ida deerz makes furry music. draws things. codes funny websites. runs a netlabel called @CUTECERVID. puts deer boobs on label 228s. owns a modular synth. is 25. or 26, depending on when you read this. can't really edit it after the site has shut down, can i? does activism. sucks girlcock. injects grey market estradiol once a week. streams videogames. mods videogames. programs videogames. is mentally ill. speaks dutch. has several headmates. composes amigamods.

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idadeerz
@idadeerz

i have some thoughts. a lot of them, in fact!

this is, like, extremely long. i have been writing this for several hours. there's a lot of themes in- or connected to this game which i think might get overlooked, and i'd like to think i'm in a position to touch on them critically. so that's what i'm going to try! also, general commentary on the gameplay and visuals and storymode and everything else.

very mild storyline spoilers here. i tried to work around spoiling the story as much as possible. you be the judge if i succeeded at it or not. :eggbug:


the game's setting

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk makes absolutely no secret of the fact that it is a Dutch product. Red's voicelines include phrases like "vet!" and "wajo!" (the latter specifically being a Moroccan word that made its way into Dutch street language — you should take a mental note of that for later). there's Kubuswoningen integrated into the architecture everywhere you look. the characters in the police force are all named after famous Dutch architects and designers. some pedestrians will tell you to "doe normaal!" if you run into them. some of the stores read "Speel Station" on them, which is an extremely literal translation of "PlayStation". Bel's name is a pun, the name meaning "call" in Dutch. the ferries to Pyramid Island are directly based on the ones that can be found in Amsterdam. the Millenium Mall has lettering that reads "1000 MALL" with what appears to be a C above it; a possible reference to the deprecated C1000 chain of supermarkets? there's an easter egg that contains a 3D model of an old grachtenpand. the Mataan area contains coffeeshops and an area that is clearly inspired by de Wallen, and the whole level itself feels like it's one big city canal except it's floating in the air now.

one of the NPCs you find in the game makes a comment stating that the city of New Amsterdam looks more like New Rotterdam these days; a direct reference to how New Amsterdam is filled with skyscrapers, which only Rotterdam has a lot of in real life, since our country is a big swamp and it's pretty much impossible to build any high-rise buildings so you won't find a lot in Amsterdam. yeah, at times, the game will get that specific with its references to Dutch culture and locales.

i have to find a spot in this review to talk about the music, so i'm gonna do it here. the music selection is perfect. 2 Mello is in it! Sashko is not! what more could you want? i'm not super familiar with the Jet Set Radio soundtrack, but i am aware of how beloved it is and how many artists have been inspired by it. what does strike me about the Bomb Rush Cyberfunk soundtrack is how besides all the Naganuma-style tracks, there's a lot more space for all sorts of different music genres, from techno to rap and disco tunes. like, this soundtrack manages to seamlessly string together groovy, slow, 80s synth funk disco beats with extremely abrasive minimal techno tracks. and it just works. it's fucking awesome.

but yeah, it's extremely cool to see a videogame that has been going all around the globe in the past few days put all of these Dutch things on the map. they're little things, sure, but it's those little things that really sell the setting of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. people outside the country wouldn't even pick up on any of it, and yet they added it in anyways. it's also extremely cool to see something like Jet Set Radio being reimagined in such a wildly different location, and this time it's one that immediately feels familiar to me! it's an absolute joy to look at and to recognize things within.

but Dutch culture isn't just voicelines, cube houses, and bicycles. Dutch culture is a lot more than that.

the Dutch multiculturalism behind Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

the Netherlands is one big melting pot. right-wing politicans will argue about "keeping Dutch culture/heritage alive" without being able to solidly define what Dutch culture is. and you wanna know what that is, besides bicycle infrastructure and hagelslag? it's straattaal. it's Kapsalon. it's having a Chin. Ind. restaurant in every single town no matter the size, where you can order yourself some Babi panggang, a meal within the Chinese-Indonesian cuisine that in this version literally doesn't exist outside of the Netherlands. Dutch culture has owed a lot to immigrants and foreigners. i'm personally not very familiar with the Dutch hip-hop culture that influenced Team Reptile in particular, so i can't comment on that directly, but i am absolutely aware of how much it's a cultural thing here too that borrows from a ton of different other cultures.

however!
it has to be said that this isn't all just positive. the Netherlands is not a perfect country. it's mostly just very tolerant. most people here merely tolerate cultures that are not our own; if they have things we like, we are happy to take those things, but if they step out of line and we don't like it, we feel the need to silence them. it's the mentality that this country was built upon in the Gouden Eeuw. it's why we're happy to have Babi panggang, but simultaneously think that people of colour are going too far when they want to get rid of Zwarte Piet. it's why my grandpa is happy to be married to my grandma, an Indo-Dutch woman, while also happily voting for the PVV because they will keep all the foreigners out of our country. our society is a big amalgamation of all sorts of different cultural practices and beliefs — which is great! — but only the ones the dominant culture has deemed valuable enough, and often through methods of cultural appropriation and assimilation. sometimes to the point where we don't even recognize the origin of some of these things anymore, and we just view them as "ours" while being blind to their actual roots. you grow up with Chin. Ind. restaurants everywhere, so you don't think where they come from — you don't stop to think that that's out of the ordinary at all, you don't consider that they have history. it's just Dutch now!

the way i view Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is largely through this broader lens of Dutch multiculturalism. that's not just my own take, however; it's something that can be pieced together through interviews with Dion Koster, the lead developer of Team Reptile, too.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is primarily influenced by Koster's own experiences growing up within Dutch street culture. in several interviews, he mentions growing up and heading to Amsterdam to attend dancing lessons and hip-hop jams all the time. Jet Set Radio gave him a piece of media that expressed all these things he was taught growing up, and it became so ingrained into him that he decided to honor it with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. as such it's not a direct clone of JSR, it's more like a successor in every sense of the word; it's Koster's response to the JSR series.

in one interview, he mentions designing POC characters for the game, and when asked if it's a challenging task, he says it's not even difficult because he has spent all his life around people of all these different cultures.

quote from "Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a ‘street culture symphony,’ says director", july 24, 2021, Digital Trends
"What I see a lot lately is companies going, “Ok we’ve got to include lots of different people in our games.” And while the intentions are usually good you can feel like it’s being made by people who haven’t met those different people and they end up falling into these “stupid mistake” traps like them not giving Black people light palms.

Throughout my life, I’ve made so many friends of different cultures that I feel like I can normally create any type of person without doing them a disservice. People with different hairstyles, clothing styles, etc. I feel like that’s a luxury that not many people have. In some cases, I will check with my friends a part of different cultures to make sure things are honest as well."

i ofcourse have to refer back to Dutch multiculturalism: it's these cultural intersections and interactions present within Dutch hip-hop and street culture that have shaped Koster into the person he is today, and it is what he channeled into the world of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. it gives the game a unique personal flair, down to some of the dances and moves in the game directly being performed by Koster, i believe using motion capture technology.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is not just a love letter to Jet Set Radio, but one to Dutch street culture as well. it's where the Y2K futurism and snappy, direct gameplay of Jet Set Radio get mixed together with Dutch street culture, architecture, and style. it's clear that this is the driving force behind the game and its creators, and it makes me so extremely glad to see this being represented in such a popular title.

it's also why i'm sad that the game doesn't dive into the topic very deeply at all.

the narrative of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and my family's history

my grandma's name is Irene Rietveld. as mentioned previously, she is an Indo-Dutch woman; she was born in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies, and my great-grandma and her were forced to flee to the Netherlands. most Indo people deal with heaps of generational trauma, to the point where their refusal to share their experiences under the Dutch colonial rule is so common that it has its own name, that being Indisch zwijgen. as a result, i don't know a lot about my family's history. it was never passed onto my mom, and my mom never passed it onto me.

(note that because of this, i'm not very familiar with my family's history at all. i don't know if i'm being tactful or accurate enough about their experiences; if i'm not, please do correct me in the comments!)

my grandma and bio grandpa's home was not a safe one. i assume they must've faced a lot of hardships having to flee their home country and then being forced to adapt to Dutch society. as a result, they were extremely hard-working, and as parents they were very strict and aggressive, causing my mom to run away at 17 from the abuse. she couldn't connect with the culture she grew up in, so she decided to do everything her own way instead.

and the way she did that was by getting sucked up by New Age spiritual beliefs as an alternative to the beliefs she was raised under, leading her to ignoring all my disabilities and mental health issues, pulling me out of the school system, and all around messing up my life. i myself didn't run away, but i sure wish i did sometimes. instead i found myself becoming a transgender leftist as an adult; i guess it's ultimately my own way of rejecting the beliefs i was raised under, too. i couldn't connect with the culture i grew up in, so i decided to do everything my own way instead. are you starting to see a pattern here?

it's why i was caught so off-guard when the game introduced a character named Irene Rietveld. she bears no relation to my grandma — she's clearly named after Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld with a different first name — but it certainly threw me for a loop. for a moment, it gave me a connection to this game that felt very personal; a game that's so heavily influenced by Dutch multiculturalism featuring a character coincidentally named after someone in my life who couldn't be more representative of it. maybe it was meant to be, somehow?

i certainly had hopes that the story would go in a direction that directly tackled this topic and setting once i entered the first borough and came across the Franks; a gang whose members are all literally stitched together from a variety of different skin colours/races. knowing the game's background and the history of the developers makes it clear to me what this design is trying to communicate.

Red, the game's main character, is a "cyberhead" attached to the body of a famous graffiti artist, and he is lead to the Franks in his quest to find out more about the artist whose body he now belongs to, his "roots". it's an interesting question, for sure! what are you supposed to do when you're a robotic head attached to someone else's body? what history does that body have, where did it grow up in? do you continue their legacy? do you create your own?

yes, you do create your own; that's the game's answer to this question. your roots don't matter, it's what you do with your life that matters.

except it does matter! a lot! and it's one thing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk lacks, severely. none of these characters have roots. we all meet them as they are in the present, their history never being discussed. all the characters designs are influenced by several different cultures, but the characters themselves don't belong to any culture. we know that Dion Koster grew up in a very Dutch environment, and started exploring skating and breaking and all these other things and getting a taste of all these different cultures; but we don't have such information for any of the characters in this game. they don't have families, they don't have hometowns, they don't have languages. they just... exist. they're more there to serve the storyline and the overall vibe than to serve themselves as characters.

the quest for Red's roots quickly gets twisted from a search to find his cultural heritage, into figuring out the motives and the behavior of the person his body first belonged to. the actual roots of this body don't matter, as there just aren't any. we just get a full name, a face, and a short bio, and that's it.

as someone with a very turbulent cultural history behind me who struggles to figure out what their roots are, the game gave me hope that this theme was integral to the plot, and it would get explored in a way i could relate to. instead, it just felt like it was almost entirely just a part of the game's setting, the game's subtext.

similarly, the game seeks to portray an ultra-militarized police force, who use the original head/brain of Red's body as a database with knowledge of all the graffiti artists in New Amsterdam, with the intent of policing them and wiping them all out. a possible commentary on the mayor of Amsterdam's pleas to increase the police capacity in the city? or the escalation of violence and repeated incidents within the Rotterdam police force, such as the 2021 Woonprotest incident in which many people (including a queer activist friend of mine) got kettled and beaten by police for attending a housing protest while dressed in black?

eh, it could be commentary on these situations. but really, we'll never know, because the game doesn't ever go into detail about any of its motivations here. the police force in the game mostly fulfill the role of the baddies in the game; they're purposefully exaggerated beyond belief. is this meant to be a satirical portrayal of Dutch police? a warning to our generation that our police force might look like that some day if we don't take action against it? or are they just so exaggerated so that we don't have to feel bad about seeing them as the bad guy here, while the game devs wouldn't want us to actually associate it with the real Dutch police force?

the game won't tell you! it won't tell you any of these things. the only thing it portrays in a direct fashion is the dominant Dutch culture, and everything else is subtext. (granted, i am aware JSR has a strong anti-cop sentiment behind it, and since BRC is ofcourse a game about doing illegal things like graffiti, i feel safe assuming it's not too friendly about cops. but still! if their overexaggerated representation of police is intended to slot into what our police is like in reality, they could have been more direct about the connection between them!) i really wish it wasn't just subtext; this game had the opportunity to hit some really big punches with social commentary here, and it purposefully avoids doing so just so it has an easier time stringing together its basic gameplay loop of traveling to a borough -> complete challenges -> beat the boss -> flashback sequence -> repeat until the game's over. it's very simplistic in my opinion.

oh, wait, that's right. the gameplay!

the gameplay

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is fun. it's just a lot of fun. i've personally never played Jet Set Radio, so i can't truly comment on its relation to that series; though after playing BRC, i almost feel like i have played JSR now. i do have a lot of experience with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, which this game also borrows some influences from. for the most part, the movement here feels like THPS on steroids. the trick system isn't as complex — you just press a button and it performs a trick, no combining it with directional inputs to get a greater variety of tricks here — but the movement system is incredibly fleshed out and easy to pick up.

instead of having to balance grinds and manuals, the game does all of it for you, and the focus is placed on keeping your combo going instead. if you keep doing the same trick, it decreases in value, so you have to switch it up with different tricks. you can rack up combo multipliers by hitting wallrides and hard corners on rails, but they only count the first time you hit them in a combo, forcing you to go to different sections of the map while keeping your combo going to accumulate as many multipliers as possible. tricking is much faster than just riding around, since you're faster on rails and you can give yourself plenty of boosts. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is designed to constantly keep you moving, and it never fails at that even once.

and as i've seen remarked elsewhere on here, it's effectively just a collect-a-thon platformer disguised as a JSR/THPS tribute. progressing through the storyline requires you to gain rep by spraying graffiti across the map, which means you have to explore the game's world, and you'll quickly find that there's collectables scattered all over the map; new graffiti pieces to use, different outfits for the different characters, songs from the game's soundtrack. heck, i'm only missing some collectable VHS tapes here! the game is designed very well here, in a way that makes you automatically come across all of these items as the game progresses.

this, in my opinion, is the best thing this game has to offer the player; a rich, vivid world full of things to collect with an incredible soundtrack and a fun and rewarding movement system. if that doesn't sell you, i don't think the rest of the game will.

the storymode gameplay gets very repetitive. it repeats the same gameplay modes over and over again; you find a new borough, you spray graffiti until the gang who controls it starts challenging you, you beat all the challenges, the police attacks you and you beat them, you have a score challenge with the gang, you win, you get a flashback sequence, REPEAT! if you've played through the first stage, you've basically played through all of them, save for the fact that the challenges get more difficult with each stage. it's INCREDIBLY, and i mean INCREDIBLY linear.

the idea behind Bomb Rush Cyberfunk makes me think of games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, or Need for Speed: Carbon (which, granted, i haven't played since i was a kid, so maybe my description of it here might be a bit too positive). in those games, you have to gain territory from other gangs by battling them over it, and they can dynamically recapture territory from you and battle you over it as well. i think Bomb Rush Cyberfunk could've benefited greatly from a much more fluid and open-ended system like this, but it forgoes that and opts for a completely linear storymode instead. possibly to imitate JSR? i don't know, but still: it could have been a lot more than this.

also, at some point, the game throws one of those missions at you where one of the characters is lost, and you have to go across every single freaking stage to talk to characters there in the hopes of finding them. as if the storymode wasn't linear enough, they end up throwing this in to pad out the length just a tiny bit more.

the core gameplay mechanics of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk are incredibly tight, but in other areas it seems to fall a bit short. don't get me wrong, it was still very fun to play because this game is generally very fun to play, but the storymode mechanics themselves weren't anything to write home about in my opinion.

it's these parts of the game that prevent it from being a completely flawless experience. and i'd like to go over some more reasons why i feel that way.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has jank

i already mentioned i haven't played Jet Set Radio or its sequel, Jet Set Radio Future. i've seen some people play it though, and even without being very familiar with it, it does seem like there's some... strange design quirks in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk that i can deduce are probably there on purpose. things like the characters not having any facial animations and looking weird in cutscenes, or the fact that the cutscenes have no voice acting. every time you gain a heat level, a cutscene plays indicating that the police are on their way, and it becomes extremely annoying because it halts the gameplay for several seconds — and you'll be seeing these cutscenes near-constantly, as they show up every time you spray enough graffiti to increase your heat level.

i could excuse stuff like that for being clear attempts at maintaining accuracy with the videogame series Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is based on. it's cool, in a way! but also, if this is supposed to be a modernized version of what JSR had to offer, why wouldn't they do away with all these weird quirks? some of them are funny as a callback; others, especially the police cutscenes, just completely get in the way of playing the game.

and then there's just things that aren't designed as well as everything else.

there's three different modes of transport in the game. you can use skates, a skateboard, or a BMX. yet from what i can tell, they all handle exactly the same. it's cosmetic, with each of them having their own set of unique trick animations. instead of making them handle differently, the game just gates off certain collectables behind them. if you're on skates, there's glass floors you can break by sliding on them. if you're on a BMX, there's bike garages that open up for you that contain collectables. it really sucks that the game doesn't provide any meaningful differences between each mode of transport that would actively make me want to pick one over the other, and it just artificially gates collectables behind them instead.

there's different player characters as well, but once again, they're just a skin. none of them handle differently, so there's not really any incentive for me to play as any one of them.

honestly, this is much more of a personal opinion, but i feel like the stages get much more linear and boring towards the end of the game. at the start, you're in these open-ended areas with lots of room and lines to follow; at the end, the stages become a lot more linear and boxy, relying on pre-built rails and routes you have to follow where you can't freely develop your own lines. i really don't like these later stages compared to the early ones.

the final boss contains a section where you have to grind on rails and jump off of them to hit the boss. except the camera is fixed here, so you'll always be viewing your player character from the side. you can't see what's in front of you, or below you. it's actually really frustrating to play, as you can't aim for any of the rails and you'll be missing a lot of them as you fall to your death.

the flashback sequences are separate levels from the main game, where the focus is much more directly on platforming. you have to get from the start to the finish, with the finish being a graffiti spot you can spray over. all of the flashback levels are just an empty void with a trippy noise-generated rings background, and they consist entirely of random in-game assets haphazardly slapped together in this void to create a level. sometimes the assets clip through eachother. sometimes they're positioned in a way where you'll have to make blind jumps. i really think these are some of the most underwhelming parts of the whole game.

everything i just mentioned feels like it's the sorta thing that was designed this way out of budget or time constraints; like they wanted to do something much grander with this, but failed to accomplish it, which for instance is why we're getting a random mishmash of assets in the flashback sequences instead of anything purpose-built for these levels.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is fun and it packs a lot of style, but i wouldn't call it perfect.

some final thoughts

this game could've been something just a bit greater, but it's not. it's an indie title from a small team and it has its quirks and shortcomings here and there. what they managed to do kicks ass, but i also definitely hope someone is gonna make a quality-of-life mod some day that'd fix all of these issues and make it absolutely perfect to play.

that being said, what's there is extremely cool! most of this review is me suggesting some what-ifs and then being sad that Team Reptile didn't go there. i think it's fair to be sad over that and to criticize their ability to take the game in these directions, but it would be unfair if i judged it completely on those merits and i overlooked what they actually managed to accomplish here. because they certainly accomplished a lot and it's certainly one of the most captivating games i have played in a very long time.

yes, the setting doesn't touch very deeply on cultural issues, but the things it does touch on are portrayed very accurately and stylishly. yes, the later stages are very linear, but the earlier ones are really pretty and so much fun to explore. the visuals pop. the movement mechanics are super satisfying, and i'll come back to the game for that alone. the sound design is great, especially the music selection is incredible. some spots in the game just do not have as much attention to detail as the others, but all the spots that did get a lot of attention to detail sure did get an absolute fuckton of it. all the moments where Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is good, well, it's really fucking good.

is it worth it to pick the game up for those moments? eh. €40 is a bit steep for what it has to offer. if you're a massive fan of the Jet Set Radio series, i'm sure it's instantly worth the price. if you're looking for a fun platformer/skate-em-up with a ton of flair, an incredibly catchy soundtrack, and a lot of addicting gameplay mechanics, it's worth it. if you're mostly here for the storymode, then it's absolutely not worth it — but let's face it, given that this game is a Jet Set Radio tribute, i doubt that's what everyone wants to play it for, anyways. you're here for the movement, the art direction, and the soundtrack. and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk definitely delivers on those things. just don't think too hard about the rest.


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in reply to @idadeerz's post:

After reading this (and agreeing with most of it, though I find myself a lot more unbothered by things like the cop cutscenes and the jank) I think you'd really enjoy JSRF. It's also secretly a collectathon platformer and overall plays VERY similarly to BRC, and while it doesn't control quite as well it DOES benefit from far greater setpiece variety in its story, the biggest thing I felt Bomb Rush was lacking