Romeo is a Dead Man Review "Buy, Wait, Never Touch"

Pseudo 51 is a man with no bounds, a video game creator that has, for the time being, always seemed to be co-developing or collaborating with some entity in the multiverse and just translating fever dreams into games. So, when Romeo is a Dead Man was shown, it wasn't too surprising he was the man in charge, or in this case, maybe communing to create it. A third-p person action game in an enclosed episodic nature.

Let's see how it did. It's best to think of games from Grasshopper in the same way that the lead developer said in a recent interview. There are already enough orthodox games out there to begin with and I don't think it's our place to compete with them.

Let me tell you something about Romeo as a dead man. This game is like taking a freaking blender and throwing in Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, some old arcade games, a Dash of Eternal, and then just hitting puree while laughing maniacally. It's a fever dream of a game that somehow manages to be both completely batshit insane and at the same time actually brilliant.

But if you go into the game expecting anything even remotely resembling a coherent traditional video game experience, you're going to be either disappointed or just absolutely delighted depending on how much you actually love him in a special brand of creative anarchy. This is the kind of game that makes you question whether the developers are smoking something and are just geniuses or you are. This comes out February 11th from Grasshopper.

So, the story in the game gets going right away with Romeo killed and then given an implant to allow for him to become one of the space FBI, a galactic group that goes out and tries to save the universe. And the reason why he's doing it is that his version of Juliet is dead. Except this time also when he's going out there to explore, all the other Juliet are different multi-dimensional versions of themselves.

Each one progressively more godamned insane than the last. It's like the developers looked at the original Romeo and Juliet story and said, "You know what? Yeah, we don't either.

Let's just run with it. " The narrative embraces the chaos completely, making each encounter and chapter with a new boss, both thematically connected to your relationship or what you're trying to find out when it comes to hints and completely faking bonkers in execution. You know you're in for a wild ride when the boss at the starting pulls her own head off and turns into a 200 foot tall, massively obese, headless Goliath with a belly button the size of the Carl'sbad Caverns.

I [ __ ] you not, that's actually a thing that happens in this game. The story starts with this spaceime itself being shattered by some incident and Romeo, who finds himself on the brink of death, gets revived by some super technology created by his scientist grandfather. So, there's a little bit of Rick and Morty here.

He becomes an FBI space-time agent called Dead Man and hunts space-time fugitives while trying to find Juliet. What's interesting here is the game plays with the traditional spiritual feeling of games like say Dark Souls instead of decay though and disease in the world and that mystery and Cthulhu like Elder Gods. Romeo is a Dead Man goes the complete opposite route and embraces arcade style spiritual entities as digital RGB graphs or spectrum analyzers on equalizers.

It gives a very distinct almost RPG light kind of feel that's unlike many other games and then you mix in some twin peaks there. When it comes to the gameplay, it starts out pretty normal. You've got your A and B buttons on a controller or whatever keys on your PC for weak and heavy attacks, which builds up a blood gauge to pull off a super move when it's full up.

By pressing them in alternating fashion, you can combine your own mini combos. You also have bastards. These are basically zombies that you raise from gardens on your spaceship and can go out and battle with you.

And speaking of battle, you can send them to battle with one another to merge them into a more aggressive form. When it comes to the enemies, they have weak spots that make you pull out your gun and do some serious van damage before you go back to beating them to death with whatever weapon you've got equipped out of the four. The game actually has two distinct types of real areas.

There are open areas where you're running around exploring, and then there are spots where the game basically locks you into a small arena, Devil May Cry style, and forces you to fight waves of enemies until you clear them out. And these arena encounters are where the game actually starts to show its true colors or its better colors with different types of enemies spawning other enemies and creating chaotic cluster flex of combat that are both frustrating and somehow satisfying and also let you really come to grips with the combat in a little bit more of a sense because a lot of the open areas those enemies are a bit weaker. Let's talk about the combat's good and bad though.

The up close combat actually feels okay for the most part. It's fast enough. The blood gauge mechanic adds some nice depth, especially in boss fights where weak points and spacing and sometimes even height can make a big difference.

But then there's the shooting, which is honestly definitely a weak point in this game. It doesn't feel as good as the close combat, which itself isn't absolutely excellent, and hitting those weak spots feels more gimmicky and finicky than it probably should be. And this might also be attached to the weapons that you get.

The gun is basically a laser gun type of thing that has different forms, but there's just not enough feedback to make it feel ultimately satisfying. You get a missile launcher, for instance, a kind of a weapon that should do a bunch of damage, but until its damage is really upgraded. It feels like a shotgun that just shoots farther.

It's weird. Splash damage is almost zero and hitting enemies with it doesn't really do much. It's a little bit more finicky than I think it should be.

Another issue is that while the combat is usually, I would say, somewhat fast and responsive, the character just feels like they should have a bit more weight and momentum behind their movements, and the camera is ultimately incredibly close with no ability to adjust it, which can make larger scale battles a bit more difficult than they should be. Not in a way that'll cause you to die a bunch of times, but it just doesn't flow as well. My advice would be to upgrade your weapons as much as possible right at the starting so that all of them do the damage they need to.

Pretty much for everything in the game, there's an odd miniame that goes along with it. And for a lot of people, that's the juice and that is there. But I would like to have seen a bit more focus on the combat.

Now, when it comes to the graphics, so one thing you can always expect from a Grasshopper game is the unexpected. And without a doubt, Romeo is a Dead Man might be the one that has the most unexpected in it. The game has no less than nine friaking different art styles.

Nine. I'm not kidding. It's actually probably got more than that.

From comic books to digital realms to paintings to old VHS tapes to crude almost beus and buttthead like art. It throws everything at the wall. And I would say some of it or most of it does stick.

Normally when a game jumps between wildly different visual styles like going from Returnal Tron aesthetics to 8-bit pixel graphics, it would fall completely apart. It is really a testament to the developer that overall this doesn't. Romeo as a Dead Manages to hold most of it together.

It doesn't have the cohesive look of something like, let's say, the Guardians of the Galaxy game, which went for a specific 8070 aesthetic and the black velvet kind of paintings and inks and neons from those parts. Now, this game just embraces chaos everywhere. For example, the HUD and the menus have a very old style pastel look to it, like you're picking a color at your local Lowe's.

When you go into your item menu or status page, it can look confusing at first as well. Almost like an old PBS opening title scroll, but as you continue looking at it, you realize there's actually some artistic design that makes sense after a while. Or, okay, I'll admit maybe it's just you get accustomed to it versus it all making sense, but whatever.

What's really interesting here is that the developers approach to the art was basically to let each artist do their best work and try to put it together. He'd match up staff members to scenes that suited their particular style. So, the guy who was good at western style comic book art got to draw those different scenes while someone else was good at a different style and they get different scenes.

It's a collaborative approach that results in this wild mish mash of visual styles that somehow manages to work pretty well together. The game doesn't have the cohesiveness of something more deliberately styled, but that's kind of the point. It's supposed to be this chaotic, unpredictable visual experience.

Luckily, when it comes to performance, it's not unpredictable at all. Unless you really have a system that is many generations old when it comes to your video card. It has a lot of settings and doesn't really require a great deal from your system.

It's got smaller levels and more basic environments that I think for a lot of people might be a bit of a turnoff, but it does mean it's going to run really well pretty much on everything. And it's got enough systems and settings in there to keep most people able to get the FPS that they probably want. When it comes to all over the place, let's talk about the audio.

Voice-wise, it's pretty solid, but you need to be aware that there's a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor and inside jokes scattered throughout this. There are references to Romeo and Juliet itself, video games, TV shows, movies, and all sorts of pulp fiction kind of inside jokes, a little like a liquid TV from MTV. There are times where it was difficult to tell if the translation was slightly off or if it was all done purposefully for comedic effect.

Honestly, by the time I was done with the game, I was leaning more towards the idea that it was all intentional. It just ended up adding to the atmosphere of this weird little warped game that has you jumping between really realities, but at the same time, your own is just as weird. For example, while I love the last last generation kind of presentation in the spaceship, which is really 8bit, damn, the thing almost feels forbit, which isn't a thing.

At times, sitting there reading a ton of text goes from nostalgic to ancient feeling really fast, especially as the same jokes don't land in text the way they may in actual voices. Now, musically, I would say the game is a bit more all over the place than I expected, interjecting odd jingles in almost every menu or pop-up or loading screen, then popping out to excellent licensed and vocal tracks at other times, then leaping into older style bitty music at even more different times. Again, everything about this game is eclectic and built within the chapters that you experience.

So, your mileage may vary when it comes from chapter to chapter experiences. And that brings us to the fun factor. Romeo is a Dead Man throws so much at the wall that it's almost overwhelming.

I'm talking bullet hell moments, Dead Rising style zombie, group fighting, 2D sections, 16-bit sections, comic book moments, and then just in the first couple of levels, even more. Then you've got Dark Souls style save points where if you take a certain action, enemies are going to respawn. But then at other times they seem to respawn randomly in the level itself, which turns out to be most of the time because they were just hiding or pretending to be dead.

And it was those enemies and the way in which they were presented that did offer me a couple caveats for this game. One is that while the combat wasn't necessarily the sickest in the world, it was fun to take out some enemies. But those enemies generically are sort of boring.

No matter how much a semi boss or at least a special enemy in a group might have something that's unique, like mushroom enemies that have weak spots and run towards you or weird scorpion-like enemies. You just never quite know what to expect. And that also means that when they combine together, you may not actually enjoy the result.

You know how long shows have that season that everybody goes, "Did these guys just do all the peyote? " Sadly, Romeo is a Dead Man does have those. And it's sadly for me the second level in this game.

It's a boring affair that's like a mall from Dead Rising if that mall was just two stories barely filled with anything. A couple stores and was missing the moments you could dress up like a teenage girl and slash enemies with a foam sword. It ended up being a drag getting through that where the later ones were better.

It's just the way this is going to be presented to you. The bosses are also a perfect example of what makes this game great and frustrating at the same time. They're absolutely batshit crazy and visually weird, but they usually break down to some very basic patterns.

Find a weak spot, learn the enemy's attack timings, and wait for fairly large openings in those patterns with some crushing moments to sort of elevate the difficulty. Then there are times like those arena sections where you're facing off against slowmoving, almost impossible to die monsters that actually were sort of enjoyable to try to figure out how to remove that life bar while at the same time not having yours removed. The spectacle here is probably more enjoyable than the actual combat most of the times, but it's so crazy that a lot of people are absolutely going to love that.

You know a game's going to be like this when the developers have admitted they basically just said screw it and threw in every crazy idea they had. And somehow, especially in certain chapters, it comes together. You get to play through nine different art styles or more.

You get to face off against some massive bosses. And at all times, Grasshopper's just absolute craziness is in effect. But is it for you?

I rate games on a buy, wait for sale, never touch kind of system. For 50 bucks, you probably need to be a diehard fan. These games and their truncated style, episodic nature, they don't let it really get rolling well enough as a normal experience, but it's intrinsic to all the what the fuckness that kept me playing through the game.

Anyway, many of the bits of oddity may escape somebody coming into this without being a huge fan. It can feel like a buffet you never planned to go to. But you can only have one sample from everything, even if you loved it.

Also, the boss battles and combat, again, not as tight as I would like. So, for super fans, hey, it's the exact weirdness you probably expect. For anybody else, if this is your first go, you may want to really wait for a ton more reviews, experiences, watch some videos to truly decide if all of this oddity is for you at this cost point.

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