If you’re wondering what you’re getting into with basically any Suda51 game, you’re not alone. The mapcap game dev and head of developer and publisher Grasshopper Manufacture is known for making wild and offbeat games such as No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned, and Killer is Dead among many others. While the stories are completely different, one thing many Suda51 games have in common is that they are incredibly strange and violent and the latest, Romeo Is A Dead Man, is no exception! Welcome to Grasshopper Manufacture’s first self-published release!
In Romeo Is A Dead Man, you play…well…Romeo. You’re are Romeo Stargazer, an FBI Space-Time Agent who narrowly survived the destruction of space and time and are hunting the source of that destruction, your girlfriend Juliet Dendrobium. Or at least that’s sort of what it seems is happening. It’s hard to tell because due to the fractures in space-time, the story of your origin, relationship, job, and other details keep changing as you play the game. This makes for an immediately chaotic and confusing storyline that is hard to explain, discuss, or even follow. Either way, you are seconds from death when your somewhat psychotic genius scientist grandfather drives a bizarre high tech drill into your face and turns you into Dead Man (not the DC comics character), an almost dead science hero with the power to face the extra-dimensional threats that are scattered throughout our fractured universe. Whew. You’ve got all that, right? No you don’t, it makes no sense. Don’t worry, it won’t be clear when you’re playing either but fragments start to coalesce slowly as you work your way through the game’s strange levels and areas.
While you’re trying to wrap your head around the fragmented story and multiple concurrent timelines of Romeo Is A Dead Man, you’ll also be learning the ropes of the gameplay itself. There are two main portions to gameplay, third person combat and the ship that constitutes your home base. Let’s take a look at combat first because that’s where things start. Combat with Romeo is a fairly straightforward affair. You have a melee and a ranged weapon and can change between them on the fly and there are three additional weapons of each type to unlock with various strengths and weaknesses. The melee weapon uses the face buttons and your ranged shot uses the triggers. You don’t have to worry about ammo either, so don’t sweat it. Melee attacks feature a heavy and light attack system allowing you to improve damage at the cost of speed, but you’ll want to focus on heavy attacks more frequently because many of the popcorn enemies are more easily damaged. Light attacks are mostly for fending off groups of enemies while your ranged weapon allows you to snipe enemies, though it also gets their attention when you hit them. You’ve also got standard dodge, lock-on and jump actions, though notable the ranged weapon has a reticle but no target lock which can be irritating (more on that later). The screen is consistently filled with bloody explosions and a barrage of neon so
As the game progresses, a fairly large number of new enemies show up quickly and each has its quirks. Some stronger enemies have weird flowers growing on them and you’ll have to use your ranged weapon to shoot the flowers three times, killing them or disabling them and allowing you to attack with your melee weapon. Taking these monsters on without shooting the flowers is at best, inadvisable and at worst, fatal. Other enemies have ranged weapons and start shooting you from a distance, almost before you notice them and a few will immediately rush you. If you haven’t noticed by now, Romeo Is A Dead Man is advertised as ultra-violent and that is part of what will save you in the heat of combat. Your weapons absorb blood and as you power up your blood bar, you’ll charge a special attack called Bloody Summer that allows you to take a massive swing with your melee weapon and hit every enemy around you at once. Capitalizing on the use of Bloody Summer is important for racking up kills quickly and every successful use also heals you a little bit, which is useful. You can heal at save stations as well, but that respawns all the enemies in a level so if you can avoid it, only save when you need to unless you want to grind that area over and over.
Then there are the Bastards. Once you’ve unlocked Bastards, you’ll slot them into your quick menu (L1 + face buttons). These are essentially super-powered zombies that grow from seeds and you pull out of the ground once they’ve matured. Why? Who can say. What’s important is that Bastards are an essential combat tool. They have a wide variety of abilities and the seeds drop randomly during combat. Once matured, you can get Bastards that are sentry guns, Bastards that poison enemies, and even Bastards that heal you while you stand near them during combat. You can fuse Bastards together too, making more powerful ones and doing this vastly powers them up, allowing you to use them as enemy fodder, remote damage dealers, distractions, and healers during tough battles. Ignoring the Bastards will make you noticeably weaker, but it does take some time on The Last Chance to manage your Bastards effectively. Each takes 10 minutes real time to grow and then when you combine them in a (thankfully skippable) cage match, you have to plant the recombined Bastard and then harvest them, but there’s no timer the second time around.
You’ll also unlock a variety of badges during the course of the game that have various abilities which bolster Romeo’s weapons and abilities. Badges are applied in menu screens along with weapons and Bastards and are a bit hit and miss depending on what you end up with. Some strengthen certain abilities or powers and then decrease others proportionately. Others boost weapon strength or item drop rates. Eventually you’ll be able to unlock 3 slots for badges in addition to your four unlockable Bastard slots, significantly boosting your power and abilities in combat and making regular fights noticeably easier.
That won’t necessarily prepare you for boss fights though and they are the crux of Romeo Is A Dead Man. The end of each stage has a massive boss that is a threat to the space-time continuum and it is essential to stop them. As you might expect, these are challenging battles but the odd thing about them is that they’re wildly inconsistent from fight to fight. Designs of the bosses are entirely unrelated to the stages themselves, so tactics you’ve been practicing will not help you during the fight. The bosses are fast and brutal too, and while each has patterns of behaviour, some are significantly easier than others. Die enough times in a boss fight and the game will tell you to go build up your strength before returning to try again but that doesn’t really help either, especially once you’ve maxed out your weapons and Bastards.
The key here is typically weak points (the flowers on their bodies) and bosses move so fast and have such vicious attacks that it’s almost impossible to hit those spots with your ranged weapon (you can’t hit them with melee). If you do manage to stun them, they stay stunned for such a short time that running up on them to melee and knock their health bars down rarely works because they’ve recovered by the time you reach them and just hit you again. It’s a particularly frustrating design because it’s extremely clear what needs to be done and extremely difficult to actually do it, at least on standard difficulty.
Returning to the Last Night (your spaceship) lets you raise Bastards, cook curry (single use boosts to various stats), perform training runs, upgrade your gear, play a stat-boosting minigame that drains Emerald Flowsion (money) and even hop in your ship and fly around space looking for debris that can be used to generate more Sentreys (colored crystals) to boost your weapons. You can also travel to Palace Athena, a randomized dungeon with multiple difficulty levels (once they unlock) that allows you to grind to collect additional Sentreys, items, and Bastard seeds to boost your strength and skills if you’re struggling. Honestly, once you get far enough in Romeo Is A Dead Man, it’s pretty much mandatory to grind because you’re just not going to be strong enough to survive the bosses, which is definitely going to be frustrating for players stuck at boss fights and unable to progress.
Whether you’re frustrated or not though, Romeo Is A Dead Man is a visual smorgasbord of unique and borderline psychotic design. Every stage is thematic and gorgeous, starting with a forested area and moving to malls asylums, bizarre labyrinths and more. There are subspace areas that are done all in neon Tron-like designs too where walls and floors shimmer and shift as you past, building and disassembling themselves. And the Last Night? It’s entirely 16 bit pixel artwork, completely shifting when you drop back to your base from 3D to 2D. Everywhere you look the attention to zany details is absolutely wonderful and bizarre, even if you’re adjusting an antenna to blow off the head of a cadaver or just strolling around buildings picking up background information files and looking at the scenery. The amount of care that has gone into environment and character designs in the game is honestly spectacular and no matter how far you play or where you are, Romeo Is A Dead Man looks amazing.
The audio is top notch here too with excellent tracks thudding as the action picks up and creepy sounds all around helping you locate enemies and prepare for attacks. Sound is an integral part of Romeo Is A Dead Man and in addition to the solid sound effects, there is a fair amount of voice acting as well. Both Romeo and his grandfather are voiced most of the time, as is a significant majority of the dialogue. Not everything is voiced but you never feel like you’re missing out when it’s not. It can be irritating to have gramps yelling out mid-battle all the time as your Bastards charge but that’s not a huge deal and the majority of the dialogue is well-done if a bit over the top. Fortunately that’s entirely on-brand for the game.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of flaws with this release though. While the game itself is smooth as silk, loads fast, and controls well, there are some real problems with the gunplay and cameras, as well as the difficulty of the normal mode. The biggest and most frustrating problem in Romeo Is A Dead Man is the targeting. It’s simply too slow and too many stronger enemies are fast. Pulling your gun doesn’t let you aim fast and while you can take snap shots without aiming, you really desperately need to hit the enemy weak points, especially with bosses and stronger enemies later in the game. With how fast enemies move and how tight the window is for the targeting reticle to hit them, it’s very difficult to consistently hit the right spots. You can lock onto an enemy, but that locks the camera to them and not to their weak points, both requiring the camera to follow them and keeping you from seeing any other threats around you as they move. With a poor lock on, it’s difficult at best to hit targets consistently and that’s really frustrating when you know exactly how to beat a boss or large enemy but simply can’t do it.
The guns reload very, very slowly too, forcing you to wait for a reload to shoot again. That’s a problem because if you don’t finish reloading and are forced to dodge the noticeably fast enemies, you have to start over, wasting more time trying to reload. Chances are you’ll just give up and go full melee on many enemies, but that doesn’t work with stronger ones because your weapons just won’t cut it and unless you’ve been grinding Palace Athena hard, not all your weapons will be powered up. There are plenty of times when multiple enemies come at you from all sides too, and while sometimes you can use various Bastards to draw them off, the real issue is locking onto a specific enemy will preclude you from seeing or dealing with the others around you unless you use Bloody Summer, at which point you’ll need to charge it up again.
Finally, there’s the difficulty of the game itself. Normal mode is full of difficulty spikes at random times. Suddenly a new enemy will show up with no warning and be five times as hard as everything around it, or you’ll walk into a room and the doors lock around you until you kill everything in it and sometimes the weird eyeball creatures spawning infinite enemies. You’re rarely prepared for these events the first time you encounter them and unless you’re creeping through levels killing things one by one, it’s often tough to survive. Every time you go back to save and replenish health, you also respawn all the enemies in an area too, so the only way to survive is to move forward and hope for the best. A slow crawl with healing Bastards works ok, but this is a game that feels like it should be moving along at a crazed pace and the gameplay simply doesn’t match with that. You can’t just bull your way through and it’s not all skill-based combat either. Cultivating Bastards and dinking around on the Last Night doesn’t help the pacing either, so you go from slow crawl to hyper speed with abrupt difficulty spikes both up and down. In one stage we didn’t even die once and the boss was a breeze on the first try. The next? Slaughtered over and over with no end in sight in an interminable nightmare of frustration.
Romeo Is A Dead Man is a uniquely strange game that tries to do a great many things all at once and does some of them particularly well. The creativity is off the charts here and the core gameplay design and concepts are fun. But the game is also marred by consistent difficultly spikes and pacing issues, as well as the flawed gun targeting, leaving players feeling like the gameplay loop is a bit too out of sync with the intent of the design. That might leave some players feeling like they’re not up to the challenge. This is a game where the easy mode should have been the normal mode and Romeo Is A Dead Man suffers because of it. Some of the side games and weird minigames are clever but also unnecessary and take away from the overall experience. Unlocking levels with Pong is cool and all, but it’s also frustrating, as is trying to cook curry properly to use as a consumable item.
In short, Romeo Is A Dead Man is a clever, well-made high concept game that looks gorgeous but falls a bit flat in terms of gameplay flow and technical design. Thankfully you can play it on Easy mode and the price point at $50 is below AAA pricing, though there is no physical version available. While it won’t appeal to everyone, there’s no question that Romeo Is A Dead Man is a unique game that has to be experienced to understand it and it’s a fun overall experience that definitely stands out from the crowd!
This review is based on a digital copy of Romeo Is A Dead Man provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55” Sony 1080p TV. Romeo Is A Dead Man is also available on Playstation 5 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.