For over twenty years, fans of Jet Set Radio waited for either a sequel or a spiritual successor that could capture the same cocktail of inline skating, graffiti, attitude, and style. Official sequels never materialized. Imitators never quite got it right. Then Team Reptile, a small Dutch studio, released Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and nailed it on the first attempt.
Community reception has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly from the audience that remembers what Jet Set Radio felt like. But the game also found traction with players who have no nostalgia for the original, which speaks to how well the core experience stands on its own. The handful of complaints center on repetitive structure and combat, but they’re consistently outweighed by the sheer joy of moving through this world.
Skating, Spraying, and Pure Vibes
Movement is the game’s heartbeat, and it’s phenomenal. Whether you’re on inline skates, a skateboard, or a BMX bike, flowing through the game’s interconnected urban environments feels effortless once you learn the systems. Grinding rails links naturally into wallrides, which chain into boost jumps, which land you on the next rail. Building and maintaining momentum becomes second nature, and the moment-to-moment experience of traversal is the kind of thing that makes you forget you were heading somewhere with a purpose.
The city of New Amsterdam is a playground designed with obvious love. Each district has a distinct visual identity and layout philosophy, from tight alleyway networks to sprawling rooftop highways. The level design rewards exploration with hidden graffiti spots, collectible music tracks, and alternative routes that make returning to earlier areas feel fresh. There’s a density of content in each zone that encourages you to spend time just moving through spaces, finding lines and routes that the game never explicitly points out.
The soundtrack is exceptional and deserves its own paragraph. The mix of hip-hop, electronic, and funk tracks creates an atmosphere that’s inseparable from the gameplay. Music shifts as you move between areas, and certain tracks become associated with specific zones in a way that makes the city feel alive. Players consistently cite the soundtrack as one of the game’s greatest achievements, and many report listening to it outside the game entirely.
Graffiti tagging provides goals that motivate exploration without feeling like a checklist. Each zone has spots to claim with your crew’s tags, and reaching the most challenging spots requires mastery of the movement system. The graffiti itself is varied and colorful, and unlocking new designs through progression gives you a personal investment in marking up the city. Competing crews add light territorial tension that gives structure to what could otherwise be aimless skating.
The Crew Battles and Structural Repetition
The structure follows a formula that becomes apparent early: enter a new zone, tag enough spots to challenge the rival crew, win a series of contests, claim the territory, move on. While the zones themselves are different enough to keep exploration fresh, the progression beats within each zone are nearly identical. By the third or fourth district, you know exactly what the game is going to ask of you, and the surprises dry up.
Combat is the weakest mechanical element. Encounters with police and rival crew members involve simple combos and a dodge that doesn’t feel precise enough for the situations that demand it. Fighting is clearly not the point of the game, but it’s unavoidable at several story junctions, and these sections consistently break the flow that the rest of the experience works so hard to establish. Most players report tolerating the combat rather than enjoying it.
The story serves its purpose without excelling. Your protagonist loses their head (literally) in the opening and spends the game working to reclaim their identity while building a crew to dominate New Amsterdam’s graffiti scene. It’s a framework that justifies the gameplay loop without demanding much attention, and the characters are charming enough in their archetypical roles. Players looking for narrative depth won’t find it here, but the game’s personality carries the thin plot.
Camera control can be an issue in tight spaces. The game is at its best in wide-open areas where the camera can pull back and show off your movement. In narrow corridors and enclosed interiors, it sometimes struggles to find comfortable angles, leading to disorienting moments during otherwise smooth traversal. These issues are infrequent but noticeable when they occur.
Style Is Not Shallow
What Bomb Rush Cyberfunk understands, and what many games that try for “style” miss, is that aesthetic cohesion isn’t decoration. The cel-shaded art, the soundtrack, the movement system, the graffiti mechanics, the character designs: they all serve the same feeling. Every element of the game is pulling in the same direction, and the result is something that feels unified in a way that’s surprisingly rare. You’re not playing a game with great art direction layered on top. You’re playing a game where the art direction IS the gameplay, and vice versa.
Should You Play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk?
If you have any fondness for Jet Set Radio, this is essential. It captures the spirit of those games with a fidelity that borders on channeling. But even without that nostalgia, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is easy to recommend to anyone who enjoys movement-focused games. If you’ve ever gotten lost in the flow of a Tony Hawk level or spent hours finding lines in a skating game, this delivers that same satisfaction in a fresh context.
Skip it if you need strong combat or narrative structure to stay engaged. The game’s strengths are almost entirely in movement and atmosphere, and players who don’t connect with the skating loop will find the repetitive structure hard to overlook. If the aesthetic doesn’t grab you from screenshots and trailers, the gameplay alone may not be enough to sustain a full playthrough.
The Verdict on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a love letter written by people who understood why the original Jet Set Radio mattered. The movement system is blissful, the soundtrack is outstanding, and the world is a joy to explore. Structural repetition and weak combat keep it from perfection, but they can’t diminish the core experience of skating through New Amsterdam, leaving your mark on every surface, with the perfect track playing in your ears. This is how you honor a legacy. Not by copying it, but by understanding what made it special and building something new from the same foundation.