Romeo Is a Dead Man Review: Inventive, Baffling, and Broken (6/10)

Developer	Grasshopper Manufacture / Suda51
Genre	Action / Hack-and-Slasher
Campaign Length	Approx. 13 Hours
Platform Tested	PS5 Pro
Review Score	6/10 (Not Bad)

The Suda51 Special: Inventive, Baffling, and Broken

Suda51 games have a reputation for going against the grain, but *Romeo Is a Dead Man* pushes that eccentricity to its limit. At In Game News, we’ve seen our fair share of "weird," but this title manages to beggar belief. It’s an experience that oscillates between comical brilliance and mechanical frustration. One minute you’re laughing at a bizarre cutscene, and the next you’re ready to scrub the game from your SSD due to tedious, unexplained systems. The setup is pure Grasshopper: You play as Romeo, a man on death's door resurrected by the Space-Time Police. Your mission? Travel through history to find your girlfriend, Juliet—or more accurately, monstrous replicas of her. The plot is a fragmented mess of multiple perspectives and repeated events. Even after watching every scene and reading every line, we honestly couldn’t tell you exactly what’s happening. You aren't playing for the narrative coherence; you’re here for the ride.

Combat and the "Bastard" Meta

At its core, *Romeo Is a Dead Man* is a back-to-basics action game. While you can kit yourself out with pistols, shotguns, and rocket launchers, the meat of the gameplay is melee-focused. There’s no stamina meter to gate your fun—it’s just pure, satisfying whaling on monsters until they pop. The 13-hour campaign cycles through a spaceship hub where you can talk to weirdos and upgrade your gear. The most interesting addition to the combat loop is the "Bastard" system.

Growing Your Arsenal

• Monster Farming: You grow the monsters you kill on a dedicated farm to improve their stats.
• Ability Slots: You can equip up to four Bastards to provide heals, extra damage, or crowd control.
• Unique Forms: These abilities manifest as anything from giant bowling balls to lightning strikes and tornados.

The Subspace Headache: A Design Misfire

The game’s structure relies on stages split into "real space" (combat) and "subspace" (puzzles). You jump between them via floating TV sets, and this is where the wheels start to fall off. A single TV in real space links to one specific TV in subspace. By mid-level, you might have six different sets to track, but the game offers zero way to identify which one leads where. The environments look identical, the map is unhelpful, and the puzzles are never explained. There are no tutorials and no hints. It’s a tedious game of trial and error that frequently turns a fun hack-and-slash session into a frustrating slog, especially when a death sends you back to a checkpoint and you lose your bearings.

Performance Report: A PS5 Pro Disaster

As tech analysts, we find the performance of *Romeo Is a Dead Man* frankly unacceptable. Even running on a PS5 Pro in "Performance Mode," the frame rate is shocking. It clearly targets 60fps, but it rarely hits that target unless you’re standing still staring at a wall. During combat—the most critical part of the experience—the frame rate drops so frequently it brings the action to a crawl. This technical failure is a massive shame because the visual direction is genuinely inspired. The game frequently swaps art styles, shifting from realistic textures to 8-bit blocks and back again. Paired with a funky, high-energy soundtrack, it’s a feast for the senses that your hardware simply shouldn't be struggling to render.

The Final Verdict

*Romeo Is a Dead Man* is the definition of an uneven experience. It’s a game that rewards your persistence with unique twists and genre-bending levels—one mission is a standard slasher, the next is survival horror—but it makes you bleed for that enjoyment. If you can stomach the "trial and error" puzzles and the atrocious performance on Sony’s mid-gen refresh, there is a unique, entertaining action game buried under the mess. Just be prepared to exercise some serious restraint before hitting the "Uninstall" button.