Romeo Is A Dead Man takes style over substance beyond its breaking point. A game that features cool and outlandish ideas at every turn, with a 2D pixel hub space ship, a maze navigating upgrade minigame, and outlandish sci-fi ideas, like the Space-Time FBI. Any surprises it might hold or fun ideas it has are dulled over the course of the experience, undermined by dull combat and characters that don’t get the love they need.
ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture Inc.
Price: $50
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, PC
The publisher provided a PS5 code for review
Romeo Is A Dead Man follows Romeo Stargazer, a now deceased cop reanimated by sci-fi technology, as he searches for his missing love interest, Juliet, whom he found unconscious in the road with amnesia. Naturally, she’s a world destroying monster, with different versions of herself and other lackeys across space-time for you to defeat. The story is ridiculous, filled with silly sci-fi jargon, and a few villains that get close to being interesting.
The camp, sci-fi story doesn’t quite manage to hold this experience together for two major reasons. First is the romance between Romeo and Juliet. They have some chemistry together, and it’s relatable that Romeo would ignore every red flag imaginable because a pretty girl is nice to him, but these two never get much actual time together. Most of their conversations in the present are them talking around each other as Romeo realizes he isn’t fighting his Juliet, and the past, where they talk about nothing while gently touching each other’s hands.
Without a stable throughline in Romeo Is A Dead Man, it’s hard to treat the wacky minigames and wild artistic choices as more than novelties. That brings up the second major issue with the story: bosses. You get a small story of each boss’s journey, told through the comic book pages that make up most major cutscenes in the game, but you have few interactions with them prior to the big boss fight. The boss designs themselves are too fleshy and large to feel distinct from one another later in the game.
Romeo Is A Dead Man Is All Flash and Little Fun
It doesn’t help that, between those cutscenes, there are two main gameplay modes: subspace navigation and combat. If the story or characters of Romeo Is A Dead Man aren’t enough to tie the experience together, the gameplay ruins any chances of it.
I’ll start with combat, which starts dull and remains that way. There are four weapons, but the melee combat is completely unreactive and unchallenging. The enemies, Rotters (zombies), start out primarily as shambled corpses that don’t offer much in the way of challenge or feedback, making them tedious to take down. The bigger versions have more health, sure, but most have only two or three moves, making them easy to avoid.
The action itself never advances. There aren’t big, long combos to string together, new finishing moves, or anything to change up your attack patterns. You do have a gun, but that only serves to shoot obvious weak points on enemies, with a pretty strong aim assist. The only major change is the introduction of Bastards, summonable Rotters you grow in a farm field back on the ship. These have different abilities, like making a tornado, exploding, or absorbing blood to charge your single special attack. Because these are summonable enemies, they only give you a reprieve from combat, not something to actually do. You can summon them to handle enemies for you, but it doesn’t change the static, shallow combat loop. This takes away from aesthetic choices, too. When you die during a sequence, there’s a realistic animation of a human face melting off, before a wheel is spun by your mother to give you a boost when you respawn, with the face animation reversing at max speed.
There’s a version of this game where that sequence is fun, but when I’m too annoyed at the idea of replaying any fight in Romeo Is A Dead Man, it’s hard to have fun with that stuff. Which leads us to subspace exploration, accessed via floating TVs with a mysterious, cryptic man inside them.
That cryptic guy would be cool, but he leads you into some bland puzzle sequences. Calling them platforming sequences would oversell it, but you are essentially navigating a lotus garden filled with pixel cubes to gather keys and reach new TVs, which dump you out somewhere new in the main level. These often shake out to being linear, with only a single path to follow. In later levels, you start to navigate back and forth between subspace and the real level, which quickly becomes tedious. It’s almost hard to describe the subspace in Romeo Is A Dead Man because it’s so lacking.
The main levels in Romeo Is A Dead Man lack any of the style or big ideas that the rest of the game seems to delight in. You start off in a mall that feels ripped out of Dead Rising on the Xbox 360, with other locations including a city hall building and a small series of barren connected islands. The biggest swing is the asylum level, but it completely strikes out. It attempts to be a survival horror game but removes the combat and replaces it with a tedious, looping area featuring a single slow giant monster. The only compelling part of the level is a mini-puzzle where you have to use the controller sticks to move a deceased patient’s face, which is fun to play around with.
There are side missions in Romeo Is A Dead Man, a different kind of subspace areas, and mini-dungeons. Your rewards are more upgrade materials and currency, along with new equipment called Badges. Badges give you small boosts, which add some to combat. One I enjoyed dealt damage to enemies if I dodged their attacks. It was a nice bonus for dodging all the time, even if the damage was too insignificant to rely on.
Upgrade materials can be used to increase the damage and blood gain of both your melee weapon and ranged weapon. Those are done in menus, but upgrading Romeo’s stats is done via a maze navigation game where you use your currency as fuel to gather stat upgrades. Puzzling out the most optimal route was fun, even if the cadence of upgrades felt like it swung wildly.
The Final Word
Romeo Is A Dead Man is a frustrating experience. I wanted to meet it on its own terms and let the insanity and sci-fi camp wash over me. But too much time spent in boring and tedious gameplay loops, coupled with weak character relationships, left me without anything of substance to hold onto.
MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
