ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN
For: XBox S/X, PS5, PC
From: Grasshopper
Manufacture
★★★+
Nope.
Normally I’d start a review by explaining a bit about the setting of the game and what the protagonist’s goal is as you set out to play it, but it may give you a decent idea of what the Romeo is a Dead Man experience is like that here, this is actually a bit difficult. Broadly though, you play as the titular Romeo, a young cop in a small town who in a truly whirlwind beginning to the game is fatally mauled by zombies, only to be saved by advanced tech provided by his time-travelling grandfather (who then becomes animated embroidery on his jacket) and signed up to be an (FBI) agent for a space-time police force of sorts who are trying to piece things back together after time and space were shattered by hunting down evil individuals across the bits of time and space left — a number of whom are evil manifestations of Romeo’s pre-mauling girlfriend Juliet. Simple, right?
Romeo is a Dead Man is, when you boil everything down, a fairly standard action sci-fi slasher, but it’s all the bonkers stuff surrounding this, rather than the basic gameplay, that makes it worth a look. Between missions you’ll find comic book style cutscenes, minigames, a retro-graphics base environment where you socialise with your space-time force colleagues — one is a cat, another is Romeo’s mum — claymation sequences, and a vast, vast array of curry ingredients. (Did I expect this game to teach me some facts about turmeric? No. No I did not.) There are nods here for things ranging from the ‘‘All Your Base’’ meme to dating sims, farming games, retro arcades, Back to the Future and much more besides. All the while the story hurtles along with little sense of logic and daring you to try to keep up, while random and mysterious characters deliver lines like ‘‘It is the ninth revolution against the absurd’’. It’s all aggressively zany — and at times a bit exhausting — but you couldn’t call it predictable.
Come mission time, Romeo takes on a range of evil forces Devil May Cry-style with a range of both melee and ranged weapons, also empowered by a powerful attack he can unleash once he’s filled his ‘‘blood meter’’ — which fires off with a fun splash of neon — and supplementary abilities that are tied to some business back at home base where his sister helps him grow zombies in the ground from collectable seeds (‘‘Around here we call them Bastards,’’ she helpfully tells him) who can be bred to say, roll a giant bowling ball at enemies. (It’s that sort of a game.) It’s basic button-mashing fun, but the imagination on display elsewhere in the game is a little missing here — perhaps curtailed a bit by a modest budget. Enemies consist of zombies and the odd tougher Resident Evil-style mutant with special attacks, and the environments are weirdly pedestrian, like a 1980s mall or a small town government building (though given everything else, I wouldn’t rule this out as being some sort of deliberate irony). Boss fights with the likes of giant heads and blobby beasts made out of human skulls are a little more interesting though, and there’s also some variety to be found in Romeo’s frequent trips to Subspace, a sort of level-within-the-levels composed of floaty Tron-esque blocks and platforms where the game eschews combat and becomes more of a platformer / navigation puzzler. Combat challenge arenas and repeatable training exercises also eventually become available for you to perfect your skills or get the rewards of some rarer ingredients for that vast variety of ability-gifting curries (just don’t leave your katsu down for too long while frying).
If all this is sounding kind of incoherent, that’s probably the point. Romeo is a Dead Man may in terms of its actual play be a fairly standard hack ’em up, but everything else is designed to make playing a fairly standard hack ’em up as quirky and left-field and ‘‘what now?!’’ as possible. Think of it as being a ham and cheese sandwich in which the ham for some reason is blue, and the cheese is made out of beaver milk. If the idea of adding a bold side dish like that to your gaming diet appeals, look no further.
