspects of the PF games. Ship combat, which is frequently encountered when exploring systems and is sometimes mandatory for plot progression, is less terrible than crusading in Wrath of the Righteous and far, far less time consuming, but it's far from perfect. Because the player only controls their own ship and torpedoes or attack craft they launch from it initiative is almost entirely enemies and NPC allies and can slow to an absolute crawl in larger fights. The flagship has enough abilities to be fairly fun to play with after adjusting to its janky movement, but the experience is really brought down by the sense that one isn't doing much most of the time except waiting out turns until you can finally move again. It's not going to ruin your experience but I wouldn't say it adds a lot besides a periodic minigame. Colony management, on the other hand, is a very light management simulator that feels like it pulls more from Kingmaker. It's stripped back to essentials in RT and has removed a lot of the random elements, and I think it's a nice unobtrusive addition that allows you to feel some sense of your character's leadership position, experience the satisfaction of customizing a demesne around you, and reap some nice perks. Companions weigh in for major decisions tied to colony plotlines, rewarding recruitment with more beneficial solution options and getting to know the full extent of their questionable opinions on things. Conviction, the game's version of story paths, also can influence colonies by giving new project options, something that expands on the idea of aligned structures in Kingmaker and contributes to how rewarding the story paths can feel for character expression. It is worth noting that colony management rewards can wind up lending a lot of power, and that it's possible to inadvertently lock yourself out of high level colony projects for one colony by completing the wrong projects in another or failing to add the optional colony to your protectorate- something which can lead to late game frustration.

Roleplaying in RT is on the whole gratifying. The game is good at rewarding choices and making little things add up, and it's not afraid to make choices from early in the game Matter a lot later (sometimes in surprising or punishing ways). There's generally a solid breadth of options in any interaction that make it easy to express character in both the little light moments and the big world shaping plot ones. I rarely felt restricted by it, although sometimes character interactions could be a bit odd or while trying to play Iconoclast I could feel the hard limits of a radical character in a game that was still 40k. Convictions also work well for what they are- the game doesn't have a set lock in point in its plot for committing to a final conviction, and instead of reaching the lock in is a result of player choice. The convictions not being fully mutually exclusive is also just fantastic for character expression and reflecting a sense of complexity. I love that a lot of conviction dialogue isn't locked to having levels in the conviction, allowing a lot of space in interactions to drift between different points of view. Locked dialogue also being tied to level of conviction is also brilliant for expressing the degrees of belief a character may have, as well as allowing some leeway for characters committed to one conviction to still access locked dialogue from the low levels of another. It feels like the best possible combination of Kingmaker's more fluid alignment system and alignment locked dialogue with Wrath's plot driving mythic paths. The non-exclusivity also draws welcome comparisons to reputations in Obsidian's Tyranny. I was continually impressed by how much the game managed to make its story feel like the story of my specific character, reactive to that character and bringing ends particular to them. This level of expression also made the game great to replay- I started with Heretic and then replayed with Iconoclast, and it was extremely rewarding to see the other side of things!

Originally there was a big paragraph about backgrounds but character limit forced a cut. TLDR: low point of reactivity but a step in the right direction.

Owlcat is known for character writing and RT delivers. Its cast is delightfully expressive and varied, and some of the companions have become fast favorites in the genre for me. The dynamism of companion storylines can be breathtaking, and romances have similar depth and breadth of outcomes (although I think it's beyond unfortunate that the only male LI available to male characters is a late game companion who can be missed without prior knowledge). The main plot can feel a bit thinner simply because it winds up a bit scattered and sometimes unfocused, but it's overall fun and all the little threads of it come together brilliantly at the end. The web weaving and conspiracy unraveling of it haunts me. I love this game a lot.

There's so much more I could write about this game, but the bottom line: I warmly recommend it to anyone considering it. It takes a little adjustment if you aren't familiar with or fond of 40k going in, but I think that it's well worth anyone's time even if it would ordinarily be something you passed over. It's an exceptional game and fully deserves the praise it earns. I am glad that Owlcat has made both a game I like as much as Kingmaker a game that unlike Kingmaker is good enough that I can tell people to play it. Although... play Kingmaker...?