Stupid Never Dies review – from the producer of Devil May Cry

A new Japanese developer, run by veteran creators from Capcom and elsewhere, unleashes a new action game whose main character acts like an undead version of Nintendo’s Kirby.

From Resident Evil Requiem to Pragmata, not to mention the new Resident Evil movie, everyone can agree that Capcom has had a hell of a year. But while the quality of their games is obviously no accident, their release dates all falling on the same year largely is, and at the moment we know almost nothing about their plans for next year, beyond Resident Evil Veronica.

Given their success in reviving Onimusha, many fans are hoping for more reboots of older franchises but the most obvious next step for them is a new Devil May Cry. The last new one was seven years ago now and while it seemed to be a success, Capcom has given no indication of any plans for a new one, not even after the popularity of the Netflix animated show.

One obvious problem is that Devil May Cry 5 director Hideaki Itsuno left Capcom in 2024 and while he’s not involved in Stupid Never Dies it is the work of a number of other veteran action game developers. This includes former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi – who worked on Devil May Cry 1 and 4, and is the founder of new studio GPTRACK50.

As exciting as it may seem to have a new studio on the scene, with a lot of experienced developers, the first impressions of Stupid Never Dies are not good. In fact, they’re awful. This is clearly a low budget affair and the ugly cel-shaded visuals and unfunny comedy are very reminiscent of a lesser Suda51 work. He’s not involved, as far as we known (Kobayashi did work with him on the classic killer7), but the sense of humour, nonsensical plot, and obsession with cheerleaders feels very familiar, as you take control of a lowly zombie named Davy.

The game’s absurdly overcomplicated premise involves a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has all but been wiped out and a scientist has invented a dimension hoping device built into a toilet. Although a slow moving, and thinking, zombie in the real world, flushing Davy down the bog turns him into a fast-moving one with his own repartee of moves.

At the end of the day, you’re still just dishing out light and heavy attacks but there are a number of unusual ideas that the game isn’t very good at explaining and which, in all honesty, don’t really add to proceedings. Parries are a key mechanic, as in any melee action game, but here you take damage no matter what you do, but if you’ve timed it right you reduce the damage by recovering it later.

This is called a Stupid Parry and, frankly, that name is very accurate. Thankfully Davy’s combat mechanics are an increasingly minor part of the game, the more you progress, since what you really want to be doing is eating an enemy that can grant you a new ability or, ideally, a transformation and a completely new set of powers.

Cannon fodder enemies will grant nothing more than an instant use power-up but if you eat one of the more powerful monsters you can turn into them and use their powers for a short time, just like Kirby. The first is a werewolf, which can move and jump with much greater range than Davy, as well as use its claws for more powerful attacks. But there’s a huge range beyond that, including a cyclops, fairy, merman, vampire, and more. Each has their own default skills, but you also get a random Style Skill, that’s still unique to that monster but ensures that each run is ever quite the same.

That means that, almost inevitably, this has a roguelite structure, not dissimilar to Hades, in that you keep going back to the central hub to talk to the same group of characters and unearth more of the plot. Except in Stupid Never Dies the plot is really dumb (it revolves around Davy fawning over a frozen girl he’s never actually spoken to) and none of the characters are very interesting or well written.

The far bigger problem is that the combat is just no fun at all. There’s very little sense of weight or connection, despite the fact that so many of the transformations are frustratingly slow, but it’s also very imprecise, with no lock-on option. This is presumably because there’s a lot of enemies on screen at once, but never as much as, say, Dynasty Warriors, to the point where it would’ve been a better idea to thin the crowd down and make the action more focused.

Having so many transformations is a neat gimmick but they’re poorly balanced and in some cases just fundamentally flawed. The merman, for example, seems like it was supposed to be riffing on Splatoon, in terms of travelling quickly underwater, but you can only do so for such a short period of time it’s pointless.

The roguelite structure also works against the game, as while it’s fun to unlock enough permanent buffs and abilities to level up at lightning speed the game is already inherently repetitive and having to complete multiple runs in the same uninteresting environments, again and again, is not worth the intrigue of finding out what new styles you’ll get this time.

Stupid Never Dies has some strong 2000s vibes, in terms of its presentation and Davy’s fashion sense, but the problem is it also feels like something that would’ve come out at that time. Not one of the all-time classics of the era, but the sort of low rent Xbox 360 game that would’ve been long forgotten by the time you got to the present day. If that’s what the developer was going for then mission accomplished, but this is a very disappointing debut from people that should have known better.

Formats: PlayStation5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £39.99
Publisher: GPTRACK50
Developer: GPTRACK50
Release Date: 21st October 2026
Age Rating: 16

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

Comment now

Comments

Add Metro as a Preferred Source on Google

Add as preferred source