Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51, is one of those authors who has such a style that it doesn’t take you long to recognize his games. In the last twenty years, we got, among others, the cult Killer7, the iconic No More Heroes, and my personal secret favorite – Killer is Dead. All of them are action games with a brand of bizarre, which persistently walk the fine line between crazy art and total nonsense, and that’s why they often stick in your head. Romeo Is a Dead Man is no different. And that is simultaneously his greatest strength… but also his greatest weakness. Let’s see why.
| Initial price | Reviewed version | Reviewer copy |
| 49€ | PC | Provided by publisher |
Bizarre and a bit tired
As with most Suda51 games, “bizarre” is still the most accurate and powerless word to describe what’s going on here at all. In short: you are Romeo Stargazer, a young sheriff’s deputy who, in the first five minutes of the game, experiences a brutal attack by a mysterious beast that “eats” half of his face. And just when you think that’s crazy enough, his time-traveling grandfather shows up, saves him from the brink of death, and turns him into some kind of crazy Power Rangers cyborg. He is baptized by the Dead Man, and then, of course, is recruited by the FBI’s space-time police to hunt down alternate, monstrous versions of his quasi-girlfriend Juliet across the multiverse.
Wow!
Silly, but actually pretty straightforward when you read it again, right? A central mystery, a tragic main hero, a grandfather-helper, a motley crew at the FBI agency and a clear main villain. Eh, if things were really that clean and tidy, it wouldn’t be a Suda51 game. And let’s face it – I always expect a certain amount of craziness at the Court, that’s part of the package. It’s just that in some previous games these crazinesses were more often a spice, and here they too often become the main dish.
You’re never sure if what the game is telling you is important or just Suda51 being weird.
The problem is that the premise and everything that comes after it is told in a confusing and non-linear manner. And approximately 70% of everything that happens seems like pure nonsense, while the remaining 30% still has a point or is directly related to the main narrative. The worst part is that during gameplay it’s often difficult to tell which group what you’re watching falls into – whether this is an important scene or another moment that exists just to be wacky. Then you constantly have the feeling that something is missing and that the context escapes you, and you very easily get to the point where you start skipping dialogues, movies and everything that smells like a narrative, just to get back to playing.
At the same time, the game jumps between various narrative styles: part of the story goes through classic films, part through comic panels, part through other forms, and the game is often self-aware of its own thick. And there are things that will be really cool. Let’s say you have a HUB that switches the perspective to isometric, and the presentation and music throw you straight into the best times of pixelated 16-bit feel good games.
However, there is more often the feeling that this self-awareness and “artsy” presentation are not there to enhance the story, but to serve as a kind of shield: as if the game is counting on you to swallow its confusion and gaps more easily because, well, that’s the way it is. No, unfortunately the story here is quite weightless and often weird just for the sake of being weird. And Suda51 is the strongest when it is strangely not just a decoration, but when there is a clear idea behind it – something that, despite all the chaos, really has weight and pulls you forward.
Multiverse of madness
Where the story isn’t helped by the chaotic jumping around, at least the gameplay partially benefits from it. The game pushes you forward quite effectively because there is a constant feeling of curiosity – where will they send you now, what will be the next turn and in what tone will the next hour be played. And really, when you are thrown into a new location for the first time, they leave a good impression. The shopping center full of zombies has that 80s feel, and the creepy madhouse makes a sharp cut and momentarily turns the game into a mini-horror with a great atmosphere.
The problem is that most of these locations, no matter how much potential they have conceptually, end up being rather generic and without identity. There are no funny visual jokes, interesting ones easter eggova or scenography that tells its own story, but often you only get a series of corridors and rooms where your only concern is to find a door you haven’t passed through so far. And that’s a shame, because the ideas are juicy, but the execution is too functional, almost sterile.
The location ideas have tons of potential, but the execution is often generic.
Even worse: the game occasionally throws you out of these levels into a kind of Subspace, a labyrinthine cyber-space that looks cheap and uninteresting, and serves as a break in the action in which you solve puzzles that are, to put it mildly, totally unimaginative and do not change from the beginning to the end of the game. All of this together looks rather grayish and impersonal, with flat lighting, a dull color palette and a generally somewhat dated visual impression. It’s not an aesthetic disaster and the game definitely has its moments, but you constantly have the feeling that the game is much more creative in its idea than in the execution of the space itself.
The most imaginative location is the aforementioned HUB in the shape of a spaceship. That’s it pixel art the presentation and music really sit down, and along with the charming and twisted crew of the ship, you also have some mini-games for character progression like cooking, taking quizzes, and the activity of raising zombies to help you in battle. All in all, something that gives the game a ton of personality that all the force of madness in the rest of the campaign often fails to bring to the surface.
A pixelated HUB and progression mini-games are part of the whole package.
This brings us to combat, which, along with the aforementioned puzzles, is actually the main activity in most of the game. First and foremost: Romeo as a protagonist is really fun to control. It is fast, responsive, its movements are smoothly and finely animated, and the whole feeling of the fight has the necessary weight. Every blow is felt, the effects splash in all directions, and the opponents’ heads literally explode when they fall, so you have the level of dopamine you’ve never seen before. headshotovi in Destiny they wouldn’t embarrass.
And it all works well… at least at first, before the lack of enemy variety and mechanical simplicity start to take their toll. You have four melee weapons and four ranged weapons at your disposal, and everything mostly revolves around the standard archetypes: strong but slow – fast but weak, something with longer range and medium damage, and of course the middle ground. Numerically, it is not a disaster, but the problem is that this arsenal, apart from statistical improvements, does not evolve into anything new during the game.
The fight has its moments in the short term, but in the long term it is quite repetitive.
Melee weapons live on a light and stronger attack (plus a special move that can restore your health), and ranged weapons – just shoot. There are no alternate fire modes, no secondary functions, no twists to force you to change your pace or think differently. And when you add to that that the defensive options you have are practically only avoidance, without blocking and parrying, the picture becomes clear: for about 12 hours of the campaign, you spin the same couple of moves against the same couple of enemies, which, despite the short-term infusion of dopamine, is difficult to sustain in the long run and somewhat repetitive.
In terms of variety, the only saving grace is the aforementioned zombies you breed and boss opponents. These zombies, called Bastards in the game, are essentially a really imaginative special attack system where you can call on each one to unleash their effect in battle. Throughout the game, you collect their seeds, literally sow them, grow and harvest them, give them some silly random name, and then combine them with other Bastards to power them up.
Gardening in this game is a progression system – only you grow zombies instead of plants.
And there really is everything: electric attacks, localized time slowing, a scream that knocks opponents to the floor, debuffand even variants that practically draw you additional weak points on enemies. Fortunately, recharge they are relatively fast, so you can often put them in the rotation, and they are the spice that somehow keeps the fight above water when it starts to get repetitive.
Bosses with imaginative design at least spice things up a bit by having a wider arsenal of attacks, forcing you to target weak spots and watch out for AOE attacks, but that’s about the ceiling when it comes to combat depth.
It does it all on Unreal Engine 5 and it’s definitely not the worst optimized UE5 game we’ve seen. But it is not without its flies. There are occasional stutters and drops in performance when the screen is loaded with effects, but nothing that significantly spoils the impression.
The biggest problem though, especially for those who count on it upscalerima (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) to push the game past the “magical” 60 fps, is that they simply don’t work in practice. At least they didn’t work for me during this review, and from the impressions I’ve seen online along the way, I’m clearly not an isolated case. Apparently the situation is more stable on consoles, but for PC I would recommend waiting for at least one update that will fix it upscalere and potentially polish the rest of the technical details along the way.
Romeo is a Half-Baked Man
Despite the relatively negative tone of the review, I can’t say that I didn’t have fun with Romeo is a Dead Man – purely due to the fact that the game is so different from everything that is served to us every day. That has always been the strength of Suda51 games and it’s no different here.
Admittedly, when you scratch beneath that bizarre-stylistic surface, it quickly becomes clear that Romeo lacks substance, purpose, and a more coherent idea that would tie it all together into something more than a series of silly scenes. I have a feeling that a cleaner vision would automatically bring a more focused realization with better levels, more meaningful pacing, deeper combat, and a story that isn’t just a smoke screen.
But come on, at least at no point does the game sell itself as some kind of AAA experience, nor does it pretend it wants to be, which is also evident in the slightly lower price. And that’s exactly why it’s easier to forgive her for having more style than substance, especially if your goal is simple: take a fantastic weapon and use it to turn zombies into pixelated confetti.