The Warhammer brand is expanding. Specifically, it’s coming stateside, thanks to a hot new venue for Warhammer World.
Creator Games Workshop announced plans to create a North American version of its hub celebrating its tabletop enterprise. Where the English version’s set in Nottingham, England, the American one will be just outside of Washington, DC that it hopes to open in late 2027. Nottingham’s contains an event hall, exhibition center, restaurant, and a store for fans to buy anything Warhammer-related, and the US version will likely bring as much of that over as possible. However, while Games Workshop hopes to live up to the Nottingham venue’s “high bar,” it also doesn’t want a one-to-one recreation.
“We’re going to build something equally uncompromising on quality and experience, something worthy of Warhammer’s rich settings and of course the title ‘Warhammer World,’” said Games Workshop. “And of course, at the heart of all this is creating something extraordinary for all of you – the fans!”
In recent years, Warhammer’s profile has grown thanks in part to the success of Warhammer 40K’s various video games (like Space Marine II and Total War: Warhammer 40K), news of Henry Cavill starring in and producing a Prime Video adaptation, and an upcoming expansion for the tabletop game. There’ve been some stumbling blocks like scalpers just killing chances of fans buying new collectibles and not-quite successful nostalgia plays, but fate currently seems to be on Games Workshop’s side, and Warhammer World should continue that streak when it opens its doors in North America in 2027.
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2is a sequel I never expected. The original Space Marine, developed by Relic and released in 2011, was a fun, action-focused shooter, with just enough story and good ideas to keep you around until the credits rolled. A sequel seemed like a long shot, even if I and other players wanted one. Now, in 2024, we have Space Marine 2, which includes a similar, linear campaign as found in the first game, as well as a more robust multiplayer mode that might be the real reason to play this belated sequel.
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Space Marine 2, like the first, is a third-person sci-fi shooter set in the expansive (and expensive) Warhammer 40K tabletop universe. And like the last game, you play as Titus, an Ultramarine who, since the events of Space Marine, has been charged with heresy, imprisoned for a century (Space Marines live a long time), and eventually released. He was offered the chance to return to his Ultramarine brothers, but instead punished himself for his mistakes in the first game and joined the Deathwatch. Eventually, he’s forced back into the Ultramarines at the start of Space Marine 2. Here he’s put in charge of two new characters as their squad leader and helps the Imperium of Man push back a deadly alien threat known as the Tyrannids. All the while, Titus’ squad is suspicious of his past, his motives, and his tendency to question leadership.
Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment
The main plot of Space Marine 2’s campaign, which will take most players about 10 to 12 hours, is focused on how Titus, his squad, and the Imperium will win the war against the alien invaders and another, worse threat that emerges in the second half of the game. And this aspect of the story is totally serviceable and fine enough. I was curious how things would wrap up and how the heroes would save the day or fail. And if you love Warhammer 40K, there’s probably some neat lore to be found in the campaign, which can be played solo or with two other players.
But rather than all that high-stakes interstellar conflict, it’s actually the story of Titus and his squadmates slowly starting to trust each other and learn from one another that’s the more compelling narrative hook of Space Marine 2. The end of the game, which I won’t spoil, definitely left me wanting more adventures with Titus and his squad and hopefully, we’ll get to play those adventures in the future.
Difficulty problems and awesome guns
Between the cutscenes and dialogue is a whole lot of combat and action, which is Space Marine 2’s meat and potatoes. And the good news is Space Marine 2 is a joy to play. Like the original game and unlike most modern shooters, Space Marine 2 rewards players for being aggressive.
If an enemy damages you, the easiest way to recover is to quickly attack enemies to re-up your health. Wait too long, though, and you’ll have to heal using a medpack. Likewise, you have armor that can be replenished by executing aliens who are staggered or by counter-attacking an enemy. This system rewards you for being aggressive and deadly, which means you’ll quickly start acting like a Space Marine. Well, you might.
My biggest problem with Space Marine 2’s campaign (and the rest of the game) is that some ranged enemies on higher difficulties can become incredibly annoying. These few baddies can single-handedly melt your entire shields away and kill you in a matter of seconds on the game’s Veteran difficulty, which it implies is the best way to play. When I eventually got annoyed by a single, random alien dropping me from halfway across a battlefield, I dropped the difficulty down to normal. And sadly, this sometimes led to fights being too easy.
It’s frustrating that a few enemy types can disrupt Space Marine 2’s difficulty and super warrior fantasy so much. I hope a future patch either gives you a bit more health on Veteran or nerfs some of the ranged attacks so players can actually feel they are a big, hard-to-kill, and aggressive man-tank. For now, I’d recommend playing on normal or hiding behind walls during large fights to avoid alien snipers.
Thankfully, as the game progresses, these ranged enemies become easier to manage as new, less annoying enemies replace them in most fights and you gain access to better weapons. And there are a lot of guns to find and use in Space Marine 2, from fully automatic SMG-like bolt guns to slow and heavy-hitting snipers and even plasma guns, too. Each of these guns feels powerful but different, and offers its own advantages and disadvantages. I appreciated that while playing the campaign, I never felt like Space Marine 2 was forcing me to use a specific weapon. (Outside of one intense sequence involving flamethrowers…)
Oh, and you don’t even have to use guns. Space Marine 2 includes a basic but functional melee combat system that lets you block, parry, dodge, and strike enemies either one-on-one or while facing a massive group of baddies. In Space Marine 2, any weapon can get the job done if you use it correctly, so you can choose whichever one you want. It really comes down to your preference. Are you more of a chainsword guy or a melter gun dude? All that matters is you help your fellow soldiers kill thousands of aliens.
So many aliens, so little time
And yes, there are thousands of aliens to kill. Thousands. Saber Interactive developed Space Marine 2 and is using its Swarm Engine—first seen in World War Z—to power the W40K sequel. And this engine is really, really good at tossing hundreds of enemies at you at the same time.
Not every single combat encounter in Space Marine 2 is a last stand against thousands of insect-like Tyrannid aliens, but there are plenty of these moments and I didn’t mind at all. Mowing down hundreds of aliens climbing up walls and cliffs with a giant automatic bolt gun never gets old.
Later on, when the game’s story shifts and introduces a new enemy to deal with, these large crowd moments become a bit less common and are replaced with more standard third-person shooting action against tanky soldiers. It’s a shame that what might be the most unique quality of Space Marine 2, its massive crowds of deadly aliens, is partially left behind in the second half of the campaign and replaced with more generic shooter combat. Thankfully, the alien crowds made up of hundreds of individual Terrannids trying to rip your face off are a big part of the game’s Operations mode.
The real reason to play Space Marine 2
When I wrapped the main campaign of Space Marine 2 I found myself disappointed by how little progression there was as I completed missions. You can choose which weapons you start the next level with, but that’s it. No skills trees, no upgrades, and no perks. None of that. Don’t worry, though, because all of that stuff and more is in Operations, which is basically a separate game attached to Space Marine 2. In fact, I’d argue the best part of Space Marine 2 is not its heavily advertised campaign but instead this great multiplayer mode.
The Operations mode is connected to the main story of Space Marine 2, letting you see how some missions were completed while Titus and his squad were off doing something else. And like the campaign, Operations is an action-packed third-person shooter built around completely linear levels, which you play either alone or with two other players.
However, in Operations, you pick a class of Space Marine—each with their own unique abilities—and create loadouts that you can swap between at certain points in missions. These loadouts are made up of weapons that you can upgrade over time, making them deal more damage, fire faster, or hold more ammo. Eventually, you can even unlock weapon variants that look cooler and have their own special stats. Similarly, as you complete missions and earn XP, you level up your Space Marine and get access to new skills and perks via a skill tree as well as the ability to fully customize your soldier.
Screenshot: Saber Interactive
If you are someone who loves painting actual Warhammer 40K figurines, then the customization options in Space Marine 2 are going to make you drool and you’ll likely grind away in the various missions just to earn resources to unlock more paint jobs and patterns.
There’s a lot to Operations and after playing for a few hours I came away impressed. My only concern is that this mode lives or dies based on how much new content is added to it over time. Sure, for now, the eight missions you can play and replay are fun enough, but three months from now will I still want to play the same levels over and over again? Saber Interactive has already promised new missions, weapons, and enemies are coming to Operations over the next 12 months, so hopefully this already content-stuffed mode will only grow more. If that’s the case, it’s likely that a year or two from now I’ll still be playing Space Marine 2’s Ops mode either alone or with random players via matchmaking.
There’s also a PvP mode in Space Marine 2, which I didn’t get much time with but also didn’t seem like the thing I’d care about in this kind of game. It works and maybe you’ll dig it, but to me the moment everyone is a big Space Marine, the combat stops feeling special and starts playing more like a so-so Gears of War knockoff. I’m far more interested in co-op action and fighting off massive waves of enemies, so I’m more excited for the already-announced horde mode to be added in 2025.
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is a surprisingly big game. It features a robust and well-made blockbuster campaign that is only held back by some difficulty balancing issues, a really awesome and in-depth co-op PvE mode that offers a lot of replayability, and a PvP mode that is fine and might be fun for some. The complete package is very enticing and I think that, even with some of its flaws and some minor performance issues on console, Space Marine 2 is probably the best Warhammer 40K game ever made.
Warhammer 40,000‘s grimdark world of horrors both human and alien has developed a complicated relationship with elements of its audience over the years. What was once a biting satire of Britain’s conservative government in the late ‘80s has, in iteration after iteration of lore and retcons, become a messy extrapolation of the fascism and its imagery, and what it means to present that from a marketable perspective—and what that in turn means for cultivating elements of a fandom that interprets those ideas in a very different manner.
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This is a tightrope Warhammer’s owner, Games Workshop, has had to balance for years at this point—but this past weekend it found itself rocked from its balancing act as the game became the target of right-wing fans and culture war proponents eager to grift on the so-called threat of “wokeness.” The cause? A single short story in a new rulebook, or “Codex” as they are called in Warhammer 40,000, for the Adeptus Custodes faction.
In 40K, the Custodes (the chosen army of occasional actor and full time Warhammer fan Henry Cavill) are a specific branch of the Imperium of Man’s martial forces dedicated to the protection of the God-Emperor, the desiccated husk that maintains the religiofascist domination of Humanity and its territories across the stars from atop a golden throne that has kept him alive for thousands of years through the daily sacrifice of legions of people. Clad in golden, red-plumed armor, they are even above the mighty Space Marine chapters of the Imperium’s forces, and the direct right hand of the Emperor’s will. As with many elements of the game, for many years, they have so far been presented in Warhammer’s fiction from a masculine perspective, but a new story in the Custodes’ latest codex, updated for the game’s 10th edition, introduces us to a Custodian named Calladayce Taurovalia Kesh, who uses she/her pronouns: the first ever female-identifying Custodian in Warhammer fiction.
Kesh does not have a dedicated model in the Adeptus Custodes line, nor does she appear elsewhere in the new edition of Codex: Adeptus Custodes. The new book was only introduced alongside a single new miniature for the Custodes this past weekend—a Shield Captain that can be built with either a masculine head or a non-gendered helmet, as is the case with many of the Custodes models. No one knows yet if she will appear in Warhammer fiction again, but her very existence has made Codex: Adeptus Custodes the flashpoint of a new front in the online culture war, one that grew even brighter when Games Workshop addressed the “controversy” of her existence on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with a simple statement: “There have always been female Custodians.”
The statement, and ensuing backlash from people eager to paint the decision as an example of “woke” ideas in entertainment, marks an inflection point of several issues Games Workshop has had to struggle with in its fanbase in recent years. The first is the very existence of female characters within elements of its fiction. Although the concept of female Space Marines has never been “canon”—Games Workshop went as far in the 2022 updated rulebook for its prequel-spinoff game, Horus Heresy: The Age of Darkness, to state that Space Marines are raised from genetic stock described as the “biological makeup of the human male,” drawing ire from audiences who perceived the language as adjacent to gender-critical ideas around sex—it has long existed as an idea among fans who have developed their own lore and ideas for custom chapters and factions, and has been debated over almost as long.
Games Workshop has modernized its models and redeveloped factions over the years, and sometimes that has included presenting more options for female-presenting characters and infantry across the board—whether they’re for alien armies, the forces of Chaos (which in and of itself has a bunch of wild, genderless demons from beyond the constraints of physical space, let alone any perceived constraints of a gender binary), or the forces of the Imperium. The Custodes themselves received something of a sort with the introduction of the Sisters of Silence in Warhammer 40K’s 7th edition in 2017, an all-female allied faction that, in the lore, became the left hand of the God-Emperor’s elite armies to the right hand in the Custodes.
Image: Games Workshop
In turn, elements of lore established in years past have likewise endlessly been rewritten and updated as the story of the fiction has expanded, with Warhammer’s concept of what is and what isn’t “canonical” almost always in flux, things changing from one updated supplement to the next. Yes, that Games Workshop would say the existence of female Custodians has always been a thing, despite us only having just been introduced to the first-ever named one, is indeed a retcon, but that’s also just how Warhammer fiction has always worked. The Horus Heresy, the interstellar civil war that set the stage for Warhammer 40K’s world as we know it today—and now considered an important, fundamental cornerstone of the fiction—simply didn’t exist in the earliest versions of the setting. Things always change: few Warhammer fans actually familiar with the material could be pressed into saying that the original lore for the Space Marines presented in the original iteration of the game, Rogue Trader—where they’re closer to armored cops on the frontiers of the Imperium, policing gang worlds and punks, rather than the quasi-Roman fundamentalist crusaders of the modern fiction—are one and the same to the idea of the Space Marines as we know them all these decades later.
And yet, in spite of all this, Games Workshop finds itself once again having to navigate another struggle with its audience that has increasingly become a problem in recent years: how its portrayal of the fascism at the heart of Warhammer 40,000‘s biggest faction has invited opportunities for people who align themselves with that ideology in real life to believe that they have a safe space within Warhammer’s community to share and support those beliefs. Multiple incidents recently, from showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 to a European tournament prevaricating over whether or not to disqualify a player who showed up to play in clothing depicting Nazi iconography, have seen Games Workshop release statements rejecting hate groups and their place in the Warhammer community. But those statements in turn have relied on an increasingly precarious argument: that it should be clear to bigots who believe that Warhammer’s world supports them that, in fact, the setting is a satirical extrapolation of conservative ideology to its most evil and absurd heights, and that, in turn, it is making fun of their beliefs.
“The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in.Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical,” a blog post released by Games Workshop on the official Warhammer Community website in 2021 titled “The Imperium Is Driven by Hate. Warhammer Is Not” reads in part. “For clarity: satire is the use of humour, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system’s flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh-out-loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime, turned up to 11. The Imperium is not an aspirational state, outside of the in-universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilization, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see.”
Image: Games Workshop
This may have been true in Warhammer’s earliest days, but as we said: the franchise has grown and changed in the years since Rogue Trader’s satirical extrapolation of British conservatism nearly 40 years ago. For as much as Games Workshop can state that Warhammer 40K’s satire is clear for all to see, in reality, its clarity of purpose is far murkier. The Imperium is an explicitly evil organization, responsible for mass genocide, xenophobia, and bigotry across Warhammer’s stars—but the Space Marines are Games Workshop’s poster child. Their perspective is presented as heroic and noble, and as the default, in the vast majority of its fiction. Beautifully rendered artwork of their legions is plastered across posters and displays inviting newcomers to walk into Warhammer stores and learn how to play the game. They are the stars of children’s books, they are the face of merchandising efforts beyond the models themselves, they are the protagonists of dozens upon dozens (upon dozens) of video games. For as evil an entity as it is, the Imperium, and its vanguard in the Space Marines, has been romanticized as something that looks cool. Space Marines are giant, brightly colored power-armored soldiers with guns that shoot the equivalent of artillery rounds in a hailstorm of bullets and literal chainsaw swords. They fight monsters and things that look far, far worse than they do. They are meant to look cool, because that then sells you an awful lot of Space Marine models, and rulebooks, and fiction books—and soon, presumably, an Amazon TV show.
When that evil is presented as cool, it is no longer satire: it’s just something that looks cool. And in being something that looks cool, it in turn invites people who see the Imperium’s ideas about hating things that are different, controlling people through vile doctrines, and its terrifying religious dogma as ideologies that are actually worth supporting, and to feel like they and their awful beliefs have a place in Warhammer’s community, regardless of what Games Workshop says. These are the same people who blow up at the very existence of a character of a non-masculine gender, or a character of a non-white racial background, regardless of how minor or fleeting their existence ultimately is—the same people that now Games Workshop finds itself being harangued by for purportedly turning Warhammer 40,000 “woke.”
Satire without clarity is not effective satire—and not an effective defense for someone to claim as they try to push back against a hateful co-option of a universe like Warhammer’s. If Games Workshop wants a world where it can mention the existence of a diverse array of characters in its fiction without delving its fanbase into arguments and harassment, it can no longer sit back and claim satire as its guiding principal, and instead must actively push back against these bigoted elements and forcefully prove to them that they have no space in its community. To do so, it has to recognize something many people within and without the company have already noticed: Warhammer has changed since its origins, and it will always continue to do so. Defending it from becoming another front line in the endless culture war requires Games Workshop to adapt or face consequences of its own making.
Games Workshop retail staff have a rough job, from low pay to consistent unreasonable targets from upper management, so it’s with all the love and respect that I tell you about the animated lad that my 14-year-old friends and I used to make fun of for liberal use of the phrase “If a Space Marine walked in here right now…” It was always accompanied by wildly enthusiastic gesticulation meant to convey the absolute unit-tude of said Space Marines (8 feet tall in Warhammer 40,000’s lore). I bring this up because it perfectly sums up the thorny issue behind marketing these yoked stormtroopers: Space Marines are very expensive for something so small, forcing Games Workshop to make the legend of these tiny plastic soldiers tower over the reality.
And what a legend it is. The Horus Heresy book series currently consists of over 60 fat paperbacks worth of lore. There’s far too much nuance to unpack here, but it’s fair to say that when writers spend that long exploring something, they have to take it quite seriously, especially if they want to keep their readers hooked. To be clear, 40K is a fascinating, fun, creative, vast, and often extremely clever setting. But it’s also — at least as recently as 2021, according to its parent company — explicitly, intentionally satirizing the very faction that the vast majority of its lore seems so fascinated with. “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be,” wrote the novelist Dawn Powell. As 40K grows and grows, it’s becoming more difficult to deny that the portrayal of the Imperium is at least somewhat aspirational.
Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon
A quick primer: Humanity’s overwhelming presence in the 40K setting takes the shape of the Imperium of Man, where staunch xenophobia, mindless zealotry, and outright hostility toward social or technological progress are among the highest virtues — a literal “cult of tradition”. Ordinary folk live in cramped “Hives,” toiling away until death, at which point they’re repurposed as tasty, nutritious “corpse starch.” The Imperial Guard, humanity’s most numerous military force, is best known for employing the Zapp Brannigan maneuver, i.e., throwing endless bodies at a problem until it sorts itself out. As such, individual human life is less than worthless. Terra’s more elite military are the Space Marines. As 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd is to law enforcement, so are the Space Marines to the concept of the Ubermensch — a grimly satirical warning about the pursuit of perceived physical perfection and ultimate strength.
Of the 36 playable factions in 40K, around half (17) are of the Imperium in some capacity, with a further nine being their direct foil in Chaos, leaving just 10 to split between the multiple nonhuman species that populate this mind-bogglingly huge universe. Sci-fi can vary wildly in flavor, but a unifying thread is that great science fiction is almost insatiably curious. 40K absolutely shines when it mocks the staunch anti-curiosity of its human protagonists. But as the company has gradually grown to value sales over artistic intent, that lack of curiosity too often seems to be adopted by Games Workshop itself.
Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon
This fantastic look at the timeline of 40K, and how it moved from satire to something almost resembling celebration, puts it like this: “As the setting grew more mainstream, Space Marines’ [portrayal] as noble warrior monks became more and more prominent, resulting in a world where these abused, intolerant, mass-murdering child soldiers are only ever portrayed from the Imperium’s point of view,” and, in the vast majority of official artwork, “as genuine heroes.” Even the official website categorizes nonhuman armies as “the Xenos threat.” Look a little closer, and it’s easy to see the inherent satire in images of Primarch Roboute Guilliman with a Christ-like halo of light shining from the background. But unless you know what you’re looking for, this stuff looks suspiciously like the very propaganda that it’s making fun of.
This isn’t to say, of course, that modern-day Games Workshop has lost its sense of satire, and most certainly not its sense of humor. As we’ve seen time and time again in the games industry, shareholders misunderstanding or just straight-up not valuing the creative process is a depressingly prevailing theme — it’s easy for nuance to get crushed under the pursuit of easy profitability. The rule of cool sells plastic, not difficult themes. Plus, 40K is a wargame. In a setting that requires constant conflict, factions that think in absolutes become necessary. But that’s where video games like the recent, excellent CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader come in. It’d be a massive anticlimax to end a game of 40K with a conversation before it even starts, but as the setting is allowed to spread its wings in a new genre, some of that classic satire begins to flourish again.
Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon
40K is, above all else, ridiculous, and Rogue Trader hasfun with it without losing any of the campy grindhouse stuff that grimdark excels at. Characters speak in rich, baroque prose, at once excellently written and almost indecipherable to anyone not already indoctrinated into their bizarre religious neo-feudalism. You don’t even have to leave your own ship to encounter dehumanizing class structure, and each of your erstwhile associates is comically nefarious enough to be the main villain in any other setting. In Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, the evil path requires a deliberate, long attempt to stray into monstrous territory. Here, you can have several crew members executed in the first few hours without breaking character.
Rogue Trader isn’t even the first game to pull this off recently. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, despite a rocky launch, is shaping up as an excellent successor to the Vermintide series, and portrays the horrific satire of existence in 40K’s horrendous hive cities masterfully. Loading screen quotes are such pointed satire you’d have to have accidentally super-glued your eyes shut building models to miss them, with lines like “A small mind is a tidy mind,” “Blessed are the intolerant,” and “Duty is vital, understanding is not.” It seemed only a few short years ago that the glut of Warhammer games felt like a punchline. Now, the scope and breadth these games offer are starting to feel like a better medium to portray the most complete version of 40K than the tabletop game itself.
“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” That’s the tagline of Warhammer 40,000, one of the most over-the-top and brutal sci-fi settings around. But even in a merciless, brutal dystopia that grinds its people into dust, some get to enjoy being on the top of the food chain. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is about the perils and pleasures of being atop that particular hierarchy.
Rogue Traders in 40K are freelance explorers, scouting the far frontiers of the Imperium of Man. It’s a risky career, but it comes with luxurious rewards: agency, freedom, power, and a giant flagship. As the player, I explore a system of the Imperium with a loyal crew of companions, making impactful choices and determining the fate of those around me.
Rogue Trader is a computer role-playing game in the vein of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Pillars of Eternity. I create my custom protagonist, determining stats and bonuses based on my backstory, home world, and so on. I’m then thrust into a high-pressure job interview as a potential heir to a Rogue Trader aboard her flagship. Little do we know that there’s a coup in the works, and traitors aboard the ship. After a deadly struggle against heretics and demons, I ascend to the position of Rogue Trader. I’m the captain now, and I get to decide how to run my ship.
Image: Owlcat Games
This is a vast game, with tons of features you’d expect from a CRPG — companions (each with their own narrative paths and conversation trees), top-down strategic combat, and branching choices that impact the world around you. I get to make choices all day — in fact, that’s part of the gig of a Rogue Trader. Some are more important than others; whenever I get to specific points in the story, I can choose from one of three major paths. Dogmatic choices exult the God-Emperor and loathe the mutant and the witch, the Heretical options pursue corruptive power, and the Ionoclast path is the closest thing we have to modern-day “good guy” morality.
After the events of the tutorial, my beautiful voidship is run down and my staff is struggling. As the newly anointed Rogue Trader, I have to trek around the various planets of the Koronus Expanse to get a new Navigator, fix my ship up, and avoid any major diplomatic incidents with the locals. My voidship is the size of a modern city; I’m as much a governor as a captain, and I have to manage the ship, its cargo, and its many occupants.
In the process of getting back on my feet, I uncover a nefarious cult and a deep conspiracy. It’s not an easy job, but I’m blessed with a handful of companions from the Imperium to help me out. I can call on them to unlock doors or perform other environmental checks, but they come most in handy in combat.
When I meet opposition, it’s deeply satisfying to control my troops in a turn-based battle. Each fight takes place on a grid; it’s very similar to Baldur’s Gate 3 or even XCOM 2. Some positions provide cover, while others are out in the open. Friendly fire is also a very real concern. An arc of auto-fire from a bolter, or a Navigator’s third eye opening, can harm friend as well as foe. My Rogue Trader is a sniper, and she would be lost without her Senechal taking the front lines. There’s a lot of firepower at my disposal, and it’s mostly quite satisfying to use — even if I occasionally shred my poor Senechal with a devastating AOE.
Image: Owlcat Games
I can chat with the companions between battles, learning more about their pasts. Most of them have deep and dark secrets I can uncover with a little time or patience, and they have fascinating stories to tell. Abelard, my Senechal, is a guy who sucks morally but will back me to the absolute hilt. I grew to love hearing about his days in the Imperial Navy, and he was the one guy I felt like I could trust. Augusta, a Sister of Battle, starts as a one-note zealot, but cracks form in that facade when I learn about her past and doubts. Cassia and Pasqal both represent two sub-factions in 40K, and they have lots to share about the Navigators and Tech-Priests.
My absolute favorite companion is Marazhai Aezyrraesh, a dark space elf who feeds off the suffering of sentient beings. He’s cruel, depraved, and an absolute hoot. Yes, he may flay a few too many people for my tastes, but he’s the best companion to bring to a party.
In the grand scheme of things, this is one of the most complete and detailed explorations of the 40K universe you can find. The game is an homage to the Warhammer 40K RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, including Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy. I spent years as a teenager and young adult poring over these sourcebooks (which Rogue Trader isinspired by), learning more about the tiny details of life in the Imperium. Developer Owlcat Games has paid the same attention to every detail of the Koronus Expanse. I delve into ancient facilities staffed by tech-priests of the Machine God, the hostile xenos city of Commorragh, or massive cities built to honor the God-Emperor of Mankind.
I love the characters, the environments, the writing, the lore, and the flow of battles. But I have concerns with the game’s pacing. By the end of the first chapter, I had leveled up 16 times. Each level offered marginal rewards, like being able to move slightly farther during the character’s turn in combat or having a higher parry chance when being attacked. A slow drip-feed system means each level feels less important, and even though I’m growing stronger, I don’t get that sense of long-term satisfaction.
Image: Owlcat Games
It’s especially frustrating to hit a roadblock like the one at the end of Act 1, where an incredibly tough boss rolls out of nowhere and spanks my crew — and I can’t leave to go grind experience somewhere else. I eventually found out a way to cheese the fight by focusing on my melee fighters’ positioning, but it took far too long banging my head against the wall. The victory tasted like ash in my mouth after all that frustration.
Voidship combat is another aspect that feels clunky and frustrating. Like the squad-based skirmishes, naval encounters are also turn-based, where positioning is ultra important. Space naval battles should feel tense, but instead, I’m mostly annoyed at having to continually rotate my ship and set up my zones of attack. I wish I could delegate these annoyances to my Senechal — to delegate the duties of character leveling and ship combat, the better to appreciate all of the things Rogue Trader is doing so well.
Rogue Trader is a dense, vast game, and much of it has clearly been crafted with love for the expansive lore of the 40K canon. While there are small annoyances and clunky features along the way, the political intrigue, cast of characters, and moral choices have me hooked. For 40K fans, this is a rare treat — a game that digs past the heroic facade of bolters and battles and taps into the grimdark dystopia that makes this particular sci-fi setting so damn compelling.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader will be released on Dec. 7 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code provided by Owlcat Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Warhammer 40K: Darktide released on PC late last year, a dark and chunky take on Left 4 Dead set in Games Workshop’s grim, distant future. It was OK! Had its problems, but was OK. Those problems have persisted into 2023, though, and so the developers are shelving an Xbox version of the game while they get to work fixing them.
In a statement released earlier today, Fatshark say they set out to “create a highly engaging and stable game with a level of depth that keeps you playing for weeks, not hours”, but “fell short of meeting those expectations”.
As a result, they’re not only delaying “seasonal content” for the PC version, but will be delaying the release of the game on Xbox Series X|S as well.
OPEN LETTER ΤΟ OUR PLAYERS
We take enormous pride in our ability at Fatshark to deliver a game that millions can enjoy. This was what we set out to do with Warhammer 40,000: Darktide to create a highly engaging and stable game with a level of depth that keeps you playing for weeks, not hours.
We fell short of meeting those expectations.
Over the next few months, our sole focus is to address the feedback that many of you have. In particular, we will focus on delivering a complete crafting system, a more rewarding progression loop, and continue to work on game stability and performance optimization.
This also means that we will delay our seasonal content rollout and the Xbox Series XIS launch. We will also suspend the upcoming releases of premium cosmetics. We just couldn’t continue down this path, knowing that we have not addressed many feedback areas in the game today.
Thank you for playing and providing feedback. We really appreciate it. It has and will continue to help shape the game we love.
Martin Wahlund CEO & Co-Founder of Fatshark
I didn’t think the PC version was that bad! Sure it had problems, but online games from smaller teams like this often do. Then again smaller teams often don’t have the resources to do everything at once, so if this is what they want to do with what they’ve got then this is what they’re going to to do with what they’ve got!
The 2022 edition of the LACC went down at the Los Angeles Convention Center between December 2-4. Why are we only posting it now? I’ve been on vacation, give me a break!
It’s comfortably one of the biggest nerd shows on the calendar; last year’s event drew over 126,000 people through the gates over those three days, and because a huge number of them were cosplayers, the video and pics you’re about to see are of the highest order.
As usual everything was shot by our friend Mineralblu, and as usual you’ll find each cosplayer’s character, series and social media details watermarked on the image. You can see some video highlights below, or click through for a gallery of some of our favourite photos.
THIS IS LOS ANGELES COMIC CON LACC 2022 MASHUP BEST COSPLAY MUSIC VIDEO BEST COSTUMES ANIME EXPO CMV
The line between an amazing video game name and a terrible one is nebulous. Some game names try so hard that they loop back around and become good, despite being objectively bad. Some game names are good only in that they use cool words, but the vibe screams, “I was created in a vat overseen by a focus group.” And some game names, who the hell knows what was going on there, but god bless the mind who came up with it.
Occasionally, there’s a video game name that is exactly right, managing to perfectly capture the essence of the game in question. More often than not, though, game names leave us scratching our heads. This year, we’ve decided to put together a list of some of our favorite game names of 2022, in no particular order.
They are a mix of good and bad and everything in between. Some of them will speak for themselves, but we’ll have the occasional commentary for some of the titles accompanying the list as well. Preemptive shoutout to Square Enix, the GOAT at bewildering game names such as this year’s Various Daylife. Never change, Square Enix. Speaking of which…
CRISIS CORE –FINAL FANTASY VII– REUNION – Claire tells me that it’s an admittedly annoying name to type out, but to its credit, it does incorporate the themes of the game in there.
You Suck At Parking: I’m queer so they’re probably right, but still, lol.
Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories: Tell me you don’t immediately want to find out what this game is about? Spoilers, it’s as cute as it sounds:
[Search for your friends] in a town full of adorable animals with eccentric personalities. Yet under this sweet surface lies a tale of crime and corruption… Where did Cantaloupe disappear to? Is the Cavity Crew as dangerous as Captain Hamley believes? How does the Kitten King fit into Hog Town’s struggles?
Warhammer 40K: Chaosgate: Daemonhunters – Luke says: Warhammer 40K? There are too many of them! Chaosgate? Which one? It’s been over six months since this game came out and we still have to call it “that XCOM game with Space Marines in it.”
Super Kiwi 64
Unsouled: This is the most video games title I’ve heard all year.
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