Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a love letter that undoubtedly does more than enough to captivate Jet Set Radio veterans and those who have no idea what it is. Between the contextually stellar soundtrack, fantastic movement system, and intricate narrative, you’re bound to find yourself attached to some part of this experience that boasts its heart on its sleeve. Even though the combat scenarios can overstay their welcome, and the pacing can be a turn-off, looking past those faults provides a one-of-a-kind skating dream.
Absolute gem. This love letter to Jet Set Radio franchise brings fresh ideas and all the futuristic funk you could hope to see. Hideki Naganuma himself contributes to the soundtrack which is rounded out with other solid tracks from indie acts.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a delightful skating and hip-hop mash-up that builds its foundation on Sega's classic Jet Set Radio series, but contains enough narrative and gameplay freshness to stand on its own as an arcade-style action game.
It isn't hard to recommend a game like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to fans of Jet Set Radio. But I still think that 3D platformer fans should give this game a shot, too, as the mechanics are pretty easy to get into, and there's a lot to do here that will scratch that itch. With the number of games that are bangers releasing this year, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk feels like a nice break.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is resuscitating what made Jet Set Radio so great back in the day, and it’s far from being a disgrace to the name. But it’s off-kilter in every way that the original games felt cohesive.
This is a shame because there's a fun game here – it's just trapped in a hollow shell. Its final sin is having a miserable story hardly even worth bringing up. It's boring and bad; we can leave it at that. There's room for games that want to recapture some old glory – to remind you how cool games used to be – but to do that, you have to add something new to the conversation. Neon White is a great example of a game that did this right. Bomb Rush isn't interested in adding anything new. It just wants to have the same conversations we've been having for years. Jet Set Radio was cool. Go play that instead.
Very solid game, very similar to Jet Set Radio, a little to similar for me though. As it leads to me wanting something different as Jet Set Radio was always so close to being great and this is closer but still falls a little short.
I consider Jet Set Radio to be one of the greatest achievements in video game history. It pioneered its own graphical style to look unique in the sea of polygons that was late 90s-early 00s gaming and looked great doing it. It still boasts one of the best soundtracks ever, features an intuitive, fun control scheme, a great cast of characters that feel different from each other, and wonderfully fluid level design. The graffiti also looks great and it again felt great moving the control stick in a way that made me feel like I was actually tagging a wall. Its simplistic skating mechanics didn't matter because JSR wasn't trying to be Tony Hawk. It made its own niche when it came out and felt distinctly like its own entity. The physics made skating fun without relying on a huge catalogue of tricks, and the floatiness of the jumping and grinding had its own set of challenges. Rather than maintaining balance and not falling, you were tasked with making sure your feet touched the right surface to maintain combos. The Tony Hawk-esque time limits and score tallying, however, added necessary tension and replayability and made skating for points worth doing. All of this adds up, somehow, into one of the most pure fun games ever made. I'd probably have a ton of fun if I started it up now, like I did back in 2021 when I played through the game for the very first time. Yes, it stands the test of time and remains an easy 10/10, especially considering how impactful it must have been back when it first came out.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is JSR's spiritual successor. It's definitely fun but it's not nearly as impactful as JSR. Every ounce of praise I could give BRC could be given to JSR as well, but with less enthusiasm. The soundtrack is awesome, thankfully, though it actually feels more repetitive, especially after you beat the main story and JACK DA FUNK hits you every single time you start the game up afterward. Speaking of, the main story feels insultingly short for a game released in 2023, and while JSR didn't have a narrative for the ages either, I didn't care because the game was so fun I knew I'd be playing it after I finish the story regardless.
Perhaps the biggest sin BRC commits is that it's faithful to JSR in all the wrong ways while forsaking it in ways that would have made it more worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as its "ancestor." For example, it looks pretty much exactly like JSR, down to all the fuzzy edges and inexpressive faces that make JSR look like it was released 23 years ago. Painting the town red, blue, green, purple, silver, maroon, etc. is still a key feature of BRC, but they go with quantity over quality. JSR allowed you to select and change your graffiti before going to a level, one of each size. Every piece of graffiti you have in BRC is available for you to tag (sorry, "bomb") surfaces with at any time. To achieve this flexibility, BRC assigns a series of directional inputs to each piece of graffiti, so it's like a code for each. That sounds like an improvement on paper, but it's worse in execution. If I'm not actively trying to change it up every time, I'll tend to inadvertently bomb surfaces with the same few pieces of graffiti over and over, making the sheer variety of graffiti superfluous. Also, it really makes me miss JSR's method of tagging surfaces, which is simultaneously far more intuitive and challenging than the simplistic directional inputs of BRC.
BRC is free-roaming and has no time limits. Points never matter, but combos are still scored. You just have to pause the game to remind yourself what your best combo was, though you'll seldom have any reason to care. The physics in BRC are kind of borrowed from JSR, but in BRC you're able to grind up vertical poles and upside-down across ceilings, which again sounds cool, but grinding doesn't increase your point total unless you're doing tricks as you're grinding and leaning into turns for point multipliers. This is what JSR avoided for good reason; the simplistic trick system in BRC makes it feel like Tony Hawk for toddlers.
This time there are three different modes of transportation: in-line skating, skateboarding, and cycling, none of which feels different from each other. In fact, all the characters in BRC are identical in the way they play. Gone are the character attributes that encouraged experimentation in JSR - I see very little point in unlocking new characters in BRC as a result.
I could write more but I have to keep it under the character limit, so I'll close with this: wait for a sale to maximize value if you love JSR like I do. Play JSR ($7.99 on Steam) instead if you haven't played it but are interested in BRC.
Ill start with what I liked... the music? Totally fab, and it fits the vibe so well. The way you move? Super fun, like, fantastic even. And, oh my gosh, the story? It's all like, intricate and stuff, and it's got this, like, heart right on its sleeve, you know?
But, like, let's not get too carried away. Those combat moments? Ugh, they stick around like an annoying guest who just won't leave the party. And, like, seriously, the pacing? It's like, so not my vibe, you know? It's like they're trying to be all epic but end up being a major buzzkill.
But hey, if you're willing to, like, put on your rose-colored glasses and ignore all those, like, issues, you might just find a skating dream in there somewhere. It's, like, kinda unique, I guess. Just, like, don't say I didn't warn you about the not-so-great parts... 5/10
I played for around 10 hours and can say for sure that Bomb Rush Cyberfunk absolutely overhyped and overpriced. It was made mostly for JetSetRadio fans.
cons
From gameplay trailer was shown a lot of tricks in different locations, but sadly all of these tricks places were scripted. You haven't an opportunity to do long-time combo like in Tony Hawk, because game doesn't have mechanics for this.
Compare to the original JetSetRadio, locations much bigger, but places where you can do combo less, a lot of free space with nothing.
The price in $40 I can explain the big amount of licensed music, but anyway for $40 better buy AAA skatesim Tony Hawk 1+2 (brilliant skate sim).
pros
The style and music are excellent.
P.S. Maybe game is just not for me. I was excited from the first till the last trailer, and even bought on day one, but was very disappointed after all.
SummaryTeam Reptile brings you Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, 1 second per second of highly advanced funkstyle. In a world from the mind of Dion Koster, where self-styled crews are equipped with personal boostpacks, new heights of graffiti are reached. Start your own cypher and dance, paint, trick, face off with the cops and stake your claim to the extru...