Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Review (Switch 2)

Warhammer, I have to say, is something that I've only come to really appreciate properly in recent times. I was never particularly bothered until I picked up a big starter pack of wee guys and big monsters to paint (y'know, for my kids), and then a proper, no-holds-barred addiction set in.

I needed lore. I needed more! And so video games, as ever, have ended up being a very important part in my journey, and this time it's a journey towards a deep understanding of Warhammer. Something like that. Anyway, in short, I've been banging through your Warhammer Boltguns and Mechanicuses (Mechanici?) in order to get myself all up to pub-chat levels of knowing stuff about the franchise. Breezily japing with the lads over a bevvy without sweating being found out. That's the goal.

Luckily for me, recent times have brought us a swathe of what I'm gonna go ahead and proclaim as the best Warhammer video games we've ever had. The licence is being wielded wisely, and the likes of the aforementioned Mechanicus and Boltgun on Switch, alongside the mighty Space Marine 2 on other platforms, have gifted fans of all things space murder a blood-soaked smorgasbord of shotguns and shot wrong'uns. Again, something like that.

"Stop rambling and get on with the review, Grimgor, we don't all have hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of years to spend chit-chatting!" (Check out that pub-level knowledge, amirite folks?). So, now, we've got Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader arriving on Switch 2, and this is another one of the games that I've dug into (on another platform, for shame) over the past year or so in order to sate my big Warhammer appetite. And it's excellent. Let's just get that out of the way. I'm already a big fan of this one before booting into its Switch 2 port, so all they need to do here — all they need to do to stroll to an easy victory — is dish out the goods in working order and we're all in for a treat.

Before we get into the performance, though (as if you can't see that score), let's first get into what's involved in Owlcat Games' epic — you're looking at well over 100 hours here, chief — isometric adventure. Rogue Trader (not be confused with the terrible Ewan McGregor movie) sees you dive into intergalactic battle in the Koronus Expanse, as anyone with pub-level Warhammer knowledge will know is a very dangerous place indeed.

Taking control of a party of six combat units, and in keeping with the original TTRPG, the game thrusts you into strategic, turn-based combat whilst peppering the action with big dialogue choices and player-driven decisions that feed into a unique "Realm Building" mechanic. This sees the world affected by the path you choose to forge, and it's this mechanic that really ties together and elevates a game that also delivers the goods in terms of its strategic scraps and worldbuilding. It's a very solid package indeed.

If you've played the likes of Mechanicus (which is another banger by the way), you'll sort of know the drill. The Warhammer universe suits this sort of video game down to the ground, and as usual there's depth to spare in the combat skirmishes, tons of replayability built into its ever-changing narrative, and loads of fun to be had in co-op modes - and even a bit of ship-to-ship combat.

Now, I'd love to go on and on and really gild this lily big time, whilst telling you how this Switch 2 port's slick performance helps bring all of this cleverness to life and make it pop, but unfortunately as things currently stand, there's no real point. Indeed, I have to say, this is one of the worst-performing things I've played on Switch 2 so far. Emperor's bowels, indeed.

From the moment you boot into Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader on Nintendo's console, you can tell you're in for a very bad time. The first swooping camera shot of the entire thing, as the game settles down upon your player character and another NPC, stutters and strains as it circles a big tower that's very obviously had all of the graphical spit and polish removed from it. A big visual downgrade, and one that chugs and splutters along, easily down into sub-20fps territory, whilst also crashing consistently, taking an absolute age to load between scenes, and having you stumble about in unresponsive menus. It's not good.

The combat excels in its brutality, with opportunistic attacks which make for devilishly fluid face-offs that can turn on a dime, but it's derailed thanks to controls that are ruined by the frame rate. It's genuinely hard to place the movement cursor where you want it at times.

So, instead of having a great time (and it's easily a great, if not excellent game when working well) building our own rogue trader's empire, exploring space, and interfering in the fates of planets, we're left in a situation where I think it's best nobody be tempted to buy this thing until it's been fixed up. Until you can shotgun the face off an enemy with nary a stutter.

It's very frustrating. The combat is so crunchy and brutal and full of strategy, it really is some fine stuff, and there's cunning required on anything but the lower difficulty settings to best some ferocious and wonderfully well-designed foes. The narrative is also solid overall, especially given the genre (I shan't spoil in the hopes we get a magical patch in the future), and the decisions and dialogue tree aspects all come off really well thanks to some top writing and perfectly gruff voice-acting. Replayabilty is built in here, and it's one of those things that portable play makes sing, absolutely.

Gosh, I so want to give this game the score it deserves! However, it's a big-time swerve. I should also note that, whilst I had zero issues with this game on a high-powered PC, I am aware that it does run like trash on Steam Deck, so perhaps this is something worth noting. We shall need to wait and see.

For now, though, a wildly vacillating frame rate, unstable resolution, hugely downgraded visuals, unresponsive and sluggish controls and menus, and multiple crashes to the Switch home screen put this one far beyond a recommendation.