Playing Rooster Teeth’s RWBY Game With Three Like-Minded Huntresses

Released last year as a fan game for Rooster Teeth’s hit animated webseries, RWBY: Grimm Eclipse returns as an official four-player co-op action game on Steam Early Access, and it’s a blast.

Jordan Scott created his original version of RWBY: Grimm Eclipse as a love letter to the late Monty Oum’s fan-favourite animated series, and the animated series loved him right back. Rooster Teeth picked up the game as an official companion piece to the series, and now it’s available for anyone to pick up and play for $US14.99 ($20) on Steam.

Quite a bit has changed in the transition between fan-game and real product. Now all four of the show’s core group of Huntresses — Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang — are playable, with players choosing one of them before dropping into an online session. Grimm Eclipse now features an all-new RWBY storyline, tons of black-and-white enemies to pummel and voicework from the original cast.

It’s a bit rough around the edges. The sound is unbalanced, some actions cause characters to float across the ground briefly rather than run or walk, and it feels like some enemies and on-screen prompts are popping up at the wrong time. The fan-game made heavy use of borrowed assets — mainly sounds from games like League of Legends and Super Smash Bros. Brawl — so those had to go.

Still the groundwork for a very entertaining co-op experience has been laid, and when you’ve got a team of four players being swarmed by massive hordes of enemies it’s a damn good time.

RWBY: Grimm Eclipse is available now on Steam Early Access, and it’s off to an excellent start.