Romeo Is a Dead Man Review (PS5)

Suda51 games have a proud reputation of going against the grain, yet Romeo Is a Dead Man still manages to beggar belief.

The latest effort from the No More Heroes lead is utterly baffling in some of the best and most frustrating ways possible. One minute, it delights with comical cutscenes and unique gameplay sequences. The next, it confuses and annoys with perplexing mechanics and tedious actions.

At the end of it all, Romeo Is a Dead Man comes out the other side just about worth playing. Just.

Where do you even start?

Well, at the beginning, when the story makes the most sense. You play as Romeo, a man on the brink of death, as he’s brought back by the Space-Time Police. As a make good, he’s to travel through time and space in search of his missing girlfriend, Juliet — or, rather, monsters that look like Juliet.

It’s difficult to follow exactly what’s going on beyond the initial setup, because the plot seems to follow multiple perspectives, interjecting with random cutscenes and repeated events.

If you sat us down to ask what happens, we honestly couldn’t tell you. We watched every cutscene. We read every line of dialogue. We don’t know what happens in this game. You just have to go along for the ride.

What we can explain is everything else.

At its core, Romeo Is a Dead Man is an action game focused on melee combat. You can equip just as many guns as you can weapons, but it’s the latter you’ll spend most of the time swinging and bashing.

The roughly 13-hour campaign is structured around stages, with a spaceship acting as the hub area between them. Here, you can upgrade your arsenal, grow and improve Bastards, and speak to an assortment of weirdos. Optional dungeons can also be travelled to via the spaceship to collect upgrade materials and additional items.

You travel through space and time, using the spaceship to visit various moments in history to take down the monstrous copies of Juliet. Clear out the enemies, get keys to progress, work your way to the boss, and then it’s on to the next one.

Each level is fairly small in size, except the twist is you’re essentially only seeing half of it at first. The stages are split into “real space” and “subspace”, with the former providing enemies to fight and the latter puzzles to solve. You travel between the two through floating TVs, and it’s this exchange that represents one of the game’s most frustrating mechanics.

One television set in “real space” only ever links up to a single other one in “subspace”. At any point in time, you can have up to six TV sets to teleport from one side to the other, and there’s no way to track which one leads where. All the environments look incredibly similar, and while there is a map, it doesn’t communicate which TV goes where.

It’s very difficult to keep track of which TV you need next to progress a puzzle in subspace, especially when you die and get turned around, having respawned at a checkpoint. Romeo Is a Dead Man can quickly become a tedious game of trial and error as you work out where you need to go next.

On top of that, puzzles within “subspace” are never explained to you. You’ll simply be travelling from one TV set to the next much of the time, but sometimes, you need to form bridges, ladders, and walkways to get across. Through much confusion and, again, trial and error, you work out what the game wants from you. There’s never a tutorial; never a hint to help you along.

The two extremes of Romeo Is a Dead Man are what have you threatening to delete the game off your SSD one minute, then thanking yourself for persisting the next.

This is an inventive experience where you’ll never guess what the next stage has to offer. It can transform from a standard hack and slasher in one mission to a survival horror title the next. By mixing the gameplay up, it keeps things fresh and offers the chance to forget about those more tedious elements. The downside is they feel like a slap in the face when they return.

While basic, the combat system — which combines melee weapons, guns, and ability use — remains fun throughout. There are no stamina meters to worry about; this is a back-to-basics action experience of whaling on monsters until they die. There’s a standard and heavy attack, then guns complete your loadout, from pistol shots to shotgun blasts and rocket launchers.

Romeo Is a Dead Man differentiates itself slightly through Bastards, which are the monsters you kill. Back on the spaceship, you can grow them on a farm to nurture better levels and stats. Up to four can be equipped by the end of the game, and they can provide extra means of damage, a heal, or ways of hindering enemies.

Some will take the shape of a giant bowling ball, others will cast lightning down onto monsters, and another type damages enemies as a tornado. They provide a nice bonus to the melee and bullet action.

Taking away from the gameplay, however, is absolutely dreadful performance — even on a PS5 Pro in Performance Mode. The frame rate in Romeo Is a Dead Man is absolutely shocking. It seems to aim for 60 frames-per-second, but you’ll struggle to find many examples of it actually achieving that outside of standing still and staring at a wall.

Frame rate drops during combat are incredibly frequent, getting in the way and bringing the action to a crawl. On a PS5 Pro especially, this is not an acceptable level of performance.

It’s a shame because the title goes out of its way to make its visuals appealing and surprising. Across the spaceship and its various stages, Romeo Is a Dead Man changes art styles multiple times, from realistic graphics all the way down to 8-bit blocks — and so much in between. It’s a really cool aspect, which, combined with fun and funky music, leaves the experience looking good. If only it ran just as well.