ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN from Grasshopper Manufacture and Netease Games brings us a Rated M for Mature third-person action game from the mind of SUDA51. Check out our ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN review!
Please enter your date of birth to access this video:
ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN from Grasshopper Manufacture and Netease Games brings us a Rated M for Mature third-person action game from the mind of SUDA51. You’ll be placed in the shoes of protagonist Romeo Stargazer and placed in a third-person single-player journey with many unpredictable plot twists thrown in here and there for good measure. This all begins when a monster attacks you. How bad is it? Well, you do end up losing half your face and your right arm because of this!
Since you’re going to end up dying in 15 seconds, your grandfather uses a special contraption that grants you a new chance at life… as the titular DeadMan! It’s thanks to the DeadGear Life Support System – a very sci-fi looking helmet – that your vitals are kept in check. Professor Benjamin Stargazer is, after all, the most brilliant scientist and engineer in the whole universe, so you know his tech is going to be the best out there!
You used to be a rookie deputy sheriff stationed in Deadford, Caliban County, a small town in Pennsylvania located right next to Lake Trewlyze. As DeadMan, you have a series of special abilities and skills that make you a very important asset, and you’re thus recruited by the FBI’s Space-Time Police as one of their special agents. You will now need to give it your all as you search the cosmos for criminals, so that you can bring some justice to the universe. Oh, and Juliet – your sorta girlfriend – has gone MIA, so you’ll also be using your time with the Space-Time Police to search for any clues that can hopefully help you find her.
This particular indie dev and publisher combo recently gave us the revamped Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered on PlayStation 5, a game that I got a chance to review last year. As a fan of Grasshopper Manufacture and SUDA51 – the beloved No More Heroes series is certainly among my favorites -I was more than ready to dive into ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN!
The game can be played by choosing one of the three available difficulty settings: White Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, and Orange Chocolate. The White Chocolate difficulty setting, made with the finest Greek pistachios,
is going to be the easiest of the bunch. The Milk Chocolate difficulty setting, made in Tuscany and featuring a mellow, full-bodied flavor, will provide you with the standard experience, balanced as to challenge your skills and abilities but without making you feel overwhelmed. As for the Orange Chocolate difficulty setting, it offers a rich flavor of the slightly more bitter Indonesian cacao that makes it simply irresistible… and almost to die for! There’s also room in the box of chocolates for a fourth difficulty setting, but you’re going to have to find out how to unlock it!
Once you start your new journey as part of the FBI’s Time Travel Police, you’ll be taking control of DeadMan by using the left analog stick as you use the right analog stick to move the camera around as needed. You can sprint by pressing in on the left analog stick. Light attacks are mapped to the Square button, while heavy attacks are set to the Triangle button. You can also jump by pressing the X button, and you can use a quick dodge to try to avoid incoming attacks by pressing the Circle button. You can also use ranged weapons to attack enemies from a safer distance.
For these, you’d better first aim by pressing the L2 button and then shoot by pressing the R2 button. You can also lock onto enemies by pressing in on the right analog stick. Change your ranged weapon and your melee weapon by pressing left or right on the D-Pad, respectively. Some enemies will have weak spots that look like shining blue flowers. Shooting these weak spots with a ranged weapon will deal considerable damage. Pressing up on the D-Pad will allow you to use the Regenetizer to heal a bit of your wounds and recover some lost health.
And then, we have the Bloody Summer ability. This one is a specially strong attack that does wonders for getting rid of the Rotters. You know, the zombie-like creatures that are ready to attack you at all times. You can fill up the Blood Gauge by attacking enemies with melee attacks. Once the Blood Gauge is full, you can activate Bloody Summer by pressing the R1 button. This will also help to slightly recover Romeo’s health. Oh, and you can activate Bloody Summer with melee weapons or ranged weapons.
Be sure to stop by the Space-Time Pharmacy when you find it during your missions. The Space-Time Pharmacy will allow you to replenish your Regenetizers stock to the maximum number you can currently carry, as well as save your progress. You can also use the Space-Time Pharmacy to return to the Space-Time Ship if that’s what you want to do. Do know that accesing a Space-Time Pharmacy will make all enemies in the surrounding area respawn.
While exploring each location, be sure to keep an eye out for Tesseracts. These can be opened by approaching them and pressing and holding down the X button to retrieve the items they hold inside. You could find a yummy Mango Lassi, which you can drink to regain one Blood Gauge, or a Salty Lassi that makes your first attack deal 30% more damage. You could also get some Sentey, a crystallized Emerald Flowsion that can be used for upgrading weapons.
Speaking of which, visit the training room in the Space-Time Ship to be able to enhance Rome, unlock new weapons, upgrade weapon abilities, and generate the Sentrey you need for all of this. You can play DeadGear Cannonball to enhance Romeo directly. This arcade-style game will consume the Emerald Flowsion that you’ve collected in order to power the nanomachines in your body. As the nanomachines touch the different icons that appear on the stage, Romeo’s ability is tied to those icons once you clear the stage. For this mini-game, you’ll be steering with the left analog stick, as you accelerate with the R2 button and can boost by pressing the R2 and X buttons at the same time.
Another mini-game you can play is Sentrey Forge. This one will allow you to generate the items required for upgrading weapons. Emerald Flowsion can be extracted from the space debris found during investigations. That way, it can be converted into Sentrey. You can obtain Normal Sentrey and Red Sentrey. Red Sentrey is the rarest one, and it will be needed for higher-level upgrades.
To unlock new weapons, you can use the DeadBall Unlocker. Depending on how much Emerald Flowsion you’ve collected, you’ll be able to unlock weapons in the training room at the Space-Time Ship. You can use the L1 and R1 buttons to swap between melee weapons and ranged weapons, and use the D-Pad to select the weapon type. Once you’ve made your choice, you can press and hold down the X button to consume the required Emerald Flowsion amount, and a new weapon will be unlocked in return.
Upgrading weapons is done with the Deadball Enhancer. Depending on how much Sentrey you’ve collected, you’ll be able to use the DeadBall Enhancer in the training room to level up your weapons. Each weapon has its own level, and as the level increases, you’ll need to spend more Sentrey to keep the upgrade cycle going. The higher you go, the more Red Sentrey you’ll also need.
You can also go and visit your half-sister Luna when you’re back at the Space-Time Ship. You can bring Rotter seeds to her to take care of some intergalactic farming. Except that Rotters are called Bastarrs on the Space-Time Ship. You will, therefore, be working on harvesting some Bastards to aid you! In the garden, you’ll be planting Bastard Seeds that Luna has previously appraised. You can find three ranks of Bastard Seeds – Common, Rare, and Epic – and the rarity and strength of the Bastard you harvest will vary depending on its rank.
You can speed up the process by spending some of your hard-earned Emerald Flowsion. To use the harvested Bastards, you’ll first need to equip them in a dedicated slot. Pick the Bastard that you intend to use, and then select which slot you’ll be equipping it to. Depending on your DeadGear upgrades, you can have up to four available slots that can then be called upon by pressing the X, Square, Circle, and Triangle buttons. There’s also the option of using the Bastard Fusion feature to generate a seed that will produce a more powerful Bastard compared to the two you currently have… which need to be sacrificed in the process.
On top of all of these actions, you can also end up cooking your own delicious buff items! You can cook some delicious Katsu curry, so that you can bring it with you during battle. Each curry has its own recipe, which requires around 5-6 ingredients or so. You’ll need to complete a Katsu mini-game to fry it up. Based on your performance during this mini-game, the Katsu curry will have a different rank.
An area that you should visit between regular missions is the Palace Athene. Going to the Palace Athene every now and then is a good idea, since it will allow you to explore the procedurally generated dungeon so that you can obtain additional Sentrey as well as Badges to boost Romeo and his stats.
Trophy-wise, this release has a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy waiting for you. The list is split into 34 Bronze trophies, 5 Silver trophies, and 4 Gold trophies. What will you need to do for that shiny Platinum? Some of the objectives to take on include defeating the different bosses that the game will throw at you, you’ll also need to complete Palace Athene for the first time, make all types of Katsu curry, become afflicted by status ailments ten times, retrieve 1,000 space debris, suffer damage from an exploding metal barrel, defeat three enemies at once, and expand your garden to the max, to name some examples.
ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN from Grasshopper Manufacture and Netease Games brings us a Rated M for Mature third-person action game from the mind of SUDA51. You’ll be placed in the shoes of protagonist Romeo Stargazer and placed in a third-person single-player journey with many unpredictable plot twists thrown in here and there for good measure. This all begins when a monster attacks you. How bad is it? Well, you do end up losing half your face and your right arm because of this!
Since you’re going to end up dying in 15 seconds, your grandfather uses a special contraption that grants you a new chance at life… as the titular DeadMan! It’s thanks to the DeadGear – a very sci-fi looking helmet – that your vitals are kept in check. Professor Benjamin Stargazer is, after all, the most brilliant scientist and engineer in the whole universe, so you know his tech is going to be the best out there! It’s now up to you to find the deadly criminals who are hiding within the space and time continuum before it’s too late. ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN launches tomorrow on PlayStation 5.
Disclaimer
This ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Netease Games.
