Romeo is a Dead Man PC review — Dead(man) on arrival

What would you get if you took Grasshopper Manufacture’s action games from the past couple of decades, threw them in a blender, and added subpar combat and tedious, yawn-inducing level design into the mix? Well, you’d get Romeo is a Dead Man, one of the most disappointing action games I’ve played in some time. Between the rote enemy encounters, uninspired levels, and a goofy story that goes nowhere, I had a pretty poor time with this one across the board. There are a few neat elements here and there, but this is one dead man that you shouldn’t bother reviving.

The story centres around the titular Romeo, who is mauled to death by a monster and then revived with a device by his genius grandfather. His grandfather immediately dies offscreen before a data backup of him is slapped onto the back of Romeo’s jacket to guide him on his way. Romeo joins the Space-Time Police and goes looking for his ex-girlfriend Juliet (so, so stupid,) who is a wanted space-time criminal who’s trying to destroy existence. The plot is dumb, the characters are even dumber, and, while the plot seems complex at times, it’s honestly brain-dead simple, with much of its flavouring just being more stuff added into the mix.

Romeo is a Dead Man is underwhelming. You have four melee weapons and four ranged weapons to choose from. They can all be upgraded, but most of them simply aren’t fun to use. The melee combat is a lot like No More Heroes, but the ranged combat is akin to Shadows of the Damned. The melee combat is functional, but it felt a bit too stiff to me, plus the lack of cancels or any depth didn’t do it any favours. It’s mostly just hacking and slashing, as there aren’t many combos or moves on display. Romeo gets a small sword, a heavy sword, two spears, and fists, but they simply don’t do enough damage for most of the game.

You’ll want to use melee weapons against Romeo is a Dead Man’s fodder enemies which are just. . . zombies. Yes, in a game about a Space-Time cop travelling through time to stop time criminals, you spend most of it hacking and slashing groups of zombies. How uninspired can you get? They’re weak and mostly just exist to pad out the enemy encounters. Then you’ve got your special enemies that all have glowing weak spots on them. You can button mash to slowly kill them, or you can use a gun that functions akin to a bazooka and just one-shot them by shooting their weak spot.

What this means is that you’ll use melee weapons to kill the zombies, and mostly this one gun in particular to kill everything else. The gun, called Yggdrasil, is ridiculously powerful, and it’s almost like no one playtested it carefully enough since it trivialises almost every enemy you run into. Granted, it’s not much fun to use and reloads kind of slowly, but the combat is poor anyway, so there’s no reason to make it take any longer than it has to. There’s just not much reason to have both melee and ranged here when melee’s mostly useless, outside of using it to build up Romeo’s blood meter to allow him to use his special attacks.

While fighting, you do have a dodge with i-frames, at least, but it’s just so incredibly barebones. You’ll get positively sick of the enemies long before you hit the end, too, which makes all the combat encounters feel incredibly samey and old. Mash mash mash against the weak, pointless zombies and then bust out Yggdrasil to one-shot everything else. What a lark. You’ve also got equippable subweapons on cooldown timers called Bastards that you can summon to help out, but, again, the enemies are so weak and easily dispatched that you’ll rarely need any extra help outside of when groups of zombies trap you.

There were times when I literally couldn’t move at all due to how easy it can be to get locked into place by enemies. Romeo is a Dead Man loves to put you in rooms that are too small for the enemies in them. Since the combat’s pretty rigid, this leads to a pretty poor play experience. On top of that, the blood and particle effects when hitting enemies are so over the top that I often just couldn’t really see what I was doing when using melee attacks. How this made it past QA, I’ll never understand. There were simply too many times when I just couldn’t see due to how sloppy this game can be.

Romeo is a Dead Man is just crazy about making you do repetitive, pointless things. When you start most of the game’s chapters, you’ll find yourself on The Last Night, the game’s hub and the Space-Time cop ship. This is rendered as a top-down 2D pixel game because wow, so wacky. You’ll be able to run around the ship and talk to its inhabitants, who offer various boons such as a (mostly useless) shop, an upgrade centre, and the place where you’ll plant and harvest your Bastards. To do this, you have to have Romeo’s sister analyse seeds you’ve found and then plant them.

You’ll wait a bit and harvest them (you have to manually harvest each individual one by watching the exact same animation play out over and over and over again) and then equip them. You can fuse them to raise their parameters, but again, you don’t really need to use them to begin with. Once you get the briefing on each criminal out of the way, you then need to go to the computer and play a pointless, Pong clone for five seconds to locate them, then you do yet another pointless minigame where you select a location and then hold a button to move to it. Then, you watch a drawn-out cutscene where the ship fires a laser at the location, before finally doing a useless sequence where Romeo rides his bike to his destination.

These are pretty much identical every time, and they add nothing, just like how each chapter ends with an unskippable credits sequence. This game just really loves to waste your time, and the levels themselves are possibly the worst of this. You’d probably expect a game where you play as a Space-Time cop hunting time criminals out of a spaceship to have some pretty crazy locations set in some wacky time periods, right? The concept is ripe for creativity. Instead, most of the game is spent in a single American town in the 20th century in such exciting locations as a town hall, underground ruins, or an abandoned asylum. Ugh.

To make matters worse, the level design is just dull. To make matters even worse than that, you’ll jump back and forth between the real world and a cyber real that looks even more boring and basic than the regular levels. You don’t fight in the cyber world (save for the very last chapter,) so you’ll mostly be running through these while doing nothing and looking for a few things. One of these is a “puzzle” where you have to make a green ball out of an object. This is always the same thing, and you do it over and over and over again (sensing a pattern?) Other than that, you’ll mostly look for TVs that lead you back to a locked-off location in the real world. Rinse and repeat.

You’ll also find four key pieces that you’ll need to open the chapter’s boss room. The bosses are even worse than the regular enemies. They mostly have weak points that let you take them down in a reasonable amount of time, but some of them don’t require you to slowly tick their health bar down. The bosses are just as boring and tedious as the rest of the game, but many of them get a special move when they’re almost down, which pretty much instantly kills you if it hits you. In the end, I didn’t like a single one of Romeo is a Dead Man’s boss fights.

I actually almost enjoyed one of the game’s levels, which placed me in a cult compound and had me use objects to open up the way to different areas. It looked interesting, and I felt like I had to do some actual exploring. But then it just led to another boring cyberspace section, and that underground ruin part that bored me to tears. Still, I’ll gladly take that over the asylum chapter, where you’re caught in a PT loop, going through the same wing repeatedly, where one or two aspects change. Then you have to avoid a shitty monster that one-shots you, of course. That was probably my least favourite part of the game.

Sadly, the last chapter is spent in the biggest cyberspace section yet, but this time with combat. You can get stunlocked until you fall off a platform and die, which is great fun. I really “liked” the part where the game threw a dozen bird enemies at me at once on narrow walkways, so I had to kite them back to a nearby room since they’d just knock me to my death if I tried ignoring them. This was probably the most visually dull level in the game, too, and it just goes on and on. I’m not sure why, but the level design in this game just felt so far behind Grasshopper Manufacture’s other games, even ones from two decades ago. It doesn’t help that the protagonist has absolutely no personality or interesting qualities, either.

You can upgrade both Romeo himself and his weapons. For Romeo, you’ll get currency from beating enemies that you can use for an annoying minigame where you guide a ship through a maze to get power-ups that permanently increase his attributes. This is another thing I didn’t care for, as it felt like just another way to pad out something that should have been done in a menu. Yes, Romeo is a Dead Man wants you to “interact” in order to accomplish something, but it’s all usually so incredibly simple that it just feels like nothing.

As for the weapons, you’ll find a steady stream of green and red objects that you’ll use to upgrade them. You can upgrade their damage, which is good, but the rest of the upgrades just simply don’t feel that important. And the amount of objects needed for the upgrades is ridiculous, and you’ll need to farm the game’s randomised dungeons to have enough to upgrade everything, so I mostly just stuck to the spear and Yggdrasil. These dungeons are highly redundant, even in contrast to the rest of the game. They’re made of so few different rooms that you’ll likely start recognising them all on your second visit. On top of that, they feature the same small handful of enemies as every other location.

But if that sounds boring, don’t worry. There are more boring, pointless things to occupy yourself with. You constantly collect cooking ingredients, which you can use to cook dishes via a simple minigame. These give you temporary buffs and are pretty much worthless. Plus, you’ll find medicine to knock off the game’s incredibly brief, meaningless status effects. You can undergo some trials too if you want. All of this feels like fluff, and I would have preferred that the devs actually make their game enjoyable instead, but what do I know? The game also ran very poorly for me on a 3090 FE and a 5700x, sometimes dipping into the low 20s in terms of FPS. The performance was all over the place, plus FSR adds a persistent flickering effect to all sorts of graphics.

Romeo is a Dead Man took me about 13.5 hours to get through, but I also did most of the randomised dungeon sections as I ran into them, while I spent some time fusing Bastards I barely needed to use. If you’re a fan of Goichi Suda’s typical brand of wackiness, you might like this. If you actually want a good action game, though, this is far below the standard that would entail. This is a bland, boring game with crummy level design, lots of “lol so random” elements, and very little substance. There is indeed a new game plus and what appears to be a true ending, but I uninstalled as soon as I could muster.

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