Romeo Is a Dead Man assessment – a misfire from a storied gaming provocateur | Games

Ever since he baffled GameCube house owners with 2005’s Killer7, Japanese recreation director Suda51 has had a repute for turning heads. From parodying the banality of open-world video games with 2007’s No More Heroes to collaborating with James Gunn for 2012’s pulpy Lollipop Chainsaw, his video games typically provide a welcome reprieve from soulless, half-a-billion-dollar-budget gaming blockbusters. It was with appreciable pleasure that I fired up Suda’s first new recreation in 10 years.

The recreation kicks off with a slick cartoon that exhibits 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 – after which we’re off. Almost instantly I’m bombarded by an impenetrable wall of proper-noun nonsense. It’s like this for the subsequent 20 hours.

Romeo is now a “deadman” – a being trapped between life and demise – who has been recruited by the FBI’s house time police to cease interstellar criminals from terrorising the cosmos. Along the best way you’ll be taking down wave after wave of unstoppable zombies – identified on this world inexplicably as “bastards” – whereas a girl known as Juliet sporadically seems in several dimensions, terrorising your goals in PS2-era 3D, earlier than battling you as an finish of stage boss. If this description sounds prefer it’s been written by a child who hasn’t finished his homework, I’m sorry to say that’s as a result of even after enjoying this recreation to completion, I’m nonetheless none the wiser.

In an interview final 12 months, Suda cited Rick and Morty as a significant affect on Romeo Is a Dead Man, struggling to clarify the sport’s story whereas espousing his love of rooster katsu and sticking it to “the bastards”. I remained hopeful that there could be a deeper that means beneath all of the bafflingly juvenile nonsense, however extra idiot me.

Outside of the story, the sport itself initially appears promising. Main missions see you swinging a legally distinct lightsabre as you carve up wave after wave of “bastards”, enjoying like a souped up successor to the seminal No More Heroes collection. Hacking and slashing at zombies is dumb enjoyable, with trendy assaults inviting screen-filling bursts of color. The boss fights are enjoyable and stylised, and all the pieces feels satisfyingly chaotic. Yet as the sport drags its nonsensical story kicking and screaming to the top, even the sport engine decides it’s had sufficient. Despite reviewing this on a PS5 Pro, I discovered that the body fee frequently slowed to a crawl as I used to be mobbed by waves of enemies in later ranges, making an already flawed recreation nearly unplayable.

In between inter-dimensional killing sprees, gamers roam a charmingly retro hub world – your FBI-branded spaceship. Here all the pieces is depicted in 16bit-era 2D pixel artwork, as you roam the spacecraft chatting to Romeo’s shipmates – which embrace an historic Roman god, a speaking cat and a Jamaican journalist. You can purchase new stuff, play mini video games and have a tendency ability-granting crops impressed by the completely different zombies you slay alongside the best way.

One factor Romeo Is a Dead Man has going for it’s it’s all the time fascinating to take a look at. From totally animated cartoon sequences to PS2-tribute polygons and sculpture-esque artwork, it is a recreation that options extra disparate visible kinds than most recreation publishers’ whole catalogue. Yet whereas it seems eye-catching in trailers, the ultimate playable collage in the end feels much less auteur-led and nearer to a toddler mashing collectively all of the disparate contents of their toybox.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is actually not predictable. It’s able to getting a baffled smile out of you, and its anti-gaming-establishment angle may have diehard followers looking for an irony-drenched motive to have a good time it. But the place No More Heroes’ simplistic yarn saved the fights flowing and the jokes rolling, Romeo Is a Dead Man’s sprawl feels disappointingly directionless. Instead of coming collectively as a kitschy universe-spanning epic, this sci-fi story is unfortunately advised with all of the mastery of a rambling drunk in Wetherspoons.