Ever since he baffled GameCube owners with 2005\u2019s Killer7, Japanese game director Suda51 has had a reputation for turning heads. From parodying the banality of open-world games with 2007\u2019s No More Heroes to collaborating with James Gunn for 2012\u2019s pulpy Lollipop Chainsaw, his games often offer a welcome reprieve from soulless, half-a-billion-dollar-budget gaming blockbusters. It was with considerable excitement that I fired up Suda\u2019s first new game in 10 years.<\/p>\n
The game kicks off with a slick cartoon that shows our hero, Romeo Stargazer, being eaten by a zombie. Hastily resurrected by his zany scientist grandfather, Romeo returns from the brink imbued with new powers \u2013 and then we\u2019re off. Almost immediately I am bombarded by an impenetrable wall of proper-noun nonsense. It\u2019s like this for the next 20 hours.<\/p>\n
Romeo is now a \u201cdeadman\u201d \u2013 a being trapped between life and death \u2013 who has been recruited by the FBI\u2019s space time police to stop interstellar criminals from terrorising the cosmos. Along the way you\u2019ll be taking down wave after wave of unstoppable zombies \u2013 known in this world inexplicably as \u201cbastards\u201d \u2013 while a woman called Juliet sporadically appears in different dimensions, terrorising your dreams in PS2-era 3D, before battling you as an end of level boss. If this description sounds like it\u2019s been written by a kid who hasn\u2019t done his homework, I\u2019m sorry to say that\u2019s because even after playing this game to completion, I\u2019m still none the wiser.<\/p>\n
In an interview last year, Suda cited Rick and Morty as a major influence on Romeo Is a Dead Man, struggling to explain the game\u2019s story while espousing his love of chicken katsu and sticking it to \u201cthe bastards\u201d. I remained hopeful that there would be a deeper meaning underneath all the bafflingly juvenile nonsense, but more fool me.<\/p>\n
Outside of the story, the game itself initially seems promising. Main missions see you swinging a legally distinct lightsabre as you carve up wave after wave of \u201cbastards\u201d, playing like a souped up successor to the seminal No More Heroes series. Hacking and slashing at zombies is dumb fun, with stylish attacks inviting screen-filling bursts of colour. The boss fights are fun and stylised, and everything feels satisfyingly chaotic. Yet as the game drags its nonsensical story kicking and screaming to the end, even the game engine decides it\u2019s had enough. Despite reviewing this on a PS5 Pro, I found that the frame rate regularly slowed to a crawl as I was mobbed by waves of enemies in later levels, making an already flawed game almost unplayable.<\/p>\n
In between inter-dimensional killing sprees, players roam a charmingly retro hub world \u2013 your FBI-branded spaceship. Here everything is depicted in 16bit-era 2D pixel art, as you roam the spacecraft chatting to Romeo\u2019s shipmates \u2013 which include an ancient Roman god, a talking cat and a Jamaican journalist. You can buy new stuff, play mini games and tend ability-granting plants inspired by the different zombies you slay along the way.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t let the bastards bring you down \u2026 Romeo Is a Dead Man. Photograph: Grasshopper Manufacture Inc<\/p>\n
One thing Romeo Is a Dead Man has going for it is it\u2019s always interesting to look at. From fully animated cartoon sequences to PS2-tribute polygons and sculpture-esque art, this is a game that features more disparate visual styles than most game publishers\u2019 entire catalogue. Yet while it looks eye-catching in trailers, the final playable collage ultimately feels less auteur-led and closer to a child mashing together all the disparate contents of their toybox.<\/p>\n
Romeo Is a Dead Man is certainly not predictable. It\u2019s capable of getting a baffled smile out of you, and its anti-gaming-establishment attitude will have diehard fans searching for an irony-drenched reason to celebrate it. But where No More Heroes\u2019 simplistic yarn kept the fights flowing and the jokes rolling, Romeo Is a Dead Man\u2019s sprawl feels disappointingly directionless. Instead of coming together as a kitschy universe-spanning epic, this sci-fi story is sadly told with all the mastery of a rambling drunk in Wetherspoons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ever since he baffled GameCube owners with 2005\u2019s Killer7, Japanese game director Suda51 has had a reputation for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-291807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}