Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, the Jet-Set-Radio-alike skating game from the devs behind Lethal League, has been delayed until summer next year.
We've been waiting on this one for a while now. When we were getting excited about it all the way back in the halcyon days of 2020, we were expecting it to come out the following year. Then the development updates started saying 2022, and now here we are, eyes still fixed on a receding horizon as a tweet from Team Reptile sends the game sliding back to summer 2023.
If you've not been following Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's development, it's a very deliberate spiritual successor to beloved Dreamcast classic Jet Set Radio. The game sees players freerun, skateboard, and BMX around a cel-shaded city in order to cover it in graffiti and challenge rival crews for turf. You can use your personal boostpack (which everyone apparently has in this gleaming vision of the future) to pull off Tony Hawk-style tricks and, most tantalisingly, the game promises that you will "encounter a lot of weirdos". Just like real life.
Better a delayed game than a bad one, of course, but hopefully this is the last delay Bomb Rush Cyberfunk needs before it's ready to go. In screenshots and videos the game already looks very Jet Set indeed, and the involvement of JSR's original composer, Hideki Naganuma, has my JSRF-weaned brain clapping along like a baby seal to the soundtrack. But Team Reptile says that releasing the game this year "will not take it to a level" that the devs "would be personally satisfied with". Next year it is, then.
If you want to wait impatiently with the rest of us, you can find the game's Steam page (which still proclaims a now-incorrect release date of 2022 at time of writing) right here.
