The game is largely inspired by Jet Set Radio and especially its sequel Jet Set Radio Future, borrowing its artstyle, aesthetics, and gameplay. The gameplay itself is classic urban skating Sports Game fare: rollerblade, skateboard, or bike around a cityscape, doing tricks to score points. Like with Jet Set Radio, the main objective is spraying graffiti onto surfaces to make progress, using an Action Commands system to quickly spray patterns down and giving the player the option to choose what to draw.
The game released on Nintendo Switch and Steam on the 18th of August 2023, with Playstation and Xbox receiving the game on the 1st of September.
Trailers:
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Teaser
- Official Trailer
- Official Trailer v2
- Gameplay Trailer
- Movestyle Teaser
- Release Date Announcement
- Official Special Trailer
I just can't Get Enuf (of these tropes):
- Abnormal Ammo: The missiles that the police fire out turn into handcuffs when they hit the player.
- Amazon Brigade: Eclipse consists entirely of women due to their shared dislike of men. FUTURISM notably has exclusively female members as well but is led by the male DJ Cyber.
- Amnesiac Hero: After getting decapitated and having a replacement robot head grafted in its place, Red can't perfectly recall his former life as Faux, but can tap into Faux's memories when he dreams. As revealed by Vinyl after taking out DOT EXE, they actually aren't actually Faux's memories; they're of Faux's partner, Felix, whose flesh-and-blood head is encased inside Red's.
- And the Adventure Continues: At the end of the game, while BRC celebrates going All City, DJ Cyber warns Felix not to relax, as they aren't going to be able to hold onto the All City crown forever. This acts as an indirect challenge from FUTURISM, as a continued part of their rivalry for turf, and also implies that other gangs might start making moves too. BRC's work is far from over.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The airdash mechanic gives players some leeway when trying to land precisely on things like railings.
- Touching collectible music and spray pickups will prompt your cellphone HUD in the bottom left of the screen to show up; swiping right to unlock it immediately opens the screen to the relevant unlockable.
- Important NPCs that give quests are clearly distinguished from random civilians: you can tell them apart from normal people because they're constantly dancing, and their constant movement makes it easy to spot them from a distance.
- Unlike its spritiual predecessors the spray paint is unlimited and the pickups are solely for boost.
- Similarly the entire painting process is based on the sequence of directions you input, enabling you to use your favorite sprays easier. This also helps modders as there are many more options for the different sizes.
- Whenever you race a rival writer, the goal will be some graffiti spot in the distance. The AI is really slow to put down paint, so if the race is neck-and-neck you'll still clutch the win.
- Each borough has a collectible item hidden somewhere that will enable graffiti spots to show up on your phone's map. Incredibly useful for finding that Last Lousy Point in the postgame, in which one of the quests is tied to 100% Completion.
- Half-pipes and quarter-pipes seem to auto-accelerate the player character moving into them to a certain speed, so you don't have to back off before running into it too often.
- There are easily-activated Robo-Post boxes in Millennium Mall and Pyramid Island, two locations heavy on vertical traversal with fairly lengthy platforming puzzles between floors, and Mataan, the most sprawling area in the game, that act as fast travel points so the player doesn't have to redo huge swathes of the map just to get to the graffiti spots they missed.
- One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in Jet Set Radio was avoiding the police while trying to finish complex tags. Bomb Rush lets you leave an area temporarily or enter a port-a-potty to shake the cops, and has a tagging system that makes dealing with them much less of a hassle in general.
- Even when skating, your character will still be able to clamber onto platforms you were just slightly too low to jump to.
- Apathetic Citizens: The random NPC civilians only care if you bump into them, spray them, or trick carelessly near them, getting knocked away while possibly telling you to watch where you're going. Besides that, they won't give a damn about all the all the vandalism you're committing on everything else. One particular group of NPCs in the heart of the city are having a boardroom presentation; you can crash through the window, spray a sign over their projector screen, then skate off, and so long as you never actually touch them, they won't lift a finger about it.
- Arc Words: "Roots" and the remembrance thereof. In this context, "roots" is used to refer to where one comes from and the circumstances that make one who they are. Red wants to remember his roots by recovering his old head and therefore his old memories. Other characters bring it up from time to time, like one of the Franks boasting that he knows one of his legs came from a top athlete, or Escher stating that one's origins aren't important, it's what they make of them. The final boss was consumed by his roots, resorting to underhanded methods to achieve his goals because he thought having a corrupt cop for a father would delegitimize him. The ending affirms that your roots matter less than what you decide to make of yourself.
- Art Attacker: After launching any number of cops into the air, if you jump into range, you can spray graffiti onto them. This will instantly defeat all of them in one fell swoop.
- Benevolent Architecture: Levels are designed to accommodate the various skating tricks the player will employ, which can result in some rather conspicuous concessions for game design. On the Golden Pyramid, for example, there's one particular red pipe near where Rise is relaxing, which doesn't connect to anything, goes in a loop, and only really exists so the player has access to the graffiti spots placed on the nearby solar panels.
- Bilingual Bonus : Many of the playable Writers will start cheering in a secondary language. Rave, for example, cheers in Spanish and German, while Red and Felix occasionally do so in Dutch.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: The Writers are, at best, public nuisances who can constantly get in the way of civilians on their path to tagging every area they can find; and at worst, deliberately endangering others to keep a hold on their turf, to the point where they have a code in place to ensure nothing goes too far. However, they're up against a police force that will gun them down mercilessly for tagging one too many places and a Writer whose own desire to go All City causes him to betray his teammate and kill/frame up every other Writer in his way.
- Bloodless Carnage: Most situations don't have blood involved: anything from getting shot to getting decapitated won't spill blood. That said, the times when blood does get spilled become all the more dramatic for this, such as when Red gets shot in the face and a couple of droplets fall from his head, indicating that he's got a human head.
- Bookends:
- At the end of the tutorial level, DJ Cyber decapitates Faux, leading to Red's head being put on his old body. Later, at the climax of the story, Faux in his Project Algo form rips Red's head off.
- In the backstory, the feuding between gangs started when Felix of the Big 3 made it All City and then got wasted, making the position up for grabs again. At the end of the story, Felix has regained the title of All City and Faux, the man that wasted him, gets wasted himself.
- Cassette Futurism: Late 90's tech such as clamshell flip-phones, boomboxes, and floppy disks hardly look out of place with the equally-chunky robotic head replacements, giant tank mechas, and jetpacks. DOT EXE in particular are equipped with cybernetic heads whose monitor faces strongly resemble CRTs.
- Chained by Fashion:
- Faux, a member of New Amsterdam's Big 3 graffiti writers, wears a bunch of chains on his pants. Red, an up-and-coming graffiti writer aiming to become All City, wears those same chains whilst "borrowing" Faux's body.
- The police like to fire lengths of chains with manacles at the end to capture your player character. Thankfully, breaking these chains is trivially easy, and earns you a set of manacles for your character's wrists and ankles until you hit a loading screen.
- Character Select Forcing:
- To demonstrate the character selection mechanic of the Bomb Rush Crew, Eclipse refuses to talk to Red because he's a dude; you'll need to bring Bel (or Jay, if you bought the DLC) along by dancing at the nearby checkerboard.
- Certain doors with a bicycle symbol on them can only be unlocked by bringing a bike to them and waiting on the pressure plate. Extendable fire hydrants similarly require a skateboarder to activate via Natas spin, and glass floor panels can only be broken by cess sliding with inline skates.
- Code of Honor: The Code of the Streets dictate how gang disputes are resolved. The Oldheads act as impartial mediators who enforce the Code, and going against their rulings is a good way to make enemies out of everyone and lose what status and territory you may hold. The Code also forbids killing, which makes it ironic that one of the Code's biggest enforcers, DJ Cyber, has a habit of beheading people.
- Cool Old Guy: The Oldheads are a gang of these: comprised of three gangster geriatrics, all the crews respect them enough to trust them as impartial judges of Crew Battles.
- Cosmetic Award: All the permanent unlockables are cosmetic. New songs to play via the phone, new patterns to spray as graffiti, new dances to do whenever, and new drip for the Bomb Rush Crew.
- Culture Chop Suey: New Amsterdam is a mix of Amsterdam and New York City. From Amsterdam, many characters have European legal names with most of them being Dutch, like "Rietveld", "Berlage", or "Teun Vogelaar", while one of the Oldheads complains that New Amsterdam more resembles the nearby city of Rotterdam than actual Amsterdam. From NYC, "going all city" is real graffiti slang that used to specifically refer to be known throughout all five of NYC's boroughs, which parallel New Amsterdam's own five boroughs, in addition to "New Amsterdam" being the original name of New York City. Architecture from both is also incorporated: the ferry port to the Golden Pyramid only having a two-layer bike rack and no car parking lot would be alien and inconvenient to Americans but is normal to the Dutch, while the massive indoor shopping complex of Millenium Mall is a common staple in the US but rare in the Netherlands.
- Creator Cameo: The graffiti that Felix throws up in the Chapter 5 flashback reads "DION", as it's an old piece by project lead Dion Koster.
- Cyborg: Replacing body parts with metal seems to be common practice among the various gangs and even the police, with Cyberhead head replacements being apparently mass-manufactured and to the point where no one blinks at DOT.EXE being a group entirely composed out of people with their heads replaced with monitors.
- Dance Battler: The same trick moves your character uses to show off during combos are also used to fight off police in combat. You can also dance freely when out of combat.
- Dance Party Ending: Faux is no longer corrupting the police force from within, Rietvield has done her best to clean up the Bomb Rush Crew's name, and they're now All-City. In celebration of this, the BRC hold a dance-off at their hideout, with the Oldheads swinging by to commemorate it.
- Deadly Rotary Fan: A fan blade chops off Felix's head, after Faux pushes him off his ladder.
- Death by Irony: The Final Boss is taken out by the very man he killed in the backstory, in much the same way by being knocked down from a tall building. To really make sure Faux's death is as ironic as possible, the background transforms from the Mataan skyline to the rooftop with the deadly fan that Felix got killed by.
- Disproportionate Retribution: And how! The more gangs you beat, the harder the cops will go down on you, sending in officers in riot armor, attack helicopters, and even a giant armed mech to take down a bunch of street punks with lethal force, specifically because they sprayed some graffiti around. Even the common street cops you first encounter upgrade their arsenals from police batons to handguns halfway into the game. This is because Faux, as Project Algo, is mind controlling them.
- Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: As revealed at the end of the Golden Pyramid, Vinyl didn't actually defect from FUTURISM. She was working for DJ Cyber the whole time while joined with the Bomb Rush Crew, it's just that DJ Cyber's goal was to help them all along as well.
- Dull Surprise: An inevitability of every character literally having one generally non-emotive face pasted onto their models that doesn't ever change.
- Edgy Backwards Chair-Sitting: One of the Oldheads sits on a backwards chair when judging the results of Crew Battles.
- Evil Former Friend: Faux, Felix, and DJ Cyber used to be known as the "Big 3" of New Amsterdam. Then Felix made it "All City", only to get killed, and DJ Cyber's ambition to make his own crew "All City" leads to him decapitating Faux and then antagonizing Bomb Rush. After the Golden Pyramid, it turns out that Faux was the evil friend in the group, being the one who killed Felix, and DJ Cyber had good intentions all along, only killing Faux in retaliation for Felix's death.
- Facial Markings:
- Riedveld has two black, vertical lines over her right eye.
- Felix, the original All-City King and New Amsterdam's #1 Most Wanted, is identifiable by the wing tattoo on his left cheek. However, it still takes a while for regular people to recognize them because Felix was constantly wearing a face-covering mask.
- Fame Gate: Every borough has its own Rep score, and Bomb Rush Crew needs to increase their Rep by tagging buildings, finding collectables, and beating the local gang's missions before they're allowed to get past obstacles set up by the Oldheads or challenge gangs for control of the area.
- The Farmer and the Viper: Via Project Algo, Berlage is able to resurrect Faux's decapitated head and grant him almost total control of the New Amsterdam PD. Faux uses this power to kill Berlage.
- Foreshadowing:
- After the tutorial a "Wired CYBER OS Professional" install screen shows up for Red's Cyberhead. During that you can see an error message in the bottom left corner: "Error: Can not find Ai.Main Component". The Cyberhead doesn't have a critical component like that because it's running using Felix's head as a base.
- When meeting up with the leader of the Franks, it's revealed he was the one who put the cyberhead on Faux's body despite the fact his trade seems to be more focused on stitching body parts together. Then it's revealed that Red's Cyberhead isn't so cyber after all. One of the Franks even boasts that he has the leg of a famous talented athlete. Turns out just like that one Frank, Red also has the body part of someone famous and talented, specifically the head of Felix.
- As early as Red's first hallucination level, one of the things he sees is Faux pushing him off the side of a building. This was the last thing Felix saw before dying.
- Eclipse predicts the BRC's fortunes after getting bested. Their extremely vague advice is "You are taking a big risk. You trust him. But the selector does not speak the truth. Nevertheless! What your headless friend is looking for... and All City. They are connected. One will lead to the other." All of this is foreshadowing for lategame events: the BRC are indeed risking their lives by going All City, as the Final Boss threatens to kill them. The second and third sentences hint at DJ Cyber deceiving Red as a Secret Test of Character (selector being another word for DJ). And going All City really is connected to what Red's looking for, ie. either Faux's head, his original identity, or both, as claiming all five boroughs gives him his final flashback and returns his memories as Felix, shortly before Faux's head — in control of a mecha — shows up to antagonize them.
- After beating DOT EXE, their leader gets killed by a shot to the face, and in the hallucination flashback level after, he asks Red if he collected any intel about that event, stating that he should be able to use his Cyberhead to pick up on police radio. Red responds that he doesn't have a clue how to do that. This is more foreshadowing about Red's "Cyberhead" being human; when Escher shoots him at the BRC's hideout not long after, a human head is revealed beneath chipped metal.
- Fragile Speedster: Snipers are incredibly nimble and situate themselves in hard to reach spots, but they go down in even less hits than the average police grunts.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: While fighting the Final Boss, Faux disposes of his old body by throwing it out from a tall height; Red Felix's Cyberhead gets placed on his original body, and the final blow shatters the Cyberhead shell to entirely reveal his original head. Despite this, Felix becomes playable in addition to Red in the postgame, so not only can you have Red still alive and kicking despite the destruction of his Cyberhead and the body it was stuck on, you can set it up such that Red dances with Felix in Cyphers, which would be impossible by the story's standards.
- Gang of Hats: In true Jet Set Radio fashion, all of the crews are themed in some weird way:
- The Franks are a bunch of stitched-together homunculi that love basketball.
- Eclipse has an astral and zodiac theme to their graffiti, practice fortune telling, and judge Red by his zodiac sign. They are also all female and dislike men.
- DOT EXE is a crew of breakdancing cyborgs who upgrade their bodies to win dance battles. Their "faces" are computer screens with pool ball designs painted on them.
- Devil Theory are themed after samurai, but with red masks that have huge teeth to invoke Oni imagery. Their graffiti invokes other Japanese traditions, such as featuring daruma in their medium-sized sprays.
- Oldheads are a bunch of old men and women that wear wizard-like garbsnote over tracksuits and wide-brimmed bucket hats. Which fits with their sagely role and being from a much older generation.
- FUTURISM are a gang that are “damn near equipped for chemical warfare”, donning gas masks and Y2K inspired outfits. Every member is female except for their leader, DJ Cyber.
- Game Mod: Modders worked stupid-fast within a week on launch. Highlights include custom player models, custom music, a movestyle swapper, and a barebone multiplayer mod.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: Escher is a sniper that fights Red by constantly running away, putting distance between them to potshot at him with a rifle. Fighting him involves punching him, then figuring out where he ran off to before hunting him down, using cover to safely close the distance.
- Guide Dang It!: Doing on-foot grounded tricks into jump will result in high jump. This is also how you quickly defeat in-game cops instead of mashing tricks over and over.
- Grind Boots: Depending on your movestyle, your chosen character can grind along rails with inline skates.
- He Knows Too Much:
- After taking over the DOT EXE borough, they decide to warn the Bomb Rush gang about the police's "Project Algo" that they picked up on their scanners, but their boss gets sniped immediately after.
- The Final Boss was motivated to kill Felix because the latter knew that the former's father, a corrupt cop, was scrubbing his record clean.
- Historical In-Joke: "New Amsterdam" was the original name of the Dutch settlement that ultimately became New York City.
- Honor Among Thieves: The crews might hate each others' guts, but they're usually above killing each other or letting them die; case in point, the Flesh Prince is left salty from the Bomb Rush Crew taking over Versum Hill, but once they tell him that Red is in a bad condition after being shot in the head, his tone immediately changes and he rushes to the BRC's hideout to help. This is part of why Felix's death and Faux's beheading are taboo and stand out, as actual murder is usually off-limits.
- Hub Level: The BRC's hideout has shortcuts leading to Versum Hill, Millenium Square, and Mataan. Millenium Square is itself also an example, as it's the center borough and you can access all of the four other boroughs through it.
- Human All Along: After taking out DOT EXE, it's revealed that Red's head isn't actually a robotic replacement; while Vinyl is telling the Bomb Rush crew the cause of Red's blackouts, Escher ambushes them and shoots Red, breaking the faceplate and revealing a human head underneath. When asked about it, the Flesh Prince of the Franks admits that it was part of an experiment he was doing, and Bomb Rush asking him for help with a decapitated body seemed like the perfect opportunity to take it further.
- Hypocrite:
- DJ Cyber enforces the Code of the Street with an iron fist but has no problems breaking it himself in pursuit of his own goals, even if he did have a very good reason for murdering Faux.
- The Devil Theory crew condemn DJ Cyber for breaking the Code but they themselves don't really follow it in the first place. They're pointlessly antagonistic and like to trap other writers in enclosed spaces with police officers.
- Implausible Boarding Skills: Some of the feats shown off would be really difficult (if not impossible) on a skateboard, let alone doing it with rollerskates, a bike, or bare shoes. Tricks include grinding up vertical lampposts, while upside-down on ceilings, or on a bunch of offshore wind turbines' blades. However, the Boostpacks that the characters wear make it perfectly feasible by giving the Writers the needed momentum. Their ubiquity among the Gangs is part of why Felix was so revered; unlike all the other Writers, he didn't need one.
- Improbable Weapon User:
- Just like the game's inspiration, you can down heavy ordnance police weaponry like turrets and helicopters by spraying them with graffiti.
- Then there's DJ Cyber who carries lethal vinyl records that can slice a man's head clean off.
- Tryce and by extension, anyone using the BMX bike movestyle can use it as a weapon against cops using tricks.
- Inspiration Nod: There are quite a few levels of the game that are directly inspired by places in the Jet Set Radio series.
- The Bomb Rush Crew's hideout is essentially a modernized equivalent of The Garage from Jet Set Radio Future.
- Mataan and its Babylonian monuments are an almost carbon copy of the Skyscraper District and Pharaoh Park.
- The few easter eggs that allow you to access Old Amsterdam are highly reminiscent of Rokkaku-Dai Heights.
- The first part of Millennium Mall is basically a brighter, commercialized version of the Fortified Residential Zone.
- Versum Hill is vaguely reminiscent of Dogenzaka Hill and Chuo Street.
- Brink Terminal is virtually identical to Shibuya Terminal, while its subterranean sections are very similar to the Tokyo Underground Sewage Facility.
- Instrument of Murder: DJ Cyber throws bladed vinyl records as weapons. He cleanly chops Faux's head off in the tutorial with one.
- Intercourse with You: Some of the selected songs can get a bit explicit in their lyrics. For one example, "Precious Thing" from the Sunshine Pop mixtape is all about the singer wanting to grind with a fat-bottomed girl, with such tasteful lyrics like "I can make you wet" and "let me get your precious thing: that ass" peppered throughout the song.
- Jump Jet Pack: All of the gang members wear a jetpack (called a boostpack) that assists their movement, but can't let them fly. The closest they get is the boost ability, letting them fly a couple inches off the ground at fast speeds. The fact that Felix never needed one to pull off his stunts is why he's considered a legend.
- Le Parkour: Freerunning is one of the many ways players can navigate the cityscape, incorporating fancy moves like flips and cartwheels to gain height or maintain speed.
- Light Is Not Good: DJ Cyber and his gang, FUTURISM, are clad head to toe in white. Unfortunately, they're also obsessed with putting down pretty much all the rest of the gangs. After taking down Devil Theory, they turn out to be a subverted example, as DJ Cyber had a very good reason to put down Faux, and allies with the Bomb Rush Crew after his antagonism is revealed to have been a Secret Test of Character.
- Mega City: The Mataan district is an utterly massive cityscape suspended high above the ground. It's made mostly out of long balcony streets attached to the sides of skyscrapers that tower over the distant ground. Long stretches of Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits surround the area.
- Mix-and-Match Man: The Starter Villain gang, The Franks, are basketballers that have replaced their original body parts with those of great athletes in a stitched-together Frankensteinian look.
- Monster Closet: Police spawn into the level via human-sized pod elevators that pop out of the floor. One has to wonder how claustrophobic those are...
- New Neo City: The city where the events of the game take place is called "New Amsterdam", according to the Steam page description.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The police chief insists on continuing to pursue the crews of New Amsterdam, stating that he just wants civility and for the gangs to stop spraying "slurs" all over the city — not immoral goals. However, the cops' actions in trying to enforce the law causes way more disruption than the gangs could, bringing in attack helicopters and mechas to deal with them and forcing civilians — who generally don't seem to care about the gangs so long as they're not being bumped into — to evacuate the area when things escalate hard enough. Additionally, the graffiti has no such offensive meaning, with it being used to express art and mark turf.
- Off with His Head!: DJ Cyber slices Faux's head off with an LP record at the end of the tutorial, so his ally and his friend get help from the Franks to replace it with a red robot head, giving the Writer the new nickname "Red".
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Nearly all the Writers are only identified by a street name, with their legal names remaining unknown. The only one whose full name is mentioned is Faux, and even then only in passing as the police goes over his rep.
- Photo Mode: After taking the Franks' turf, Bel installs a photo app onto Red's phone, as a diegetic way to take photos. You can choose between multiple filters to apply to the photo and switch between a normal shot and a selfie shot, with the photo ultimately being taken from the perspective of your character's phone from how it's held in their animation.
- Pictorial Letter Substitution: The Bomb Rush Crew's S-size graffiti tags are initials that have a trait of theirs incorporated into them. While many of them are just letters, a few take it further and turn into items stylized into the letter they represent:
- Red's "R", Faux's Dummied Out "F", and Felix's "F" are pictures of their heads in profile.
- Tryce's "T" is made of his twin dreads.
- Vinyl's "V" is her shoe drawn upside-down.
- Rietveld's "I" is a jetpack dotted with a Heat star.
- Player Nudge: After beating story missions given by a borough's reigning gang, a new graffiti pattern to spray shows up in the level. A cutscene then plays out with the questgiver taking a path that passes through the pattern pickup, giving the player a hint on how they can acquire that new spray.
- Practical Taunt: Dancing isn't just something you can do for shits and giggles. It's how you start a Cypher to tag in a more useful character and get Benni's attention so the cabbie can drive you somewhere else. A few of the unlockable characters also require matching their dance moves as part of their recruit missions.
- Production Throwback: Base and Jay, the skateboarding robot and masked tagger from the DLC, are Bomb Rush Crew versions of the Lethal League characters Switch and Jet. They even come with their counterparts' voice clips from Lethal League Blaze.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Cops get red eyes when Faux is in control of them, making them much more lethal and more willing to kill.
- Retraux: Inspired by 2000's aesthetics and especially Jet Set Radio, the game uses a blocky, low-poly art style with sharp edges, vibrant colors, and thick outlines. It even goes so far as to emulate the original games' dialogue, which was displayed in the letterbox with a similar font.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Devil Theory are a bunch of assholes that disregard the Code of the Street, constantly locking challengers into confined spaces and siccing cops on them. They get their just desserts from the police when Faux, as the Project Algo lead, trashes them at the end of the game, very nearly pummeling them into paste until Solace stops him.
- Rewatch Bonus:
- During Red's activation sequence at the start of the game, there's a small message in the lower-left corner that reads "Error: Can not find AI:main component". It's something a new player likely won't even notice, but for those replaying the game it serves as foreshadowing to the reveal that Red isn't actually a full Cyberhead.
- During the fight against Escher, Red states that he wants to get back his organic head and figure out who he is. Escher, a fellow Cyberhead user, points out that this is a bizarre belief to have: functionally, Cyberheads are separate people to their original bodies (unless they undergo Brain Uploading), so Red wouldn't have any use for the head and to go back to a normal head would essentially mean killing himself. Red's quote gains new context with the knowledge that he's actually an amnesiac Felix: because pursuing his old head gives him flashbacks to Felix's life, discovering his roots while still remaining himself are tied in ways that don't contradict.
- Secret Character: Aside from Vinyl, Solace and Felix in the main game, the post-game introduces a whole slew of bonus characters to unlock, usually by beating a set style score in a specific location within a few minutes. Members from each rival crew can be recruited in their specific districts, along with DJ Cyber and a few others.
- Serious Business: The Code of the Street. It dictates how the gangs gain, compete for, and lose turf, usually determined by the Oldheads. Even if the other gangs are at each other's throats, they know better than to break the code.
- During the final stretch of the game, the exact specifics of All City and the Code of the Street are discussed. Faux believes that the Code is stupid and that as long as you become All City, it doesn't matter how. Red Felix, meanwhile, believes that All City only matters because of the Code.
- Shout-Out:
- The Franks are, of course, an allusion to the monster from Frankenstein, being a bunch of massive, strong dudes patched together from multiple different body parts.
- The Franks' leader, the Flesh Prince, is a reference to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in name.
- A few references exist towards Ghost in the Shell, from DJ Cyber's spider tank looking incredibly similar to the Tachikoma to Chief Inspector Berlage's cybernetic eyes being similar to Batou's.
- The DOT EXE crew have monitor-like heads that will remind a lot of anime fans of a certain robot.
- The Wired Cyber OS boot screen that plays as Red wakes up for the first time is based on the boot screen for Windows XP.
- One of the advertisements in Millennium Mall depicts a purple anthropomorphic cat that resembles Beerus from Dragon Ball Z.
- Sickening "Crunch!": When Faux Re-emerges as his true robotic form as Project Algo in Mataan, he takes hold of Red and twists his cyberhead off, complete with a bone-chilling crunch.
- Sidequest: Each of the boroughs has a bunch of statues of the Robo-Post mascot, a robot looking mailman guy with one big hand. High-fiving enough of them in a single combo will unlock some extra goodie in a room marked with the mascot's face — usually a collectible goodie, but sometimes it enables a shortcut to rapidly reach the top of the vertical levels.
- Source Music: The background music is played on Red's phone, and can be turned off by its interface.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Red is briefly unplayable after getting shot in the head and left comatose, but Vinyl joins the Bomb Rush Crew at the same time and also uses skateboards by default, filling that role until the Flesh Prince is found to do some repairs and Red rejoins.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: In accordance with the Code of the Street, gangs are not allowed to actually kill each other for dominance. DJ Cyber violates it at the start of the game by decapitating Faux. Faux violated it earlier by letting Felix fall to his death, and continues trying to kill as Project Algo.
- To Be a Master: All of the gangs, but most notably FUTURISM and Bomb Rush Crew, are trying to be "All City", which means becoming the dominant gang of every borough in New Amsterdam. The only person to ever accomplish that feat in the past was Felix of the Big 3, who was wasted by an unknown assailant shortly after. It's later revealed that his fellow Big 3 Writer Faux was the one who did him in, having done it out of jealousy that Felix had struck out on his own and made it All City without him.
- Tutorial Failure: Bafflingly, the game never explains its combat system. The tutorial level - which otherwise does a decent job of teaching the player the basic mechanics - ends with a mini boss battle against the cops and Rietveld, but gives no instruction whatsoever on how to fight them. Players are likely to be frantically Button Mashing trying to figure out how to make them go down, and some might still not be fully sure how the combat works even after the battle ends; the most important part, spraying graffiti onto airborne cops to take them out, isn't explicitly stated and is left up to the small graffiti button prompt at the bottom of the screen, which is easy to miss during combat.
- Unnaturally Looping Location: The storage crate maze on Pyramid Island is a Lost Woods-style maze where going the incorrect way will take you back to the start, but even going the correct way will have you revisiting rooms that shouldn't be connected to each other. Though the Oldhead guarding the entrance warns you not to think that everything you see in there is reality...
- Victory Fake Out: After defeating Faux in a police mecha in Mataan, it appears as though the game is over and the story is finished. Then Faux reappears as a Mechanical Abomination, beheads Red, and kidnaps Solace with the intent of stealing his body, leading to the Final Boss battle.
- Wanted Meter: Spraying a lot of graffiti will cause your heat meter (in the top left) to build up. First, cops get employed, then turrets start popping from the ground, the cops get riot gear, then they start fielding snipers, then they start sending in the attack helicopters, and finally they bring in a gigantic tank walker. The easiest way to decrease it is to enter a portable toilet and change your outfit.
- Warp Whistle: Certain locations have a taxi stop. After you save Benni the taxi driver, you can dance in front of them to get his attention and drive you to a previously-discovered stop. Yes, this includes stops in the middle of a city plaza unconnected to roads, an indoor shopping mall, and an offshore industrial rig that's otherwise only available via ferry: the taxi doesn't have jet boosters for no reason.
- Wham Shot:
- The ending of Chapter 3 throws a major curveball regarding Red's true nature: After Red is shot in the back of the head by Escher, blood drips from a crack in his Cyberhead...which turns out to have been holding the very much human head of the man from Red's memories.
- Even before that, the scene showing a wasted 8-Ball. The police has been upping its arms even before this incident, and death was established as early as the prologue, but the lackadaisical attitude towards it made it come off as unimportant. Now, not only is a Writer killed, but it's the leader of a major crew and they stay dead, showing that the police—and by extension, Project Algo—are done screwing around.
- Worthy Opponent: DJ Cyber opposes the Bomb Rush Crew from getting Faux's head back and is their largest obstacle in going All City. That said, Tryce still respects him 'cause DJ Cyber's mixtapes are fire.
- Zip Mode: If you have enough energy (collected by doing tricks), you can boost to move to your destination faster.
- "In the end, what defines you is what you do with the stuff you got."
