TL;DR: Messy, loud, wildly creative. Romeo Is a Dead Man stumbles in places, but its combat and sheer personality make it a future cult classic. 4/5.

The first time I booted up Romeo Is a Dead Man, I had the distinct feeling that someone had slipped something weird into my console. Not broken. Not unfinished. Just… unfiltered. The kind of unfiltered you only get when a studio decides it would rather be interesting than universally liked. Within minutes, I was juggling a sword, a shotgun, and a time-warping identity crisis, guided by a 2D grandfather who lives on the back of my jacket like a sentient Hot Topic patch.

And honestly? I was grinning the whole time.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is the latest fever dream from Goichi Suda and the crew at Grasshopper Manufacture. If you’ve ever played No More Heroes or Lollipop Chainsaw, you already know the vibe: punk rock absurdity, ultraviolence, and a complete disregard for tonal consistency. But this isn’t a greatest hits compilation. Romeo Is a Dead Man carves out its own chaotic lane. It’s messy, yes. But it’s memorably messy.

And in 2026, that feels almost rebellious.

A hack-and-slash throwback that actually lets you feel powerful

Let’s talk about the action gameplay in Romeo Is a Dead Man, because that’s what will hook or repel you in the first two hours. Combat is simple. Disarmingly simple. You get melee weapons, you get guns, you upgrade them in straightforward stat-based ways, and you go to town on grotesque enemies across splintered dimensions. That’s the loop.

There’s no labyrinthine skill tree pretending to be an RPG. No stamina bar that makes you feel like you’re fighting underwater. No desperate need to “git gud” just to survive the tutorial. Instead, it feels like a love letter to the PS3-era hack-and-slash design philosophy, where power fantasy wasn’t a dirty word.

I played Romeo Is a Dead Man on the hardest difficulty from the start, mostly because I enjoy suffering in controlled environments. What surprised me was that I didn’t feel overpowered to the point of boredom. Enemy AI is aggressive. They flank. They pressure. They punish sloppy positioning. It’s not quite Dark Souls levels of cruelty, but it has enough bite to keep you honest. There are moments that echo the brutal ballet of modern God of War Ragnarök, with a splash of survival horror tension that reminds me faintly of Resident Evil 4.

And then there are the bosses. Fewer than I’d like, but almost all of them are visually deranged in the best way. Multi-phase fights, screen-filling monstrosities, mechanics that force you to rethink your usual combo spam. These encounters are where Romeo Is a Dead Man feels laser-focused. When it locks in, it really locks in.

The problem is that it doesn’t always stay locked in.

Subspace, side modes, and the art of tripping over your own ambition

If the combat is the cleanest pillar of Romeo Is a Dead Man gameplay, everything else is where the cracks show. Environmental puzzles take place in a dimension called Subspace, which looks like someone rendered a modern art installation entirely out of floating gray blocks. Navigating it can be disorienting, not in a cool cosmic horror way, but in a “wait, where was that door again?” way.

Transitions in and out of Subspace trigger loading screens, and after being spoiled by seamless dimension hopping in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart or the reality-warping elegance of Alan Wake 2, the friction here is noticeable. Not deal-breaking. Just… clunky.

Then there are the mini-games. Oh, the mini-games. One of them unlocks early and can be farmed endlessly for upgrade materials. I accidentally broke the game’s progression curve within an evening. Suddenly, the carefully paced resource grind became optional. I was juiced up like I’d entered a cheat code.

On the flip side, there’s a farming system that feels like it wandered in from an alternate timeline where Stardew Valley was designed by someone who thinks harvesting a carrot should require a 15-second cutscene. Every plant. Every time. It’s the kind of design decision that makes you stare at the screen and whisper, “Why?”

Romeo Is a Dead Man is bursting with ideas. It just doesn’t always know when to stop adding them. Side characters in the Space-Time Police are colorful and fun in isolation, but they drift in and out of relevance. Systems feel layered on rather than woven together. It’s less a finely tuned machine and more a mad scientist’s workbench.

And yet, I couldn’t look away.

A sci-fi fever dream that refuses to be sanded down

Here’s the thing about this Romeo Is a Dead Man review: on paper, the game should frustrate me more than it does. The narrative is intentionally confounding. The tone swings from slapstick to existential dread without warning. Audio mixing occasionally feels like someone bumped a slider too far to the right. It is, in many ways, unpolished.

But it’s alive.

That’s the word I keep coming back to. Alive. It feels like a game that exists because someone desperately needed it to exist. Not because market research said “multiverse stories test well.” Not because a focus group asked for more crafting mechanics. But because a creator had a brain full of neon nonsense and decided to unleash it.

There are sequences that feel ripped from a David Lynch fever dream. There are horror segments that genuinely unsettled me. There are stretches of pure, dumb, cathartic carnage that reminded me why I fell in love with action games in the first place. Romeo’s absurd devotion to Juliet, his bizarre resurrection, his 2D grandpa advisor — it’s all so unapologetically strange that it loops back around to sincerity.

In an industry increasingly obsessed with frictionless design and mass appeal, Romeo Is a Dead Man feels like a glitch in the system. A beautiful one.

Is Romeo Is a Dead Man worth it?

If you’re searching for a perfectly polished AAA experience with airtight systems and seamless pacing, this isn’t that. The environmental puzzles can drag. The progression balance can wobble. Some mechanics feel half-baked.

But if you’re craving a sci-fi action game that dares to be loud, weird, and stubbornly itself, Romeo Is a Dead Man absolutely delivers. It’s a bloody, time-hopping, dimension-shredding ride that will not be mistaken for anything else on your shelf.

And I have a strong suspicion that five years from now, we’ll be calling it a cult classic.

Verdict

Romeo Is a Dead Man is an uneven but unforgettable sci-fi hack-and-slash that thrives on pure creative chaos. Its combat is satisfyingly powerful, its bosses are standout spectacles, and its unfiltered energy carries it through obvious design missteps. It’s not polished, but it is passionate — and that passion makes it worth experiencing.