Imagine, if you will, you’ve just met the love of your life. Granted, she has amnesia and you found lying on the side of the road, but you’ve found her and you love her. What would you do to try and see her again? If the answer is “get your arm ripped off by a zombie, be resurrected through weird cybernetics by your time travelling grandfather which also seems to rupture the space time continuum and traps your entire town in some sort of fragmented universe, and then be recruited by the FBI’s Space-Time Police force to hunt down criminals,” then congratulations, you’re bonkers enough to be the lead of a Suda51 game.
Romeo Is A Dead Man is precisely what you’d expect from a team like Grasshopper Manufacture: weird, barely understandable insanity from the starting intro to the end credits, held together by fun gameplay and an altogether off-kilter vibe. That being said, there are some idiosyncrasies involved in that which most Grasshopper fans would accept as par for the course, but new players might be put off by. If you’ve bounced off Grasshopper games before, this probably isn’t the game that’ll convert you. Heck, if you’re a Grasshopper diehard, it might not be the best showcase for them either.
The game stars Romeo Stargazer, who’s a sheriff in the fictional town of Deadford when he stumbles upon Juliet. The two strike up a relationship of sorts, only for Juliet to disappear and Deadford to be plagued with zombies. Romeo, with his grandad Benjamin as a guide on his back (literally, it’s a whole thing), is then recruited by the FBI to hunt down four space time criminals who are running amok throughout different periods in Deadford’s history. Throughout it all, you’ll learn more about the town, various events that befell it, and Romeo’s place within it all. Some of it is vague, some is open to interpretation, and some requires you to hunt down the various notes left lying around to really put together the pieces.
The gameplay has a larger scale than something like No More Heroes or Shadows of the Damned, as instead of running through linear levels, the locations in Romeo Is A Dead Man are larger scale and have the same design that you’d expect from a Soulslike. Various checkpoints that restore health but revive all the dead enemies, level paths that require you to go the long way round to open a door that “won’t open from this side”; things of that nature. It’s a very light influence, a sprinkle at most, but it’s there.
As you’re exploring the levels, you’ll need to travel between the real world and Subspace, a sort of digitised world that’s linked to the real world in certain ways, by interacting with a floating TV. It’s how you cleanse certain barriers or open those locked doors, but it’s the most annoying aspect of the game’s exploration, largely because of how long it can take to go from one side to another after going through the guy on the TV talking to you, the small cutscenes and subsequent loading screens. Later levels require more frequent swaps, making it feel more like a chore whenever a subspace TV turns up.
The combat is a lot better, as Romeo himself is probably the most well rounded protagonist in Grasshopper history, given that he can seamlessly switch between melee combat and ranged third person combat instantaneously. Both disciplines have four weapons each, with the melee going from sword, bigger sword, gauntlets and twin spears. For guns, there’s the standard mix of handgun, assault rifle, shotgun and rocket launcher. There’s no “certain enemies are weaker to X weapon” nonsense here, so you can pick which weapons you’re more comfortable with and rock them until the end of the game, which is nice. Granted, you might struggle to hit faster enemies with a rocket launcher, or faraway enemies with a shotgun, but you do you, pal.
Melee combat hits have that same weightiness and feel to them as No More Heroes, so getting stuck in and hacking at enemies is endless fun, but ranged combat takes a little bit more time to warm up to. At the start, it feels like it’s only useful for destroying an enemy’s weak point, but with upgrades both to the guns themselves and Romeo as a hero, the guns do start to feel a lot more powerful. Throw in Bloody Attacks, which are strong hits that restore lost health, and zombie helpers that can be grown, fused and upgraded and offer game changing combat abilities, and Romeo boasts quite a versatile combat system.
It’s just that the combat feels a bit generic to me. In No More Heroes, you had your wrestling moves to help make Travis stand out. In Shadows of the Damned, you had a literal transforming gun. Hell, Romeo isn’t even the first protagonist to have both melee and ranged combat. Killer Is Dead did that 12 years ago. There isn’t that much that feels genuinely new here, and aside from a random survival horror swing for half a chapter halfway through the game, complete with one (1) cheap jumpscare, Romeo Is A Dead Man doesn’t seem to experiment with itself like other Grasshopper games have. No genre switch up for a boss fight, no random shoot ‘em up section, no weird beat ‘em ups or anything like that. Even the horror bit only amounts to taking away your weapons and forcing you to walk slowly.
There’s still moments of Grasshopper charm to be found, with the interior of Romeo’s ship looking like some of the most gorgeous 16-bit graphics you’ve ever seen, or the process of upgrading Romeo, which involves spending currency to essentially play Pac-Man with a rocket ship. It’s weird, and I’m sure there’ll be attempts to theorycraft how to get all the upgrades while spending the least XP possible. There’s even a dating quiz minigame basically solved via trial and error that’s about as frustrating and as on brand as it gets, along with a section near the end that’s pretty trippy and cool. Can’t really say more than that.
This is still a weird game, from the story to the aesthetics and vibes. You want silly, you’ll get it by the bucketload here, but I just wish that the combat, while fun enough to hold your attention for the 10 hour runtime, took bigger swings. They’ll let Romeo giant swing and dropkick bosses in their death cutscenes? Let me do that stuff in-game too. This doesn’t mean Romeo Is A Dead Man is a bad game, there’s a lot of fun to be had here, especially if you’re an established Grasshopper freak. Personally? I think I just prefer playing No More Heroes.
Review code provided by PR for the purposes of this coverage
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