Generally I wait until fully finishing a game before posting a review. However given I already have 128 hours played I wanted to go ahead and share my thoughts. This game IMO is amazing. I am a huge fan of CRPG's but I also play a bit of everything. Just recently I finished Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Divinity Original Sin 2, and BG3. All great games. That being said I am having more fun with this game thus far than any of them. I had heard of the Warhammer universe but outside that knew nothing about it. The world/lore is awesome. Went in knowing nothing and love every second. It's easy to pick up and learn. The writing, story, characters, everything has been top notch for me so far. The class/origin system and the amount of builds you can make is crazy. You could have a party of 6 warriors whom all play and gear totally different from each other. The combat is my favorite part to the point where I even enjoy doing the random events during space exploration and travel. If you enjoy CRPG's this is def a must buy IMO. I had watched early reviews and seen people mention it was buggy but out of my nearly 130 hours I have encounted none. The game also runs flawlessly. I am playing 1440P Ultra settings everything maxed and maintain around 150-200+ fps at all times. Using a Ryzen 5800X3D/RTX 4070 Ti. Not had a single issue or crash. My only gripe with the game is the ship battles. Not that it's bad as I do enjoy it and there is alot fo depth to it once you start leveling up your ship. But I just find it's not near as good as the ground based combat IMO. That said the voidshape battles are few and far between so it's not a big deal. I am about 75% done with chapter 2 I would guess and there are 5 in total I believe. I have done literally every single piece of content thus far. Explored every single planet. The game is massive and is def a must buy if you like Warhammer, CRPG's, or just good games in general.

As a vehicle for a compelling story set in the Warhammer 40k universe, Rogue Trader is a success. As an RPG, it needs some work. This game may be worthwhile purchase for 40k fans, if they can deal with the jankiness, but players who have a passing interest (or less) in 40k will want to avoid. For me, I've played a ton of CRPGs, I find the 40k setting fairly interesting, but I decided to quit Rogue Trader shortly into Act 2.

Good things:
Everything related to the storytelling: Writing, voice-acting, fidelity to the tone and lore of the setting, and the plot (as far as I got in it, anyway). All top-notch.

Ship combat seems pretty good, but I only had a single encounter before I quit.

Bad things:
A truly dizzying level of options for talents and modifiers to take when you level up your character. This may sound like a good thing but by the time I was done act 1, I struggled mightily to keep track of which characters had what modifiers and what situations triggered which bonuses. A not-trivial amount of my time playing was spent reading and re-reading tool-tips to figure out what all these abilities DO. It's so overwhelming that I actually began dreading leveling up my characters, which is remarkable.

A lot of these abilities are just not interesting or too situational. Thinks like "use this while withing 5 squares of 2 or more allies during a full moon to get a +14% bonus to laser damage" or whatever.

While it isn't overly difficult, combat takes a long time and can be a slog, and since many of the abilities you can take are of marginal usefulness (see above), you'll mostly just rely on your core strong abilities, which gets old quickly.

Bad AI. Enemies will consistently walk into hazards needlessly and use auto-fire in a way that is more dangerous to other enemies than it is to you.

Too many needless skills. Skills like Athletics and Carouse that have no combat or dialog application but occasionally allow access to a piece of loot on the map are a waste of design space.


Conclusion:
For me, the tedium of combat and leveling characters was too much for the story and setting to overcome. You mileage will vary depending on your level of 40k fandom. I suspect there are some out there will will find enough to like.

This is one of the best depictions of the 40k universe, yet it's such a buggy mess that I cannot recommend it. I'm literally unable to complete the game, and after doing it 2-3 times, I'm done trying to mod my way through progression.

Side objectives, side stories, minor plots - at least 10-15% of it is/was broken. I'm in the last stage of the game so don't know how much they fixed, but what I do know is that I literally can't finish it. Landing on the next plot planet actually spawns me in the instance of the planet I already visited.

Get it for <$10 with the upcoming DLCs like 5 years from now when either devs or the community fixes it.