An arcade sports, combo-building, reflex-intensive, game in which you drive a train.
What Is It? Denshattack! is a 2026 release from developers Undercoders. The game places you in the role of Emi in a futuristic, dystopian Japan where renegades drive trains through trick competitions, races, and more. The main goal for most of the game is to advance to the end of the level, accomplishing whatever criteria you must meet to get there along the way. There is rarely any gameplay reason to rack up giant points through huge trick combos, but if you’re playing a game like Denashattack! you will almost certainly be tempted to score big points along the way.
The game is played, literally, on rails as your train will spend the vast majority of its time on a railroad track or grinding on a pipe. There are some exceptions here with small sections, such as tunnels, which allow you to navigate somewhat freely within small, confined spaces (think Crash Bandicoot’s take on 3D). And, yes, you control a train the whole time.
Your train is capable of a large handful of skateboarding-style tricks which are mostly triggered with the right thumbstick on consoles. These fall under four different levels, with the four star-gold tricks earning the most points. It’s really difficult to fail to land these tricks, that only occurs when you try something at the last second before hitting the landing, but even then your train keeps on rolling along. You can combo tricks together with manuals on normal tracks or grinds on pipes.
Beyond the tricks, which are mostly there for style points and to achieve gold medals on the levels across the game’s ten worlds, much of the action in Denshattack! plays out like a series of quick time events. Each time you approach a sharp turn, you will need to hold the trigger and release in the middle to get the optimal speed boost and avoid crashing. The rails you ride are also littered with obstacles which will require you to both jump over and move to adjoined siderails to avoid. There are also tracks which allow you to ride upside down and you’ll have to start swapping between those and normal tracks as second nature as you get deeper into the game.
The gradual layering on of all of the mechanics the game forces on you is a delicate balance that Denshattack! absolutely nails. If they threw too much at you, too soon, I would have dropped the game. If they kept it too simple for too long at the start, I would have dropped the game. As it stands, however, the game is constantly dropping small new mechanics on you the entire time, and forcing you to master them as you go. It’s a wonderful learning curve that occasionally feels impossible, but eventually feels great to overcome.
That’s the core gameplay, but the game has a variety of level types which change the goal each time you set out in your train. Some levels simply have the goal of reaching the end, others feature a Tony Hawk-esque two minute timer and a point goal you need to hit. Others have various objectives spread across the level, follow color-coded signs to reach them all and clear the level. Still going here, there are also races and a wide range of boss fights as well. That’s a lot of variety for a game that lives somewhere as a mix of Tony Hawk, Jet Set, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Skate, etc…
I spent around eleven hours with Denshattack! simply clearing each level once. The game invites you to earn gold medals across three categories in each level: points, time, and objectives. Points come from tricks, time mostly comes from not falling very often so you can glide through the levels. The objectives usually come in eight per level and are a mix of generic “find five items” and level-specific objectives. Do all of these, hit the point and time gold requirements, and you will be rewarded with the gold medal on that level. This is a fun, deep layer of depth added to the base game if you want to tackle the challenge.
The story exists and it is miles away from being the worst story I’ve seen in a game like this. Emi will recruit new allies along the journey and is constantly running into different gangs and obstacles. I would not suggest playing the game for the story, but it is far from bad.
The game looks great with the familiar cartoon/anime stylings most similar to a Jet Set game. You are zooming by the cities so quickly that the details are hard to notice, but the static conversation screens and occasional cutscenes between levels all look great.
The Best Part: The level variety. If there is one complaint I can place on the Tony Hawk games, one of my favorite series of all time, it is that the game is the same thing, just in different areas. This is pretty common practice for games in the genre: the variety comes in the different areas to explore, learn, and master. Denshattack! manages to find variety in a number of impressive ways. The fact that this game has boss fights is an achievement on its own, but the wonderful range of variety they contain is amazing. I won’t dive into spoiler territory, but they were very impressive to me. Add on the level variety as well and you have a pretty special range of gameplay for the genre. It all fits together seamlessly to create a fun, varied experience that even those of us who started playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 30 years ago will find surprising.
The Worst Part: There were a few very specific parts, spread throughout the entire game, where I could not do what the game wanted me to. I knew the controls well enough to clear the game, but certain parts felt buggy to me because the jumps it required wouldn’t work. One occasion I tried five or six times (thanks for the mostly forgiving respawn drops) I fell through the track most of the time despite being inside of a tunnel. These spots, maybe three to five of them throughout the game, felt buggy to me. There were also spots which clearly weren’t buggy but required precision movement in areas the game isn’t built for, such as sliding while off of the rails. All told, these issues show up once every couple of hours of playtime and only last for a minute or two, so the total annoyance level is quite small.
The Verdict: One stray thought I often have while playing videogames, particularly any especially tricky segments requiring fast reflexes, is “videogames sure do force me to learn how to do a lot of incredibly useless things with my hands.” That feeling was near constant my entire time playing Denshattack! The game slowly trains you to learn to pull the left trigger on a sharp curve, right trigger to jump, manual when landing, pull off a trick when you hit a wind tunnel, and so on. It is, if you want to oversimplify things, a very interesting version of a QTE game. You react to whatever you see on the screen, build up the muscle memory to know how to react, layer in some tricks as spice to gain extra points, and by the time your journey through this dystopian Japan comes to an end, you have become extremely good as an extremely useless skill.
I’ve rarely been happier to learn these finger gymnastics as I have while playing Denshattack! It is a wonderful mash-up of arcade/extreme sports games, and their off-shoots, that came before it. The immediate comparison is Tony Hawk simply because you are pulling off air and grinding tricks for points, but the actual trick controls are closer to the Skate games. The aesthetic recalls the Jet Set games while the “can’t fall while doing a trick” (this isn’t entirely true, but it will make sense to those who have played the game) aspect feels straight from Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, itself clearly drawing massive inspiration from Jet Set. The series listed here contain some of my favorite games ever.
In short: this game appears to have been custom developed in a lab to appeal to me. I’m happy to report that Denshattack! absolutely delivers. It did take me a few levels to appreciate why this game was anything special and not just an average off-shoot from its inspirations, but the game continually added more to its mechanics and delivered with creative level and boss designs in ways I did not see coming. This would have been a really good game if you simply got placed in these levels and had two minutes to score as many points as you could, but is elevated greatly by the variety. There are races, objective-based levels where you actually need to navigate to certain areas, epic boss fights, and more mixed in across the ten worlds.
You probably already know if Denshattack! is a game for you or not. If you want something to scratch the itch of the games I mentioned earlier, or many others in the genre, with a fantastic art style and its own unique twists: go play Denshattack! If you never found a Tony Hawk game you enjoyed, I don’t think this game is going to change your mind. For me, Denshattack! will almost certainly end up quite high on my year-end list.
How to Play: Xbox Series*, PlayStation 5, Switch 2, PC
*console played on for this review
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