Style, style, STYLE! If Denshattack! has anything in abundance, it’s style. Drawing inspiration from games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Jet Set Radio, the outlandish idea of pulling off tricks with a train cart somehow comes off as a natural continuation.
The post-not-so-apocalyptic world of New Japan still has some semblance of infrastructure left. This allows the most bodacious of individuals to pick up a stray train cart and race it across the abandoned railway tracks.
You start out as a lowly ramen delivery girl, nonchalantly multi-track drifting across the countryside. After meeting a self-publishing author of a Denshattack magazine, you find out that you’ve been squandering your talents on Uber Foods and should instead join the tournament to prove you’re the raddest of them all.
The tubular adventure takes you across radical regions of Japan with 2 regular tracks, 1 tutorial track and 1 trick track available in the demo. Each can be completed within about 5 minutes. At least 8 drivers will have be defeated in the full game to get a chance at battling the spoiled gyaru champion.
The game trailer gives a clear impression of what the game is about: fast action, ridiculous physics and rebel anime aesthetics. The gradients are as loud as can be, the color palette is as saturated as the bloodstream of a West Virginian and chroma as aberated as if it was a AAA game. The menus are nice and snappy, you feel cool just browsing the options. Video tutorials are available for every aspect of the game, making the learning experience as smooth as possible.
And since the game is set in a climate-changed Japan, most of the special effects, announcements and decal graphics are in Japanese. Combined with cel-shaded, graffiti-ed train carts and a funky soundtrack, the Jet Set Radio influence becomes undeniable and inviting. Team Reptile brought us Bomb Rush Cyberfunk back in 2023, and while Undercoders’ Denshattack! may not resemble the original in gameplay aspects, the execution is certainly similar.
Gameplay wise, its DNA is a mix of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and … Subway Surfers. As one would expect, a train cart is bound to the train tracks, but only in terms of direction. You can leap up at any point after a short charge up, but if you land anywhere other than a train track, it’s back to the checkpoint with you.
You can pick a lane at the fork in the road and jump over to a neighboring track if one is available. In fact, it’s preferable in case a sudden landslide occurs or a volcano inconveniently erupts behind you. Yes, the scenarios in this game are anything but standard.
With Denshattack! you wouldn’t think to expect normalcy after the tutorial instructs you on the intricacies of cart-jumping, but the game keeps cranking up the crazy with unique events.
On one of the racetracks you’re pitted against a girl with poor fashion sense and cat make-up. Instead of racing her head on (on a single train track, go figure), you take the shortcut on top of a detached ferris wheel. We are far beyond jumping the shark at this point, we’re jumping the whole Coney Island!
While you’re up in the air, you’re encouraged to pull off some skateboard tricks. These are done by using directional inputs, much like the ones you’d find in a fighting game like Street Fighter. Quarter circle+back, 360 from the top, 2×180… almost every permutation of a directional stick input is used here.
Sometimes the inputs would simply refuse to register, so a game with a simplistic control scheme still felt frustrating at times. This could be due to one of the following reasons: plain bad coding (bad ending); it’s an unoptimized demo (neutral ending); reviewer is just bad at videogames and totally pressed the jump button back there (good ending).
You can use the built-in “Tricktionary” to view all of these tricks in action, sorted by input difficulty. However, they all just look like you cart spinning around and it’s hard to visually tell the difference between a 1-star and a 4-star difficulty trick.
The Tricktionary did reveal some techniques that weren’t covered in the base demo, like Doubledrifting, Wallride Tricks and Tunnel Loop. So there are those to look forward to in the full release.
Each stage has a set of extra objectives or “Dares” for you to complete, like performing tricks under certain conditions or collecting S-K-A-… I mean, paint cans across the track. Fulfilling these, along with the score and time it takes you to finish a stage all count towards your rank.
One has to assume the unlockable carts and their respective paintjobs are locked behind ranks. Or maybe you’ll have to reach a certain rank in order to progress the story and compete with more skilled opponents. Who knows, it is a mystery. You’ll have to play the full game to find out…
Speaking of unlockable carts, each excels and drags differently. One may have a quicker jump charge-up, but has a nerfed Manual duration, while another has a higher base score multiplier for regular tricks, but is much harder to drift and grind.
There are lots of trade-offs and sidegrades for you to pick and choose from to find the one that fits your play-style. If you don’t care about min-maxing and just want to enjoy the game – the base stock cart is a balanced choice without any special advantages or disadvantages.
Denshattack! really catches your eye with its basic premise. If you saw the trailer and thought “Yeah, pulling off skateboard tricks on a train cart sounds like a good use of my time”, then by all means, try out the demo and put this game down on your wishlist.
Denshattack! delivers exactly that, ridiculous action with a high skill ceiling. There are non-linear tracks focused on performing tricks (just one in the demo), and that’s where you’ll see the depth of combo potentials this game has to offer.
You’re guaranteed to have fun, even if you’re terrible at videogames, it’s that ridiculous. The game is also perfectly playable on the Steam Deck, so it would only be fitting to play this on your rail-bound journey.
The early demo code was provided by Fireshine Games and does not represent the final product. The demo was tested on PC with a PlayStation 4 controller and performed beautifully. Denshattack! is scheduled to come out sometime in 2026 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
