From the moment it was first revealed, Denshattack looked like one of the coolest games ever. Mix the aesthetics and attitude of JetSet Radio with the tricks and score combos of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but swap out rollerblades and skateboards for… trains? A rad concept, without a doubt, but also a bizarre one. Surely “skateboarding trains” could never actually work, right?
Wrong.
Denshattack sticks the landing flawlessly.
The game takes place in a near-future Japan where environmental catastrophe has apparently rendered most of the world uninhabitable and people live in safety, comfort, and convenience in domed cities—but at the cost of their freedom, under a friendly-faced but nonetheless authoritarian regime. Yet despite what the overseers say, life outside the domes is thriving in a colourful post-apocalypse, where outsiders make a living using the expansive network of ruined train lines.
Against this backdrop, a strange new sport has emerged: “Denshattack”, where competitors race trains and perform reality-defying tricks. Have you ever seen a train leap off the track and pull a “kickflip”, or grind on the side of a skyscraper, or do battle with a massive castle turned into a quiffed-up rockabilly mech? Welcome to Denshattack.
In practice, this means short, exhilarating levels made up of a chaotic web of branching rail lines, rife with obstacles to both avoid and use for tricks. A combo system calling back to the likes of Tony Hawk’s and OlliOlli means the secret to scoring big is chaining tricks together through manuals and grinds—a system that’s easy to come to grips with the basics but has a very high skill ceiling when you start to master its intricacies.
Brilliant level design is the thing that ties everything together. This is an “on-rails” extreme sports game in the most literal sense (as compared to the miniature sandboxes of Tony Hawk’s), but with so many branches and hidden areas that you have dozens of possible routes through any given stage. That opens up even further with a nifty power-up system: fill up a special gauge by racking up combos, and rainbow rails appear all over the map, letting you literally ride your train into the sky.
In addition to time and score targets, each level has a handful of optional goals: find hidden items, do a particular trick in a specific place, crash into some object or other, and so on. The stages themselves come in different varieties, too—while most are some form of “get to the end while scoring as many points as possible”, there are occasional “sandbox” levels (of a sort) where the track loops around itself infinitely, and the goal is to complete a set of different missions as quickly as you can (again, while scoring as many points as you can).
Sometimes you’ll have to race other Denshattackers, and at the end of each chapter you’ll face a boss. These are the highlights of an already exciting game, not just because of how over-the-top they get—again, a castle turned into a giant mecha rockabilly with a pompadour cannon—but in the way they reinterpret the game’s navigation and trick mechanics into a sort of pseudo-combat. They’re some of the best boss fights I’ve ever seen in 30-odd years of playing games.
All of the above is enough to make Denshattack worthwhile: exciting, mechanically deep, and does a great job of encouraging you to master its complexities and reward you for doing so. Of all the games that have tried to capture the spirit of the “action sports” heyday, few succeed quite like Denshattack. If that was all it was—a clever, goofy riff on arcade skateboarding—it’d already be a brilliant game. But Denshattack doesn’t stop there.
Its story of eccentric outcasts carving their own path through an authoritarian world is a timeless one, delivered with a perfect balance of humour, heart, and punk attitude. The way it incorporates the unique qualities of Japan’s many prefectures is impressive, baking local culture, history, and landmarks into the fabric of the level design and visual style of each location. The cel-shaded art style and eccentric character designs are an overt homage to JetSet Radio, but they go bigger than that, too, in the way they channel decades’ worth of anime culture—not just as a superficial touch, but as the game’s beating heart.
It’s the combination of all of this that makes Denshattack brilliant. Tony Hawk-style scoring, JetSet Radio atmosphere, tricked out trains, colourful punk attitude, a loving riff on anime culture and Japan’s many local histories—all of these are great. But the way Denshattack takes these tricks, chains them together, and then lands the combo perfectly? Sublime.
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.
Review code supplied by the publisher.
Denshattack dreams up a frankly ridiculous trick—skateboarding trains and eccentric punk attitude—and lands it perfectly.
