Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

The best sentence written about Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is in a 78-vote negative review from a player with 10.7 hours:

This game has style for days and a killer soundtrack, but it feels a lot like the developers understood that Jet Set Radio WAS cool without understanding WHY it was cool.

That's the review. The game is 97.9% positive across 15,486 reviews and I don't think that's wrong — but the small, articulate minority saying this have identified something real, and it's the difference between an 8 and a 9.

The third time today

Something worth noting about method. "JSR" appears in 38 of the hundred most-helpful negatives and "Jet Set Radio" in 35 — between them, easily the dominant theme.

That's now the third game I've assessed today whose critics are measuring it against one specific other game: 007 First Light was judged against Hitman (54 of 100), Rift Wizard 3 against its own predecessor. When a game invites a comparison — as a spiritual successor explicitly does — that comparison becomes the review, whether the developers wanted it or not.

Here it cuts both ways. Team Reptile nailed the tone: the cel-shading, the graffiti tagging, the dance animations, the attitude, and a soundtrack featuring Hideki Naganuma that is genuinely excellent. Music and soundtrack together appear in 60 of a hundred negative reviews, almost entirely as praise. Nobody disputes the vibe.

What the critics say is missing is the reason the flow felt good.

The combo problem

Trick appears in 43 of a hundred negatives, combo in 35, grind in 26, movement in 25.

The top negative overall, 161 votes, states the case: "This game is too scared to challenge the player. Keeping your combo is as simple as spamming mouse buttons while rail grinding and holding a manual until you find the next rail/wall." A 68-vote review, 15.5 hours in: "Manuals are incredibly easy to do and basically prevent any combo drops."

The complaint isn't that it's easy. It's that a game whose entire appeal is achieving flow has removed the possibility of losing it — and a flow state you can't fall out of isn't really a flow state, it's a cutscene you're holding a button through. An 85-vote reviewer adds the design version: "they made a killer soundtrack, got the visuals right, fixed the clunky controls that existed in the original and called it a day."

Level design draws related fire, with 47 votes complaining the early maps are "discounts of Jet Set Radio Future maps", and combat — the police fights — appears in 28 of a hundred as an interruption nobody wanted.

What the achievements suggest

Here's a number that supports the critics rather than the badge. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has 23 achievements. The most-earned one sits at 52.2%, with a median of 12%.

Compare Stray, reviewed earlier today, whose most common achievement is at 93%. Roughly half the people who buy Bomb Rush Cyberfunk don't get far enough to clear its easiest milestone. The median playtime among critical reviewers is 7.7 hours, which is around campaign length — so the ones who complained finished it, while a large silent share appear to have drifted away sooner.

That doesn't contradict the 97.9%. People who love it, love it — recent reviewers have a 15.8-hour median, double the critics'. But it does suggest the depth complaint is being felt more widely than the review split implies.

The rest of the ledger

Support was real but brief: Patch 1 in August 2023, Patch 2 "Shuffle" in October, Patch 3 in January 2024, and effectively nothing since beyond bundles and a 2026 note. The game is finished and was finished quickly.

There is a NZ$2.95 character pack dated 18 August 2023 — the launch day — which is what a 71-vote reviewer means by "the day one dlc which just feels insulting". Three dollars for two characters is not a monetisation scandal, and I'd rather say so plainly than inflate it; the objection is to the timing, not the amount.

The mod scene, mentioned in 17 of a hundred negatives, is the genuine extender — people have been adding characters and levels since launch.

The verdict

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk earns an 8. As atmosphere it's close to perfect: the music, the art and the city are worth the money on their own, and at NZ$22.79 they comfortably are.

It stops short of a 9 because its own admirers keep describing the same hollow spot. The trick system doesn't ask enough of you, the police fights actively detract, and for a game reviving a twenty-year-old formula it adds strikingly little to it — originality scores a 6.5 for that reason and I think that's fair rather than harsh.

Buy it on sale. Put the soundtrack on. Skate around a beautiful city and don't think too hard about your combo, because the game isn't going to make you.