RWBY: Grimm Eclipse
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Rooster Teeth Games/Jordan Scott
Premise: Play as one of the four members of Team RWBY to fight the forces of Grimm, Explodey-Grimm(tm), and android guards who will ruin your day if you're in the same postcode.
Release Date: 05/07/2016
A.N: Just wanted to say that this blog finally managed to hit 500 views over the week (WOOHOO!), so thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
So, a bit of backstory: before it was a game, RWBY was (and still is) a web-show by Rooster Teeth. I quite like the show, although volume 3 did test that somewhat. There's only so much emotional trauma I'm willing to deal with in the span of 5 episodes. Anyway, the point is that I expected that Grimm Eclipse might follow the traditional curse of the movie/TV tie-in game. However, it was also made by the same people that made the show, which from experience is pretty much the best way to avert the TV show/game tie-in curse. So, now that I've actually played the thing, the one question that needs to be answered still remains: Is It Fun?
Unfortunately, like most things it isn't quite as clear-cut as that. I was enjoying myself in the early levels, after I switched to one of the easier team members and learned how to effectively use combos. However, in the later levels there's this one recurring boss monster that takes about 5 minutes to kill because it's an absolute bullet sponge. In addition, the counter prompt lasts less than a second and it does a frankly stupid amount of damage to you if you miss it. None of this would bother me so much if they didn't start trying to treat it like a regular tier-3 enemy instead of a boss. I've had to fight something like 7 or 8 of the bastards in the course of the single-player campaign, including one instance where I finished killing one after 5 minutes and thought that I was safe, only to discover that my reward for beating it was another one. I suspect that what happened may be that when they modified the multi-player to single-player, they forgot to change the health values on some of the enemies from "reasonable with 4 people dealing/taking damage" to "reasonable with only 1 person taking/dealing damage".
In the early levels it felt like the combat could never get a decent flow up, like it was almost afraid to throw more than 3 or 4 enemies at you at a time. Which is a shame, because the combat style feels like it's most suited to dealing with lots of low-health enemies in spectacular fashion, not dealing with a boss monster each wave and 5 big enemies with health or damage stats boosted to a frankly ridiculous degree. An actual combat tutorial might've been nice. My recommendation would be to play through the first mission on each character on one of the lower two difficulties and then move up to one of the harder difficulties, by which point you will have found your favourite play-style and figured out which combo is easiest to spam in the middle of a fight to deal with crowds.
The level design feels a bit stiff. The invisible wall fairy seems to have thrown themselves into their work to get over a bad break-up, so the game is linear to a frankly creepy degree given that the majority of the game is set in wide open forests. That being said, it is a smaller development team and not fencing things off means that you've got an entire forest to build and render, so I'm inclined to be a lot more forgiving in this case than I would be in something with more people or money behind it.
The story feels a bit vestigial as well; there's supposed to be some mad scientist who's been cooking up new, mutated Grimm, but his dialogue and motives seem to have been ripped straight from a Saturday morning cartoon about the power of friendship. A note to any and all people in the audience who plan to write dialogue for anything: Please, please, don't have your primary antagonist use alliteration in a final encounter. At best, it's a bit incongruous with the tone.
Full disclosure, I haven't actually beaten the game at time of writing, because the last boss fight is against a mutant scorpion that takes up about a quarter of the room you fight him in, and it commits the cardinal sin of having infinitely respawning enemies in a boss encounter. Maybe the online mode redeems it, but unless you can get 3 other friends to buy the game and arrange a time to play together, there's not much point, for two reasons. The first is that it requires an amount of coordination that playing with random people doesn't allow, and the second is that you need to be able to guarantee that you can form a party because 6 months from now, the servers are going to be ghost towns, like nearly every other multiplayer game from 6 months ago now.
It's the difficulty with making a game largely designed to be multiplayer; What happens when people move on? What's left when the multiplayer mode has managed to acquire swathes of cobwebs around arenas that once accommodated battles that made Normandy look like a pleasant beach holiday? Games need to be able to stand up on single player. If they want to use multiplayer as a crutch, then that's fair enough; but they need to be able to find something to grab on to if the player base kicks away that crutch from under them.
In summary, the game has potential, or at the very least it had potential, but at this point in time I unfortunately can't recommend getting Grimm Eclipse. If it goes on sale, or they patch it so that the single-player campaign is more than a vestigial add-on for people who can't convince their friends to spend $15 on, then by all means go ahead. Until then, it's going to be gathering some metaphorical dust in my steam library.
As per usual, anyone with a rant/review suggestion or who just wants to say 'hi!' can email me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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