For the most part, everything plays like it should too. While
Jet Grind Radio defies description for the most part, one could classify it as a race (against time). Of course, no other racing game I’ve ever played has you covering a city in graffiti, so that’s pretty much tossed out of the window anyway.
You play one of the members of a gang called the GGs. Tokyo-to, the place where most of the game is set, has a problem. Free expression has been suppressed, and it’s up to you to make the city a safer place for punks to live. Or something. The core gameplay has you rollerblading around various locales in the city (not to mention a new city added for the American release) and spray-painting over signs, windows, and other people’s graffiti.
Each level has a time limit, and, at least in the first part of the game, takes place in only a small part of an entire area. As you succeed in painting the town red/green/whatever, new areas open up for you to show your stuff off in. And as you complete the story segments, the game allows you to go back and race fellow gang members, or simply zoom around the city and spray paint to your heart’s delight. You can also go back and see how many points you can garner by pulling off tricks and whatnot.
There are quite a few things you can do in Jet Grind Radio, and some skills are very important to beating the game. You can grind along rails, sides of walls, and a lot of other things, which both makes you go pretty fast, gets you places you can’t get to otherwise, and makes you invincible to attack. The latter is important, as in every area there are cops or gang members that try to keep you from completing your job. As you spray paint more and more things, more bad guys try to stop you. As some graffiti jobs take longer than others to complete, it’s important to have a pattern to spray in -- do the big ones first, then the middles, and finally the smalls.
Every once in a while someone will challenge your gang to either a race or a test. In the races, you’ve simply got to get to a certain point and spray paint something before the other person. It’s usually damned difficult. In the tests, you’ve got to pull off different stunts that the challenger will show you. You don’t have to do them, but since each gang member has different stats (graffiti ability, health, and technique), it’s important to have as many choices as possible.
It’s really hard to quantify what makes Jet Grind Radio so enjoyable. At times it’s extremely frustrating, fighting the crappy camera and trying to make seemingly impossible jumps. But you’ll want to try over and over and over, and that says something.
