Romeo is a Dead Man from Grasshopper Manufacture is quite an usual game. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the trailer…

“Paint the screen red and travel the cosmos in this bloodstained action adventure game! Witness the latest from Grasshopper Manufacture: the advent of ULTRA-VIOLENT SCIENCE FICTION!”

First, the plot. You play as Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff’s deputy in a small town, and right away, the space-time continuum is completely shattered, which leaves Romeo pretty much a dead man. However, he is saved by some impressive tech made by his time-travelling grandfather and is then hired by the FBI’s Space-Time Police as a special agent to fix the broken space-time continuum and… I’m not writing any more details of the plot because it’s quite insane, and it really should be experienced first-hand.

Did you ever, back in the “good old days”, wander around the city centre and away from the high-street. Find a small, independent videogame shop somewhere in a back alley and casually walk in. Inside, you find half a dozen or so shelves with a selection of games. Yeah, most of them are new, big releases, there’s a couple of copies of GTA III and so on but in a corner of the shop is a shelf with some really obscure PS2 games, titles that no mainstream gaming magazine has covered, not even Famitsu. You pick one up, read the title, look at the screengrabs on the back, read the synopsis, and then the guy behind the counter says “Yeah, that game is insane!”. You take the box to the counter and purchase it. Take it home, and five hours later, you’re dumbstruck with how overwhelmingly “gamey” it is. Just absolute, unfiltered, over-the-top gaming. That is what Romeo is a Dead Man is.

Romeo is a Dead Man is a third-person, hack ‘n slash, shooter, gore-filled, violent romp that is pure, un-sanitised gaming glory. And it offers no apology for being that way either, nor should it. I miss this about gaming these days, when games were experimental and tried to push the boundaries of what videogames could be. Now, and in terms of the basics, Romeo is a Dead Man is pretty standard stuff. Think Devil May Cry or any other third-person action game where the hero has a sword and guns. Yeah, things here are familiar and standard… at first.

You get the obligatory tutorial that shows you the basics of combat, jumping and all that. You have a light and a heavy attack, you can jump and dodge. Then there’s the gun which is a simple factor of aim and shoot. The controls are simple and very “pick up and play”.  The introduction of the game sees you taking out zombie-like enemies with plenty of hack ‘n slash action… and lots of blood. Kill enemies and their blood fills your “Bloody Summer” meter, which you can unleash as an awesome attack that is as devastating as it is glorious to watch.

Hack your way through numerous enemies, of which there are a good variety, and face a boss. These boss fights are utterly ridiculous and will have you pushing your learned skills to the limits, especially on harder difficulty settings. As a minor spoiler, the first boss fight at the end of the tutorial is a young woman who pulls her own head off, throws it into a fire, her body then grows and mutates into a 100ft monster with massive saggy tits that tries to kill you. This is the level of crazy that you have to deal with.

While the main meat of Romeo is a Dead Man is third-person, mega-violence action, the game does switch things up. For instance, your main HQ is an FBI Space-Time Police spaceship. You return to this ship between each main mission, and the game changes from a third-person thing to a top-down, early 32-bit RPG, complete with pixelated graphics and all. Here, you can explore the ship, talk to some very odd NPCs (like one that is obsessed with the Manchester United football team), do side-quests and all that stuff. There are multiple weapons to unlock, new skills to learn and upgrades to apply. You can even fly the ship and do a bit of (restricted) space exploration. Romeo is a Dead Man really has a lot going on and plenty of variation both in and outside of the main story and missions.

Oh, I almost forgot about the Bastards. No, I’m not getting a bit sweary here. Bastards are zombie creatures that you can grow and cultivate. Each Bastard has its own strengths, weaknesses and skills. Once grown, you can bring these Bastards into the main game and use them in combat. There are a ton of different Bastards with different skills such as having the ability to freeze enemies, increase strength, be used as a decoy to attract enemies, explode, shoot lightning, and much, much more. You can even combine Bastards to grow a new hybrid that combines their skills and stats. The whole Bastard system is like a game in itself and even though I played through this game twice (there’s a very-much welcome game+ mode), I have not found every Bastard and every combination.

There’s a handful of mini-games and distractions that break up all the fighting action too, a Pac-Man-like maze game (without the ghosts) where you can get bonuses added to your stats, as an example. During the main missions, you go to a place called subspace. This is a maze-like thing with a handful of puzzles that work as a kind of mirror map to the mission that you are on, and they increase in size and complexity as you progress through the game.

The presentation here is wild and amazing. Even just playing around on the menu screen put a smile on my face. The story is utterly insane, well, it was written/directed by Suda51, so that should explain things. The story is told via a mix of in-game cutscenes and comic book-like panels and pages. While I would love to delve more into the story, I really can’t for the sake of wanting to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say that it needs to be seen to be believed, and even then, I’m not sure that many will believe it. There’s meta humour, non-sequiturs, nonsense, and irrelevance all over the place. As an example (not a spoiler, this is something that happens at the very start), your dead, time-travelling grandfather becomes a talking, stitched-on patch on the back of your jacket who  offers help and guidance.

Getting back to the combat of Romeo is a Dead Man, and even though I mentioned Devil May Cry earlier, that was just to get the basic idea across. With this game, you don’t have multiple, ever-increasing in complexity combos to try to remember. The combat here has been simplified to just messing around with the light and heavy attacks, there are no set combos, just fun combos. I do think this “simpler” combat may be a bit of a turn-off to those who prefer something with more depth. Me? I’m happy either way.

Jumping around through space and time, slicing and shooting your way through hordes of zombies, and battling massive and grotesque bosses has never been this bizarre or glorious. Romeo is a Dead Man is a great showcase of what I adore about gaming. Out now for PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and with a £40 price tag. You’ll get to the end credits in about 12-14 hours. As I previously mentioned, there is a game+ mode, and I dove right back in for a second playthrough. I can even see myself coming back to try to finish this on the hardest setting in the future. In my opinion, you get a lot of game for your money, and that game is wonderfully eccentric and bizarre. It is pure Suda51. Highly recommended.