Stupid Never Dies review: "This pop punk zombie action RPG oozes personality, but ends up dead on arrival"

Malls, in pop culture at least, are inhabited by three main groups. Zombies, the monster-battling kids from Stranger Things, and teenagers in Avril Lavigne music videos. Stupid Never Dies’ Davy is somehow all three at once: a hoodie-wearing defector from the zombie horde, facing off against other monsters in the hope of saving the life of – and winning the heart of – the cheerleader he’s crushing on. Even though they've never spoken, because she's in a kind of accidental cryostasis, in an ice-cream shop's storage freezer.

So, in short: he was a boy (before he died and rose again), she was a girl (before she gave herself the Walt Disney treatment). Can I make it any more obvious?

This ‘00s pop-punk vibe really does bleed into every part of Stupid Never Dies, from Davy’s baseball-cap-hoodie-&-kicks dress sense through to the game’s theme song (actually kind of a bop), which has a music video you can watch from the start menu. And, most striking of all, its zine collage aesthetic. Every cutscene, collectible, and bit of UI is composed of marker-pen scribbles, stickers, and images apparently torn out of a magazine, like a mixed-media shotgun blast to the eyeballs.

As for the mall? In Stupid Never Dies it’s a House Of Hades-style hub, with a host of friendly-ish faces – who include a were-chihuahua, a gargoyle in a shopping trolley, and the aforementioned icy crush – all waiting for Davy to return from adventures so they can sell him upgrades. Much like in Hades, once you’ve done all your admin it’s off to the underworld to see how deep you can go this time. Unlike Hades, the way you enter it is by flushing Davy down a toilet.

Get stupid

GPTRACK50 was founded by veteran Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi and Stupid Never Dies, the studio's debut, is basically a greatest-hits mashup of his back catalog. The maximalist punk style and fondness for toilet humor are a reminder that Kobayashi worked with Suda51 on Killer7. And once you’re in the dungeon, the combat mixes the aerial hack-and-slash and combo grading of Devil May Cry with the ridiculous crowds of enemies found in Sengoku Basara.

Not content to be purely a tribute act, though, Stupid Never Dies does throw a few new fresh ideas into the mix. And, in classic Capcom fashion, a whole new vocabulary of terminology to go along with them. There’s Davy Burst, Stupid Parries, Heat Attacks, Instant Skills, Style Eat, Metaphitic Miasma Layers… at this point, I admit, I’m pulling names from the in-game tips guide just to make a point. But let’s translate the important ones.

Stupid Parry, for example. This is an action game made in the 2020s, and so the inclusion of a parry is basically mandatory, but this is an unusual take on the idea. It’s called ‘Stupid’ for a reason: Davy dashes into the attack, and is guaranteed to take damage, even if there’s nothing to be parried. If it does connect, though, you’ll reduce the hurt Davy would have received, and convert it into chip damage that can be recovered later on.

And, if you parry into a gold-flashing Heat Attack, it’ll trigger a ‘Stupid Impact’. This stuns your assailant and exposes their glowing core so that Davy can do what zombies do best: take a big old bite of their innards.

This is how you offset all that damage you’re voluntarily taking, but it’s also how you tap into the game’s defining feature, the Style Eat. Not content with just being a pop-punk teen zombie monster hunter, Davy is also a kind of undead Kirby.

Eaten mess

For every core you chomp down, you’ll steal an ability from your victim. If it’s a rank-and-file monster, like one of the hordes of skeletons and lizardmen, this will be a single-use Instant Skill that shoots out a blast of bones or lizard-claw scratches. Useful enough, if not especially exciting.

But if you’ve just taken a bite of one of the elites – a werewolf, a vampire or, why not, a fairy – then you’ll perform a Style Eat transformation. Davy is able to shapeshift into their form, or at least a version of it topped off with a baseball cap. (The character designs for these transformations are an absolute delight, and maybe the best reason to Style Eat your way through the game.)

So, with a tap of the D-Pad, you can now turn into a werewolf, able to bound through the dungeon on all fours, attack with speedy flurries of claw strikes, and – classic lycanthropy stuff, this – backflip off walls to reach high ledges. Plus you get one random ‘Style Skill’, pulled from a pool of possible powers.

Including your default zombie state, there are 11 Styles on offer, each with its own move set and playstyle, and a choice of five possible special abilities to augment that. The necromantic lich, for example, can summon skeletons to do the fighting on your behalf; its Style Skills include a giant scythe swing, sapping the health of your skellies to boost its damage, and one that turns you and your bony minions into spinning tops that hurt anything they touch.

This is a remarkable amount of variety, but it’s also a lot for any developer to take on, let alone one as small as GPTRACK50. Not every Style here is created equal, and it’s hard not to conclude that the studio might have – ahem – bitten off more than it can chew.

Creature features

While becoming a werewolf makes Davy more agile, this is very much the exception to the rule. Most are really slow and ungainly, something that makes sense for a hulking tank form such as the golem or cyclops, but less so for the floating will-o’-the-wisp or fairy. Meanwhile, the merfolk Style allows you to swim underfoot like one of Splatoon’s Inklings, but just for a couple of seconds at a time. Then you have to waddle around on land like your Speedos are chafing, waiting for the swim bar’s cooldown to complete its agonizingly slow refill.

Traversal isn't a huge part of Stupid Never Dies, however: it's just how you get from one arena fight to the next. So the much bigger problem is how many of these Styles feel ineffective in combat.

Sticking with the merfolk for a moment, you’re intended to stay underground and close in on prey before popping out for a powerful uppercut. Cool in theory, but just not especially practical when you need to chew through enemies by the dozen. It’s a similar story with the snow fairy, which grows more powerful for every enemy you freeze, and the will-o’-the-wisp, which can immolate itself to hurt anyone who touches it. There is no shortage of ambition in the design of these transformations, but that's frequently undermined by their execution.

This problem plagues almost every part of Stupid Never Dies’ combat. It’s not just that hits lack the sense of connection that makes Devil May Cry’s melee sing – that would be an unreasonable standard to hold this game to, even given their shared heritage – but that, often, they don’t connect at all. There’s no lock-on targeting, which makes sense given the quantities of enemies the game throws at you, but that means you can never quite rely on your hit landing where you want.

Your foes seem to be suffering from the very same issues. They’ll often stand around idle for seconds at a time, before charging forward with some powerful attack that misses you by miles. And if this initially sounds like a blessing, remember Stupid Parry’s vital role in the combat loop. There’s an awful lot of chasing after Heat Attacks, trying to throw myself in front of them so I can line up a Style Eat – and hoping that it doesn't simply sail past the intended victim and chomp down on thin air instead.

Meanwhile, there’s always a ticking clock at your back. There's a time limit on how long you can spend in the dungeon before the game… well, it doesn't immediately kill you, but it nerfs Davy so hard that, honestly, you might wish it did.

So, with all that in mind, why bother wrestling with the intricacies of any Style that leaves you waiting on a cooldown for an attack that might just miss, when it’s so much quicker to slash your way through the hordes at werewolf speed?

And so, that’s the way I end up playing Stupid Never Dies. Relying on the same two or three Styles (the werewolf, the lich, the vampire at a push), hammering Stupid Parry for all it’s worth and just kind of hoping for the best. Occasionally, I’ll even turn on the Go Nuts Mode, which makes you – quoting the menu directly – "strong as shit", just to chew through repetitious segments quicker.

I do feel bad for throwing out most of the game’s more interesting ideas but, honestly, they’re necessary for a functional experience. And the more I play, the more I realize that combat finesse isn’t really the deciding factor in success or failure. This is first and foremost a game about leveling up: every run at the dungeon boosts the amount of XP collected, so that by your hundredth attempt you might be able to do 20 level-ups within the first minute.

It’s an RPG on fast-forward, the numbers going up over and over again. And as long as that number is higher than the next layer you enter, it’ll be a cakewalk. Try to reach beyond your assigned level, though, and you’ll find yourself throwing punches at a brick wall.

Leveling up at this ridiculous speed, with visual fireworks that go off every single time, does have a certain dopamine-loop satisfaction to it. That makes it easy enough to pour time into these dungeon runs. But for all the color, and the cool visual flourishes, and the poppy soundtrack, I find myself playing Stupid Never Dies with my brain only ever halfway engaged, not really feeling much of anything. For hours at a time, I’m just as much of a zombie as Davy.

Never die, and never stop playing, with our best ARPGs ranking that bring you even more action. Keep an eye on our new releases list for what's coming next!