Not too long ago, a game based on the RWBY series made its way onto Steam's early access doodad and I was kind of curious about it so decided to give the thing a try. The developers say that they're going for something along the lines of Dynasty Warrior and that is very apparent as the game throws tons of enemies at players in big groups to hacked and slashed through. There are only a couple of levels to try out so far, but it's about an hour of content so you're looking at around four hours if you want to get through everything once with each of the four characters.
Everyone does play fairly differently from each other. Ruby has her scythe and tends to swing it around in big arcs, making her more adept at taking down large packs of enemies herself. Weiss uses a rapier and attacks much quicker than the others. Blake has her sword but feels much better at focusing down single targets like bosses. Yang uses her fist weapons to punch everyone and can lock onto targets pretty easily.
Each character also has some sort of integrated gun in their weapon but I've not found much use for these things yet. There was one enemy type in the mines where it made a lot more sense to shoot at them from far away since they radiated a weird green goop and damaged for a lot on death, but other than that all the rest of the baddies needed to be dealt with up close.
The girls each have three special moves that consume bars from a meter at the bottom right of the screen. They're some sort of assortment of single-target and area of affect abilities with the different characters leaning a little bit one way or the other depending on the person. The meter itself most often gets refilled by either leveling up for a full recharge or by landing a certain number of attacks in a row without being hit by enemies for a trickle of recharges. There are a few other instances for this like when being revived by a team mate and from a few of the options in the talent tree, but these don't happen nearly as often.
Combat itself is very fast-paced as one would expect from a musou game. It's fluid with large packs of enemies to fight. There's about 10 different types of baddies so far ranging from weaker fodder that attacks in swarms to stronger ones that have much larger hit point pools, can defend themselves, and have special attacks. The levels themselves are fairly linear corridors so enemy encounters tend to be around certain areas where trouble breaks out and the girls have to fend off the creatures, or there will be an area that they get stuck in for a period of time and have to fight against several waves of enemies. There was also an escort mission trying to get a bomb on a mine cart to fall into a pit, which was surprisingly entertain considering how dull escort missions in games can often be,
This is all done in a straight up multiplayer environment where up to four people can play together. One person will be the host while everyone else hops on board. The game scales its difficulty on the fly as people join and leave the session, usually by adjusting the number of enemies spawning as best as I can tell. You can theoretically be in a situation where you're playing by yourself if you host your own game and no one joins, but I've found quite a few people playing and not run into this myself. It's actually a lot of fun playing with others in RWBY anyway. Also, more than one person can play the same character, as they don't get locked out as someone selects them. So, if you happen to really want to play as Ruby, for example, and someone else has her already, don't sweat it, you can play her as well.
One minor, annoying issue with the multiplayer is that if the host leaves for whatever reason the game will reset to the last checkpoint as it assigns someone else in the group to hosting duties. This results in having to redo some of a level, which is a bit of a drag.
Redoing content is also a thing if your whole group gets incapacitated, making it a must to try and help fallen allies back up by running up to them and holding down E until they're back on their feet. Interestingly, you can still fight while doing this and just need to focus on staying close enough to the person who is down while holding the E, which is nice when compared to other games where you might be forced out of combat to help the downed teammate. Also, there is an ability in the talent tree that significantly speeds up your ability to raise others that is totally worth unlocking.
Speaking of talent trees, there is a very simple one here. Each session, players start at level one on their character and gain experience points by defeating enemies, completing certain objectives, and finding little artifacts hidden throughout the levels. Once the character reaches a new level, they'll get a point that they can spend in the tree, which is divided into four sections, one for each of the girl in question's special moves, and another which is like a general quality of life section for stuff like health regeneration, the size of your special ability meter, defenses, and so forth. It's not much right now, but does give a little bit more customization options to the player, which is nice.
I should note that with the way experience points are awarded, it does seem as though it goes to whoever lands the killing blow on an enemy from what I could see while playing. There were cases where I'd be using a more single-target focused character like Blake and be tearing into a boss, do 60% of the damage but still not get any experience despite doing the lion's share of the work, then on another session I'd be on Ruby, dive into a pack of mobs that the rest of the group were on and gobble up a ton of experience from landing a bunch of killing blows. I'm not absolutely certain this is going on because it can be tough to see the little note that you got some XP, but it certainly seems that way.
So far, the game is looking pretty good. There are only two missions in this build of the game, one in a forest, the other spanning an abandoned city and some mines, but the environments look nice. The characters too look quite good. The show is a sort of CG anime, so it translates quite well to a game. I have noticed that the frame rate is a bit iffy right now and had to make sure my drivers were up to date in order for the game to run smoothly. It is in Early Access, so this doesn't really surprise me.
The voice acting is actually decent as well thus far, but they are just getting the voice actors from the show, so this probably shouldn't come as a surprise. The girls don't actually say very much right now, though, other than some quick comments when they kill monsters, find goodies, or enter new areas. Much of the talking is done by whoever the person overseeing a particular mission happens to be.
With that, this little bit of RWBY that is available thus far in Early Access is pretty fun. The combat is fast, the characters are varied, and the aesthetic is nice, While there isn't a lot of meat on the game's bones just yet, it is making a good first impression. Often times when I grab something on Early Access, I get it, play it for a while, then forget about it. With Grimm Eclipse, I actually find myself looking forward to future updates with more content being released so that I can try it as soon as possible.
