“Feeling confused” and “having fun” usually exist at opposite ends of the experience spectrum for me, but Owlcat’s Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader is bringing the two closer together than I would’ve thought possible. I’ve never warred a hammer before, and when Rogue Trader was released in 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 fully occupied my time and attention. But with Owlcat’s big July 7 Switch 2 update for the game, I figured now was as good a time as any to give Rogue Trader a go. I’m glad I did. It’s a fantastic spectacle of dark sci-fi fantasy and deep strategy, and despite a few hiccups, it runs surprisingly well on Nintendo’s hybrid handheld.
Or it does now, anyway. The Switch 2 version launched in a dreadful state in December 2025, full of wildly variable frame rates, stutters, crashes, and game-breaking (even ending-blocking) bugs, but Owlcat’s patch fixes most of the major issues and even bumps the resolution up a bit. The frame rate is capped at 30fps, and dips are much less common now. When they do happen, it tends to be in the occasionally choppy transition from gameplay to cutscene rather than during standard gameplay in, say, a crowded location (and that’s usually in handheld mode, not when playing docked). Battles unfold smoothly, even when lightning and psychic blasts are competing for attention on the screen, and so far, I haven’t encountered any crashes or quest-blocking bugs. And despite being designed for mouse and keyboard, the controls feel smooth and intuitive on Switch 2.
Load times are a bit longer than I’d like, though. It takes 30 seconds or so to go from the main menu to the game itself and about 15-20 seconds when changing areas in handheld mode, though much less in docked. Saving also takes several seconds, which is annoying when an autosave suddenly forces you to stop what you were doing until it’s done. Hopefully, Owlcat can improve these in future updates. But annoying as the load times are, I’m just glad I can play a massive game like this without being chained to my computer. As an apology, Owlcat made Rogue Trader‘s expansions free on Switch 2, too, which is a nice and welcome bonus.
Though I admit, I’m not quite finished with the absolutely gargantuan base game yet. Owlcat tosses you into the deep end of the Warhammer pool, but it’s a gentle landing that lets you float for a bit. Rogue Trader starts with you in attendance to a rogue trader, which is kind of Warhammer‘s version of what England’s Elizabeth I did with her naval captains in the Age of Exploration. “Go forth and chart new lands for us! But also feel free to do bad things and wreck our rivals and act like a pirate.” The lands in question are “uncivilized” solar systems at the far edge of the galaxy, which are perfectly civilized on their own, thank you. They just don’t necessarily follow the God-Emperor, humanity’s political and religious leader. Religion is also a bit funky in Warhammer, as its boundaries with technology blur a lot. The God-Emperor’s throne, for example, is a symbol of faith and a technological masterwork despite the obvious contradictions there.
You learn all this in roughly an hour, and while it’s a lot to take in, Owlcat doles it out in easy-to-digest chunks wrapped in a pretty gripping tale of conspiracy. Your presence on the vessel of rogue trader Theodora von Valencius is part of a weird family reunion. She’s looking for blood-heirs to share her empire with and pulled a bunch of distant cousins in to see who might be worthy. Then people start dying, and losing their minds, and exploding, and getting possessed by space demons, and dying some more. You’re the captain now by virtue of not being dead, and you’ve got a psychic, a knight, and a murderous nun with a shotgun to help you run things. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with a prologue as wild as Rogue Trader‘s.
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