Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader delivers some of Owlcat’s strongest writing, meaningful player choice, and smartly streamlined turn-based combat, making it an excellent fit for the grimdark 40K universe. But a shaky Switch 2 port weighed down by performance issues and lingering bugs undermine those ambitions, resulting in an ambitious CRPG that feels rough on Nintendo hardware.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is very ambitious and delivers an enormous amount of content, a long gameplay campaign, engaging turn-based combat, and an atmosphere that fits perfectly with the Warhammer series. It's less successful, however, at welcoming new players who are not familiar with the Warhammer lore. The experience can get cumbersome, with its heavy menus, long loading times and framerate drops, and despite recent updates, some flaws remain unadressed. Rogue Trader is a strategy RPG that does several things right, but execution problems make the Nintendo Switch 2 version fall below its potential.

Rogue Trader on the Switch 2 is a bad port of a fantastic game. If you have the patience, it’s just about playable, and there’s still some enjoyment to be found in its epic narrative and compelling characters. However, it needs a cavalcade of patches to reach the level of performance on Switch 2 that the game deserves.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader remains an exceptional, superbly written RPG capable of captivating both long-time fans and newcomers, drawing them into the grim darkness of the 41st millennium for hundreds of hours. However, the Switch 2 port severely undermines the experience with poor performance, frequent technical issues, awkward control implementation, a noticeable graphical downgrade, and the absence of key DLC. Until substantial patches and the full content lineup arrive, this is a version best avoided.

There's a pretty good RPG hiding in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. The story is interesting, the quests are plentiful, the characters are well rounded, and there's plenty of depth in the RPG systems. However, the graphical presentation is merely passable, while the performance varies so greatly that you need a ton of patience to get through all of the hitching and long load times. This is a game to be avoided for now, but if the promised patches improve the performance issues, then those who crave a really meaty RPG in the infamous grimdark sci-fi universe will have a very good time.