August 18th arrived, and Team Reptile’s Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is released to PC and Nintendo Switch audiences. The developer behind the addictive, competitive Lethal League series makes their next game to celebrate both a strange period in video gaming, and an often underlooked segment of pop-culture. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a 3D platformer modeled after SEGA’s cult-hit Jet Set Radio franchise to an almost obsessive degree — from the lush, eye-catching usage of cel-shaded graphics to the high-octane action and snappy traversal that has rarely been emulated by others. Yet after playing the game it feels unfair to me to hover the burden of being a spiritual successor over this game’s head. What Team Reptile has done with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk feels more like an expression of the developers’ own interests rather than chasing the highs of Jet Set or its sequel, Jet Set Radio Future.
As fond as I am of SEGA’s Jet Set series there’s no mistaking that narrative strength was not the reason why I held such a strong attachment to it. The plotline of the game was as clear as day; vibrant, exaggerated characters in a world where b-boy style and street art is entrenched in every corner of the player space. For a lot of people that’s all good with them — hell as a kid growing up with these games, I didn’t think much of it either. Bomb Rush Cyberpunk is an antithesis of one of its inspirations and you notice it almost immediately in the narrative. The game opens with the player character literally getting their head cut off by one of the game’s antagonists, leaving their body replaced with a cybernetic head for the rest of the game. Throughout each chapter the game tells the story through traditional cutscenes, dialogue prompts and the like to slowly unravel the world and the mystery beneath the player character’s identity, as well as the antagonists. The role that the oppressive police force plays in the game constantly ramps more and more up until the fated climax of the final chapter. It’s a final payoff that you don’t really expect at all in this kind of game that’s so heavily rooted in it’s arcade-style presentation, but it definitely isn’t unwelcome to me at all.
Along with unraveling this mystery comes the relationship that grows organically between the protagonist Red and the characters Bel and Tryce, these characters making up the Bomb Rush crew within the game’s single player. The highlight I wanted to focus on regarding these characters is how the presence of your crew plays a part in the gameplay loop. Each stage you’re tasked to generate rep to challenge rival crews and beating them leads to the eventual Crew Battle that determines if the Bomb Rush crew can claim that spot. As rep increases steadily through tagging the environment, players from your crew begin to populate that world, often skating alongside of you up until it’s time for that fated battle. In a generally sparse play space — much sparser than Future’s dense civilian packed streetways — it’s a clever way to make the world feel lively and electric. There’s even a great ending sequence involving all of the people you’ve acquired in the crew racing to the final battle. For a cast that honestly doesn’t hit the same personality highs as the cast in the Jet Set franchise, making that crew element remain persistent as you play is really welcomed.
As mentioned before; Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is an expression of the developer’s own interests. There are multiple interviews, tweets etc. showcasing the development process of that game that highlights how the design leads of this game are heavily in-tune with b-boy and street culture. It’s part of the game’s core mechanics after all; several different, unlockable dances that the player can use to interact with multiple points of interest in the game. These dances, like in Jet Set Radio Future, are defining personality traits of the many factions that you’ll come across in crew battles, NPC conversations, through cutscenes and much more. Swapping characters involves the use of the dances, the fast travel system needs to be confirmed with dancing — there isn’t a moment where you’re not in the world and utilizing the street moves you come across. It’s infectious, where the game’s presentation to show off moves that aren’t unlockable are so good that I often found myself idling at the screen to watch my crew get down. It’s an extremely clever mechanic that just feels right to use often in this game.
Still there are some mechanical elements that just don’t really serve a purpose. For example, the game’s flip-phone themed UI features a camera that allows the player to take vintage screens and selfies in the world. Ultimately that serves as mostly a novelty aside from a couple of side-missions needed to unlock additional characters. Despite its charm, it doesn’t really have a staying presence. I mentioned the taxi system serving as fast travel, and while it’s great to quickly navigate through multiple stages (especially in the post-game!), fast traveling seems like another hiccup in the gameplay that doesn’t really encourage me to use it. I want to skate! I want to flow through lines to get to point A to B, and it helps that the loading times between each stage are very snappy and on the ball. On the opposite end, the ‘heat’ system for police fights can be EXTREMELY oppressive for people that want to 100% the game and the never-ending cutscene hiccups announcing the heat increase does more harm than good. That feels like a problem that Jet Set Radio Future solved well with its pop-up alarms instead of transitioning to a whole new cutscene.
A lot of these grievances are immediately rectified with how good the overall gameplay loop is here. Hours into the game, hours of the experience ripping and shredding through tight railed corridors, wall-rides, hitting exotic spots and the overall game-feel just doesn’t skip a bit. It’s a perfect melding pot of both JSR and Future’s strengths, but the welding agent that keeps all of those elements together is the obvious pulls they’ve taken from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise. We’ve got combo extensions through manuals, combo multipliers through unique wallrides, inverts and the like to really add some needed variety in the trick system. It even has boost tricks meant to extend your combo strings, SSX Tricky style! It pops, and it helps that the dense and layered level design allows the trick system to really flow around the on-the-spot decisions you make. More of THPS is seen through the prevalence of the many map collectibles as well. We’ve got secret tapes — erm, CDs — scattered across the map to add to your custom playlists, and each one of them challenges you to reach difficult spots to claim those CDs. There are also collectible sprays, Map cards to unlock spray locations, and hidden zones the player can access with some clever usage of the trick system. If there were a grievance with it it’d have to be with the post game’s point challenges, as the high ceiling for million+ high scores kind of shoehorn the player into doing single, elaborate line strings for that win condition. The multiplier system for combos through corner cutting and wall riding just feels too limited for prolonged strings and in the end, I find myself doing full stage loops to hit most, if not all the corner multipliers. It’s as if it’s not designed for those high point skill ceilings and ultimately the score chasing feels too linear compared to what the Pro Skater franchise is capable of. But again; it’s not much of a hindrance to the main game cycle.
What’s left of my experience of playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is what I feel to be a great game. It’s difficult for successors, whether dubbed as such by the developers or the fans that are anticipating the game, to live up to the highs of the game that its succeeding from. Despite the highs that Bomb Rush can reach there are some moments where I felt that the Jet Set series, Tony Hawk and even one-off experiences like Sunset Overdrive solved the problems that Bomb Rush often stumbles into. It came to a point as I met the halfway point of the game I was asking myself ‘is it really fair to call a game like this a successor?’ There’s certainly a massive deficit of action / arcade-focused sports games as well as 3D platformers, and experiences like bomb Rush are solely needed to replicate those experiences. But as a ‘spiritual successor’ did it need to be everything that its inspirations were and more? It felt weird to judge it on the merits of some cult hits released in 2001 or so because in the end, an experience like replicating Jet Set Radio is no different from replicating a game like Seaman, or Illbleed. It’s next to impossible, and sort of reduces Bomb Rush as sort of a lesser product off the jump. Which it’s not!
I finish up Team Reptile’s Bomb Rush Cyberfunk as a satisfied man. As the ending credits roll, as I see the talented men and women responsible for such a wonderful video game, I feel a sense of satisfaction that hasn’t been felt for a while. Recently, I’ve been seeing video game completion as something of a checklist; another accomplishment and another item removed from my ever-adjusting ‘backlog’ of content. Rarely does a game ‘ending’ really stick with me because I’m so adamant on moving towards the next accomplishment. Yet Bomb Rush is one of those gaming experiences for me where I put aside the controller and really relish in the fact that the experience is ‘complete.’ In a way, I don’t want it to end — this is the video game I’ve been waiting for what feels like 20 years now. This is a game that opens me up to different avenues of media that I haven’t explored in a long time, if at all. Even as a spiritual successor to SEGA’s Jet Set Radio franchise it doesn’t do quite enough to live up to an impressive mantle, but damn if it doesn’t come swinging out the gate with a sense of charisma and flair that few video games can emulate effectively.
