Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is largely what you'd expect from a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in the year of our lord 2023. It looks the part, it sounds the part, and it plays the part pretty well.
The game really adheres to how Jet Set Radio plays, the movement and existing mechanics here are pretty much identical to the ol' Dreamcast game. The main thing that separates the two games is how BRC addresses the things people didn't like about Jet Set Radio. Jet Set has a pretty notorious difficulty curve with a lot of stuff that can prove annoying and this game sought to address most of those things. Movement on your locomotion of choice is basically 1:1 with Jet Set but with the ability to get off your wheels and walk, the air dash and the Tony Hawk manual mechanic it's a lot easier to come to grips with and start chaining tricks to start boosting around with impunity.
The big stuff though is with the graffiti and police mechanics. The original Jet Set tasked you with spraying graffiti and to do so you needed to do a lot of quarter and half circles while local authorities bum rushed your ass in real time ready to whack and shoot you. In BRC, graffiti has been greatly simplified while also stopping time for a rather generous period allowing you to spray your preferred graffiti design without worrying about the authorities.
The police, meanwhile, are now attached to a GTA style heat system that grows as you paint graffiti everywhere and escalates as you make your way through the game. Your ne'er-do-well painting can attract the police on the scale of normal mooks to sticks all the way to copters and mechs. The game has a combat system to help you out in defending yourself from the over-militarized police force and while the combat is rudimentary it's also very funny. Doing jump cancels that AoE launch a bunch of dudes into your graffiti finisher is very fun, and enemies and machines having whatever graffiti you sprayed plastered on to them is very endearing. I wouldn't say the combat is anything great but it gets the job done in a way that's positive for the game.
So yeah game's good. The soundtrack is aces, with the 2mello and Hideki tracks being obvious standouts when playing, you can hold your phone out the entire time playing the game (millenial/gen z simulator confirmed?!?) and you can unlock a shitload of characters with even more available in the post-game. They just have to populate the hideout with all of them and let you switch between them outside of dance floors in the game's other areas.
The game really adheres to how Jet Set Radio plays, the movement and existing mechanics here are pretty much identical to the ol' Dreamcast game. The main thing that separates the two games is how BRC addresses the things people didn't like about Jet Set Radio. Jet Set has a pretty notorious difficulty curve with a lot of stuff that can prove annoying and this game sought to address most of those things. Movement on your locomotion of choice is basically 1:1 with Jet Set but with the ability to get off your wheels and walk, the air dash and the Tony Hawk manual mechanic it's a lot easier to come to grips with and start chaining tricks to start boosting around with impunity.
The big stuff though is with the graffiti and police mechanics. The original Jet Set tasked you with spraying graffiti and to do so you needed to do a lot of quarter and half circles while local authorities bum rushed your ass in real time ready to whack and shoot you. In BRC, graffiti has been greatly simplified while also stopping time for a rather generous period allowing you to spray your preferred graffiti design without worrying about the authorities.
The police, meanwhile, are now attached to a GTA style heat system that grows as you paint graffiti everywhere and escalates as you make your way through the game. Your ne'er-do-well painting can attract the police on the scale of normal mooks to sticks all the way to copters and mechs. The game has a combat system to help you out in defending yourself from the over-militarized police force and while the combat is rudimentary it's also very funny. Doing jump cancels that AoE launch a bunch of dudes into your graffiti finisher is very fun, and enemies and machines having whatever graffiti you sprayed plastered on to them is very endearing. I wouldn't say the combat is anything great but it gets the job done in a way that's positive for the game.
So yeah game's good. The soundtrack is aces, with the 2mello and Hideki tracks being obvious standouts when playing, you can hold your phone out the entire time playing the game (millenial/gen z simulator confirmed?!?) and you can unlock a shitload of characters with even more available in the post-game. They just have to populate the hideout with all of them and let you switch between them outside of dance floors in the game's other areas.