THE FUTURE ISN’T JET SET; IT’S BOMB RUSH!
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was always presented as a spiritual successor to the much-loved Jet Set Radio, which initially turned me off. See, I tried playing Jet Set Radio in its HD remaster on PC and didn’t love the gameplay so I sort of had no interest in trying Bomb Rush Cyberfunk if it was going to be more than that. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was taking heavy inspiration in the visual and musical areas from Jet Set Radio already so I assumed the game would end up feeling the same to play.
It doesn’t and the game feels great to play. To be clear I have never tried Jet Set Radio Future but I have heard that it is better and this game may emulate that feeling more, but I found grinding and maintaining combos and navigating the openness of levels to be intensely thrilling and yet extremely easy. Trying to essentially solve platforming puzzles while moving at high speeds in order to reach new areas to tag graffiti all over (this is actually called bombing in the graffiti world) is what kept me coming back. There’s these little high five robots that need to be activated within a single combo and some of those are very difficult either due to some of the platforming elements or the length and I loved doing every single one of them I found. Graffiti is easy to place with some simple flicks of the analog stick controlling what tag you throw up with more being unlocked through exploration and challenges by other characters. Scoring points is less about tricks and more about comboing and racking up a high multiplier which means taking sharp corners, manualing, and wall riding to keep the combo going. Don’t expect many differences between characters and what they are riding as the only thing I could notice was that bike manuals last the longest and rollerblade manuals are the shortest; I still appreciate the choice however.
PLATFORMS: PC, SWITCH, XB1, XSX, PS4, PS5
MSRP: $39.99
PRICE I’D PAY: $39.99
The only real downside to gameplay is combat. Fighting enemies is just not fun and when everything else feels so good it stands out like a sore thumb. This would be fine except a couple of times combat is mandatory against a swarm of police which feels stiff and boring in comparison to some of the more unique enemies fought where the main goal is finding the primary enemy or solving a minor puzzle to grind into the right position to tag the enemy to stop them from attacking. It’s truly my only complaint in this game and while it isn’t the main focus of the game, I would have preferred always trying to flee from conflict than addressing it head on because of how awful it truly feels.
What isn’t awful is that soundtrack though, and it may be my favorite soundtrack of this year. Hideki Naganuma of course makes multiple appearances in the OST as he is the main artist most gamers will think of when they think of Jet Set Radio and his work here is what one would expect. He still has his signature sound on lock and these new tracks he wrote are great but the choices the devs made for the rest of the soundtrack manages to keep up. One immediate stand out was seeing 2 Mello whose album “Memories of Tokyo-To” is a must listen for anyone who loved the old Jet Set soundtracks, so I was not surprised to see him here but his track “I Wanna Kno” is great and definitely one of my favorites. The soundtrack covers stuff like hip hop, future funk, house, some glitchy downtempo stuff, and it is sort of crazy they seem to work together. Some other standouts for me were by KiloWatt, CYBERMILK, Legove, Sebastian Knight, Ethan Goldhammer, SkyBlew, and wev. Really impressed by the curation, and even songs I didn’t love were never so bad that I felt it necessary to change the song, which is impressive.
Well, since I’ve talked about the gameplay and the music, I guess that means graphics are next. I think screenshots do the job, but this game looks like Jet Set Radio. Not just in the cel shading, but in the design of characters, the colors used, and the world design. The menus look like I took a step back in time and unearthed a Dreamcast game. There’s this nuance I cannot pinpoint, but if I didn’t know better, I would say this was by the team who made Jet Set Radio. Even stepping away from how well Team Reptile emulated their inspiration, the game just looks fantastic. I always prefer stylized graphics anyways as realism always loses to time and technology marching forward, but the entire game looks great because of how its sleek angles and bright colors pop on modern televisions. I don’t want to gush too much but I liked looking at all the signs and mascots that are totally just there for decor that players would normally speed past because they just brought something extra. Also, big shout outs to the artists who did the graffiti designs because they are all fantastic, and to the devs for crediting the designs to artists directly when looking at the tutorial for how to do each tag.
Okay so, I have gushed about this game and failed to talk about the story. I love it. Not many games start off with the player character being decapitated and having their head replaced with a robot one, but Bomb Rush Cyberfunk does just that and takes it places that I have not seen before. Brilliant stuff, not going to spoil it. The characters are all fantastic and do a good job of feeling real within the setting of their world despite only having brief snippets of voice lines and the text doing the heavy lifting. Also New Amsterdam is just a character itself as some of the world design is so bonkers yet feels like it belongs in a world where Old Heads maintain the organization of street gang trick battles and where one of the gangs are Frankenstein like creations.
All the pieces come together in the end: the design, the story, and the gameplay. Despite brief hurdles with the combat sections this is one of my favorite games of 2023. I actually hope Team Reptile makes a sequel that fixes the combat and maybe changes up how bikes, boards, and skates play a bit because this game was so much fun to play. I went from having no interest in this game to being absolutely enveloped by it. I bought it for a friend. Forget Jet Set, go Bomb Rush.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
