Speedrunner of the game here.
I wanted to wait until I had 2000 hours in the game until I felt I could give the game a fair review, based on its appeal to both advanced and casual players. 3 and a half years later and here I am.
Firstly, let's talk about its appeal to casual players. To be honest, it does feel like one of those games you either love or you hate and I see most people often tipping towards the latter. I think a large portion is to do with the game's formula, in that it basically composes of "go to X area, you get locked into it, kill all enemies to proceed" and that's each and every mission besides them adding in things to try and make it feel different like "protect the security node" or "wait until the upload time finishes" but the formula of killing stuff remains the same.
Now, this wouldn't be so much of a problem if you could throw out combo after combo, but you can't really do that in this game. Not normally, anyway. You have light attacks which you can follow up with a heavy attack to do your typical hack and slash combos, but then after you execute a combo there is a "pause" where you character has to complete the animation of the attack before you can perform anything else. Given the simplicity of how few attacks there are to choose from and the fact that none can really flow into each other, coupled with the concept of the game is just "go here, kill X amount of enemies" it's no surprise that the gameplay can get stale very quickly to many players.
The game is not without its charm, however, and is very fun imo to play with others in multiplayer. Campaign is pretty chill and you're working together for a common goal of killing grimm to beat the mission, so people you meet are generally nice and competitiveness is low. People won't bark at you like it's a League of Legends lobby, you usually end up having a nice chat about RWBY or whatever else or, at the very least, spamming the emote button at each other after clearing an area. Couple this with a teamplay playstyle of finishing others' attacks and reviving/assisting others when they need help, you generally have a good atmosphere with other players since you know you're in it together.
Now let's talk advanced play, which links in to why I picked up this game to begin with and ended up running it for 3 and a half years. This game is broken. Like, I mean, MEGA broken. To the point where you are rewarded for breaking it in the forms of faster movement and enhanced combat. The beauty of such? It is limited a lot by your own input speed, considering the fact it is an unintended mechanic, there are no railguards to its use. What do I mean? Well, let me explain:
All air attacks or abilities that make you airborne (like a character doing a blackflip after a combo or even just a jump and air attack, basically ANYTHING that puts you into the air) can be animation cancelled by pressing the counter button (PC: F, Xbox: B, Playstation: O) to drop instantly back to the ground again. The only exceptions to this are Ultimates and Team Attacks which have set animation frames so cannot be cancelled, even if they place you into the air. The act of cancelling an air animation in the game is known as counter cancelling.
With this tech, it means we can break the game to the point where you are almost playing a game within a game. You are playing a crazy actions per minute button mashing simulator while bodyparts of grimm go flying in all different directions, while using RWBY:Grimm Eclipse as a framework to host your gamemode. If you like technically-advanced and high actions per minute gameplay that always keeps you on your toes, then, by using this tech, RWBY:Grimm Eclipse becomes one of the best choices out there to test your abilities. You can go from a very simple hack and slash game to suddenly feeling like a raid boss amongst 40 enemies simply because you have such a strong tool in your kit. Why is it strong, though? We get to cancel animations, so what?
Well, let's take Yang for example. In the game, Yang has an aerial heavy that strikes downwards in a single hit. After which, she remains in the air briefly before she comes back down to land before you could do it again. With counter cancelling, however, we don't need to wait that extra air time once the attack has been executed and can then press counter to drop instantly to the ground and then do the attack again. Now, what if we push this even further? You are allowed to do multiple inputs in the game to execute multiple abilities at the same time, provided they can be executed together. For example, you could press jump+dodge at the same time to jump and dodge together, but it wouldn't work for pressing light attack+heavy attack at the same time since they are 2 separate animations and would conflict for being used at the same time. With this in mind, we can press jump+heavy at the same time on Yang so that she doesn't reach the full height of her jump because she just went into an attack right after, so when I press counter after that double input I land even faster than if I had pressed jump and then heavy after each other. This means you can start to condense down multiple attacks into a very short timeframe and given the fact there are no railguards because the mechanic is unintended, it very nearly comes down to the faster you are = the more damage you deal (if you go too fast then you can possibly cancel the attack animation, however. BUT the speed you would need to achieve this is a lot LOT faster than you might think).
Now, let's couple this with movement tech. Jump and dash is the fastest way you should be able to move in the game normally, but since we can counter air attacks we can actually move faster than jump and dash with counter cancelling tech. We will still use the jump and then dash, but now we will add an attack afterwards (so counter cancelling can work, it won't drop you down if you press counter when no attack is used) and then press counter. So the movement tech is: Jump, Dash, Attack, Counter. The attack used does not really matter, but generally you stick to light or heavy attack and just use what you prefer (Ren cannot use heavy attacks for this, however). With this, you can now drop instantly to the ground after gaining the speed benefit of the jump dash and can now do it again and keep chaining that together to start zooming across the map. Using counter cancels like this to move fast is known as bunny hopping.
So we just took Yang from very simple gameplay to suddenly being a demon that can spam her aerial heavy attack to fight (faster your speed the better, use jump and dash along with it as well as movement controls so you can move and attack at the same time. A little hard for mouse and keyboard users but not impossible, controller users may have an easier time) and when we're moving around the map or to the next area we use bunny hopping to move quickly between points.
Overal I'd say:
Casual rating 6/10 (might be a bit stale after an hour or two of gametime and not much incentive for repetitive playthroughs unless you play with friends. Fun to play as your favourite characters though)
Advanced play rating 9/10 (it still has its limitations and an overall basic game formula, but mashing buttons with game tech is the one of the most fun times I've had in gaming, period).
It's hard to truly convey just how fun and intricate this game can be when people haven't played (so no context) or if my explanations in general weren't very clear. Hopefully I managed to express it well enough. If anyone has any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them when I can.
GL&HF
