Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Team Reptile
This spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio has the same stylish look and feel, though with better gameplay for the outlaw street gang
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.
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