Yes, it's surprising how many things you can figure out just by being able to read hiragana and katakana. Though there are a lot of things that tend to be anomalous, like the insertion of small tsu characters in places an English speaker would not imagine a glottal stop, even assuming an English speaker who even knows what that is.

Sometimes it really takes imagination. I have a family member who has an arcade game labeled "Hangly Man" (a Pac-Man clone). It took quite a while for it to dawn on me to reverse that back to kana (HANGURI) and figure out that it was meant to be "Hungry Man."