Romeo is a Dead Man Reviews
Like its Fractured Universe, Romeo is a Dead Man is a whole lot of disparate parts that don’t always add up to a coherent whole – but I’ll be damned if I can't stop thinking about it, and I respect how it tells its story through its gameplay.
Whether it’s a compelling personality will vary from person to person, but it throws so much at the wall that surely something will stick. The combat is excellent, the enemies are memorable, and the balance between macabre and levity is well-tuned. Despite the stumbling story, there’s enough bounty in the chaos to recommend this game.
The difficulty curve inverts as your weapons become silly powerful.
Looking at Grasshopper’s gameography, this one lives near the top of the ordered list for me. I was left wanting more from the love story incidentally promised by the protagonist’s names, but I was eager to keep playing to make Romeo stronger, see where I was going next, and learn more about the colorful cast of characters.
Suda51 is an artist with a recognizable aesthetic, and his fingerprints are evident on this game too, but what's missing is a sense of a larger vision for the game. . Sometimes it's charming or funny, but these moments are fleeting, and artistic flair does not cancel out the tedium of the game's combat and exploration. . It's not a tragedy on the scale of the real Romeo and Juliet, but this is one Dead Man I'm not inclined to mourn.
But overall, it’s the touches of mischief which make Romeo is a Dead Man stand out in a ‘good enough’ landscape dominated by Live Service and competitive games. Stuffed with one-off moments and boisterous action honed over nearly 20 years of carnage, it’s a game that never sits still, never settles for boring but functional and dies with a live hand grenade slipping from its fingertips.
No matter how dense it all gets, there’s always a method to the madness, a consistent, player-friendly path forward that ensures you can keep making progress at a steady clip, even when the game gets notably difficult. Any complaints I could make are nitpicks at best; if you also love Suda’s works, you owe it to yourself to play this one, and if you’ve never played any of his games before, this is an excellent one to start with.
Romeo is a Dead Man is a magnificent action game, a great demonstration of Goichi Suda's authorial talent, and, above all, a necessary reminder that big-budget productions can also be daring. It's a sincere, imaginative, artistic, human, and imperfect game that tries everything in terms of gameplay, narrative, and audiovisuals, achieving a fantastical whole that will ignite passions in fans of interactive media and scare away those who merely see video games as utilitarian, just like truly memorable titles.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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Review in Spanish | Read full review
Romeo is a Dead Man is exactly what you're expecting it to be if you're familiar with Suda51, which means you are expecting the unexpected. It's as weird as possible from the very beginning and features a collection of influences that combine into a unique and surreal journey. Actually fighting stuff is the least interesting part of the game, which is good because I find the combat a bit weak, but if you can see through that – and maybe start of the lower difficulty so it's less of an burden – this is a rollercoaster of the peculiar that you'll want to stick with to the end.
Although its flaws are rather obvious, Romeo Is a Dead Man is an unforgettable and ultimately successful sci-fi romp through spacetime.
After some dumb fun hacking at zombies, legendary developer Suda51's first original game in a decade sadly only delivers a host of incoherent disappointments
Romeo is a Dead Man is Grasshopper Manufacture at its most confident and its least conformist. It's got its fair share of rough edges, but the combat is satisfying – offering a challenge without being frustrating – and the sheer inventiveness in its myriad art styles and its bizarre plot ensure this is an adventure you won't have seen before. Anyone with an interest in wandering off the beaten track of familiar third-person action adventure games should check this one out.
It feels like they never really left their glory era.
The more I played Romeo is a Dead Man, the more I realized I was looking at the very definition of a merely decent game. The title developed by Grasshopper Manufacture is a formally competent action game, free of major flaws or obvious blemishes, yet entirely lacking in flair or interesting hooks. Beyond Suda51's signature madcap style, what remains is an "old school" video game that might entertain genre fans for fifteen hours or so, but never truly manages to excel. It is a shame about the optimization – or rather, the lack thereof.
Review in Italian | Read full review
ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN is a brilliant, fever-dream rollercoaster, made by Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture at their absolute peak. By leaving behind the empty world of No More Heroes III in favor of a tightly paced, linear, almost "Soulslike on steroids" experience, the studio has delivered its most mechanically polished and visually eclectic experience to date, and a statement against the sanitized, risk-averse nature of modern AAA gaming.
His past games have demonstrated that Suda51 is probably incapable of making a cookie-cutter action game. Yet underneath its misdirection of wild and crazy, that’s kind of what Romeo is a Dead Man really is. Strip away the disorienting style shifts and patchwork narrative, and you’re left with a fun but limited third-person action game with Soulslike elements. The game succeeds at stylistic surprise but at the expense of polished mechanics and satisfying coherence.
If anything else, Romeo is a Dead Man is incredibly sincere, which definitely amounts to something and lets you sidestep some of the more meddling parts of the whole experience. Plus it's really hard to refuse the offer to kill the past once again.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Romeo is a Dead Man is experimental in all the right ways when it comes to its aesthetic and visuals but forgets to try anything new when it comes to its gameplay. The game does pick up in its second half, featuring better bosses and levels, but at that point it is simply too little too late. Fans of Suda’s existing body of work will most likely be able to set these issues aside, but between the poor PC performance, stiff gameplay, and frustrating story, it becomes very difficult to enjoy this piece of ultra-violent science fiction.
Romeo Is a Dead Man is yet another belter from a director who marches to the beat of his own drum. It's unapologetically weird, well-conceived and just downright fun to play, and that's all I could really ask for. Every small detail forms a tapestry that can't really be described, only experienced with your own eyes. Where every design idiosyncracy might not land, it doesn't apologise for that. Why should it?