Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Brand New, and Better Than You Remember
BRC is built on nostalgia, and confidently delivers exactly what it promises.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk’s presentation speaks for itself. It’s Jet Set Radio. According to its Steam listing, it’s also “1 second per second of advanced funkstyle.” Bomb Rush Cyberfunk follows protagonist Red, a cyberhead who had his original head cut off in a prison break from a police holding cell. Red joins Bomb Rush Crew in order to find his old head, learn his past, and go All City by graffiti bombing every borough in New Amsterdam.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a 3D platforming game that lets you inline skate, skateboard, or BMX trick your way between grind rails and wallrides in order to build high scoring combos and go over rival crews’ street art with your own.
The three face buttons on your controller that aren’t for jumping perform a trick, and holding a manual between tricks, grinds, and wallruns extends your combos. Bombing a borough, or putting up graffiti (even above rival crews’ art) builds Rep in a borough, which unlocks encounters with rival crew members and secret areas. Defeating rival crew members in races, challenges, and score attacks in a borough unlocks a crew battle for the turf, where three of your crew tricks against three of theirs in a score challenge refereed by the Oldheads.
The variety in environmental design is extravagant, and every borough has their unique flavor and flow. So many designs in the game are just pure gold, with the trio of Adidas wizards that adjudicate disagreements between crews being a standout favorite. Even the dogs of New Amsterdam are dripped out.
The soundtrack for this game will certainly outlive the game itself, and it will probably stay in my playlists forever. Brand new jams from returning champion artists Hideki Naganuma and 2 Mello, and new (to me) artists like GRRL, Knxwledge, and Dom McLennon that all have standout tracks in this hall of fame of an album.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is wholly excellent; an excellent port of a Dreamcast game that never existed, a spiritual successor on modern hardware to a series I never played. In my thirteen hours with it, BRC amazed with its large and intricate levels, the style that drizzled off every surface like fresh paint, and how satisfying it was to just ride around and vibe even after I had beaten the game. It is a perfect hangout game, where the skill ceiling is high, but there’s enough leeway when making mistakes that you could probably play with just one hand if you wanted. Multiplayer mods on PC might make this one of the best skating games for a long time.
My biggest gripe with the game was that some core features of the game — like switching characters — were locked behind story progress. Sometimes it felt like exploring the areas when I first got to them was something that I was being punished for. They slowly dole out these mechanics, which I wasn’t a fan of, but the game’s plot is interesting, for an anime-esque story about a bunch of delinquent twenty somethings? Late teens? Some of the mechanics are just never explained, which is frustrating, but learning them felt like getting told on the playground about something that doesn’t even feel possible.
The game’s combat is a little bit of a weak point, but none of the encounters or bosses ever last long enough to overstay their welcome. By far, the worst part of the combat is having your graffiti trigger cutscenes of a new layer of militarized police coming after you, which happens fairly frequently, and interrupt your flow. I basically could do without the police heat level at all, as it never was an actual threat to my health bar, and they made it harder to switch between the fun characters at my disposal. The cops are just an inconvenience as I tricked my way around levels trying to collect every secret I could find.
Even without having nostalgia for Jet Set Radio, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk feels refreshingly old-school rather than dated, where the style is the substance. It’s a synthesis of great decisions, like a dedicated dance button being essential to play. Searching levels for secrets was a rewarding blast from the past that was executed perfectly, with collectables being just hard enough to find, without ever feeling like I needed to consult a guide to find anything, even though I definitely didn’t find everything.
Thank you for reading Parry Timing! If you’ve made it to the end of this, you’ve already done way more to support me than I ever expected! I’m very lucky that I get to have time to spend on this project, and that anyone has read it at all means very much to me.