Bomb Rush Cyberfunk imagines a kinder, gentler world, where culture was frozen in stasis in approximately 1999. The game is a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio, the effortlessly stylish Dreamcast classic about a lovable gang of extreme-sports wayfarers carving up their city with inline skates, leaving splotches of neon graffiti on every billboard and subway car. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk makes hardly any significant improvements on that formula, and frankly, its most compelling feature might be the sheer dogmatic respect that developer Team Reptile shows for its chief inspiration.
You’re playing as “Red”, a crimson robotic head strapped on to the decapitated torso of a legendary graffiti artist named Faux. The narrative unfolds as Red’s own self-actualisation process blends with the borrowed memories of the body he’s possessing (this is a cyberpunk game, after all), but those story beats fade to the background while you’re trying to perfect an extremely complex rail grind. This is a sports game at heart, albeit in the gravity-free arcade tradition.
Red spends most of his time on a skateboard, and you’ll be using the simple three-button trick system with an array of supercharged manoeuvres to link together combos, rack up points, and lay down a lot of virtuosic street art. Do this effectively, and you’ll slowly increase the Bomb Rush crew’s reputation across the five districts of New Amsterdam, the metropolis they call home.
Jet Set Radio prioritised vibes over everything else. And in accordance with tradition, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk looks luscious on the screen. Graphically, this is an evolution of the bulbous, prehistoric-feeling 3D pioneered by Dreamcast, and pairs perfectly with the game’s futuristic hip-hop pastiche, with its submarine-sized trainers, starchy graphic tees, and balloon-lettered graffiti. It possesses the best soundtrack in years, a melange of electro-funk, breakbeats and techno that would’ve dominated Walkmen at the turn of the millennium.
Dialogue is sparse, but the characters you meet tend to leave an impression. Personally, I’m partial to a trio of esteemed elders in Run DMC tracksuits, known as the “Old Heads”. They adjudicate all inter-squad beefs in the city. One of them wears a gold belt buckle that reads “BOOMBAP”.
All of this makes Bomb Rush Cyberfunk a throwback, for better or worse. The dirty secret about Jet Set Radio was that while the game cut a one-of-a-kind silhouette, its awkward controls often made it a chore to play. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk solves a lot of those problems. Handling the inline skates feels precise, and the camera didn’t betray me with its vantage. But the diminutive trick system still doesn’t allow for much creativity or discovery, especially compared with other skateboarding adventures such as OlliOlli World.
Things get much worse when the game traps you in an arena filled with menacing cops. They can be dispatched in exactly one way; by spamming the X button while in close proximity. (If Bomb Rush Cyberfunk must have combat, then it also needs a combat system.) However, I found these faults surprisingly easy to ignore. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a game best appreciated on a surface level. Let the cybernetic dreams of 1999 wash over you. Maybe we really can go home again.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is out now; from £33.50
