Denshattack! Review: Maybe the Most Unique Indie of the Year

Imagine taking a train, giving it the movement system of a skateboarding game, throwing it into an anime-inspired Japanese dystopia, putting it on a collection of increasingly ridiculous rails and then handing the whole thing a soundtrack that sounds like it escaped from a stylish Japanese RPG. That is basically Denshattack!, and honestly, I’m still not entirely sure how to explain this game without sounding like I’m making it up.

The easiest way I can describe it is as a bizarre combination of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Skate, Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi, except you’re not controlling a skateboarder, you’re controlling a train. You can drift around corners, grind on rails, perform tricks, switch tracks, wall ride, jump between platforms and eventually string together enough mechanics that you start wondering how the hell a train is capable of doing any of this.

And that is exactly why I wanted to play it. One of my favorite things about covering indie games is finding something that makes me stop and say, “I’ve never seen this before.” Denshattack! immediately gave me that feeling. I don’t necessarily need every game I play to reinvent the medium, but there is something incredibly appealing about seeing a developer take an idea that sounds completely ridiculous on paper and actually build an entire game around it.

There is one problem, though: I am absolutely terrible at skating games.I’ve always thought skating games looked cool as hell. I grew up seeing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Skate and other games in that genre and thinking they had an undeniable cool factor. I would play them for about 50 minutes or an hour, convince myself that this was finally going to be the time I figured everything out, and then eventually give up because I couldn’t consistently balance my character, remember the tricks, land anything correctly or stop myself from eating shit every thirty seconds.

That has always been my relationship with skating games. I appreciate them. I think they’re cool. I just am not particularly good at them. So when I saw Denshattack! at Steam Next Fest and realized that it was essentially a skating game where I controlled a train, I knew I had to give it a shot. Not because I thought I was suddenly going to become some elite Denshattack player, but because I love weird and ambitious indie games, and this might be one of the strangest concepts I’ve played all year. Fortunately, you don’t have to be great at Denshattack! to have a good time with it.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Denshattack! throws a lot at you. You start your engine, accelerate, brake, lean into different directions to select tracks, drift around corners, perform tricks and learn how to manipulate your train while it is flying through the air. The game gradually introduces additional mechanics such as grinding, wall riding and track switches, but even the basic controls can take some time to wrap your head around.

I will freely admit that I was terrible during my first 15 minutes with the game. I kept crashing and derailing because I hadn’t yet developed the muscle memory required to understand what the game wanted from me. I’d see a jump, try to perform something I thought was correct, and then immediately hear my character say, “I’ll get it right this time.” I heard that sentence a lot.The game is demanding, but I appreciate that it does a good job teaching you how to play. The tutorials are thorough without being completely overwhelming, and the developers clearly understand that someone coming into this game may not have any prior experience with skating-game mechanics.

One of my favorite features is the Tricktionary, which is essentially a glossary of every trick you can perform. If you want to know how to perform a front 360 kick, a front 540 kick or one of the more complicated tricks, you can look it up and see exactly what inputs are required. Each trick also has a small video demonstration, which is incredibly useful because I don’t have an encyclopedic understanding of skating terminology.

The Tricktionary goes beyond tricks, too. You can use it to remind yourself how to perform basic actions, switch tracks, use different mechanics and generally refresh your memory if you’ve been away from the game for a while. You can access it from the pause menu, meaning you don’t have to replay a tutorial simply because you forgot how one particular mechanic works.

That is the kind of quality-of-life feature that I appreciate because Denshattack! has a lot of systems to remember. Drifting is particularly important. When you approach corners, you can hold the drift input and release it when the indicator reaches the sweet spot. Hit the timing correctly and you get a perfect drift; take a corner too quickly or mistime the maneuver and your train goes flying off the rails. The important thing is that when I derail, I usually feel like it was my fault.

That’s something I really appreciate about the level design. Denshattack! can be difficult, but I rarely feel like the game is screwing me over. When I crash, it’s usually because I mistimed something, failed to understand the upcoming obstacle or simply wasn’t good enough at the mechanic I was attempting. After a crash, the game also puts you back in a reasonable position rather than making you replay a huge section of the level.

That makes the difficulty much easier to tolerate. I am not good at this game. I am probably never going to be particularly good at this game. There is a ceiling to how skilled I am willing to become at something like this, and I don’t have any desire to dedicate my entire gaming life to mastering train-based Tony Hawk physics.

But Denshattack! doesn’t require that from me. The game is extremely forgiving when it comes to simply progressing through the campaign. You can die repeatedly and still move on as long as you accomplish the basic objective of the level. Your score might suck, your time might suck and you might complete only a fraction of the available dares, but if you finish the level, you’re moving forward.

That works extremely well for someone like me.After each level, you’re given a performance grade based on things such as your completion time, tricks performed and dares completed. My scores were frequently nothing to brag about. On one of my early attempts, I finished in 3 minutes and 4 seconds, earned a score of 7,430 and completed only one of the seven available dares.I was still happy.I didn’t care that I wasn’t topping the leaderboard. I was just happy I finished the damn level.

Level Design and Variety

This is where Denshattack! really started winning me over. The game could have easily become repetitive if every level were simply about reaching the end as quickly as possible while performing tricks along the way. Instead, Undercoders keeps changing what it expects from you.

Some levels focus heavily on tricks. Others ask you to explore an area and complete specific objectives. There are racing levels, grinding-focused sections and challenges that emphasize different combinations of the mechanics you’ve learned.

One of my favorite early levels was Trick Terminal, where I needed to score 15,000 points to unlock the next track. This was basically an excuse to run around performing as many tricks as possible within the time limit, and while I wasn’t particularly good at it, I enjoyed the freedom of figuring out how to maximize my score.

I ended up with 21,400 points, which felt like a pretty significant accomplishment considering how badly I had been performing up to that point. Another level gave me an open area with several objectives to complete instead of simply telling me to reach the end as quickly as possible. That ended up being one of my favorite types of level because it allowed me to practice the mechanics without feeling like I was constantly racing against the clock.

The level design is colorful, creative and, more importantly, structured around the mechanics the game has taught you. As the campaign progresses, new elements are introduced and then combined with things you’ve already learned.

Eventually, you’re grinding rails, jumping between walls, switching tracks and performing tricks while trying to figure out what the level wants from you.That sounds complicated, and it is, but it never feels completely random.

One of the things I came to appreciate after spending more time with the game is that Denshattack! is more mentally engaging than its trailers might suggest. You constantly have to think about what’s coming next. Do you need to drift around this corner? Do you need to switch tracks? Is there a rail you need to grind? Do you need to perform a trick to activate the switch? Are you trying to maximize your score or simply survive?

The game is constantly asking you to make decisions while you’re moving at high speed. That’s why I eventually started thinking of Denshattack! as a game that is “simplistically unsimple.” The individual mechanics aren’t particularly difficult to understand, but the number of ways the game combines them becomes increasingly complex.

You’re essentially playing a Tony Hawk-style skating game, except the skater is a train, the environment is built around rails and giant set pieces, and the game keeps adding new ways to interact with the world. It should not work as well as it does.

Boss Fights and Set Pieces

The first boss fight was where the game really clicked for me. The boss is called Fashion Overdrive, and it involves four glamorous, almost Sailor Moon-inspired characters who combine their trains into a giant mech.

Yes, you read that correctly. Their trains essentially become different parts of a giant robot, and you have to dodge attacks while continuing to move along the rails. Eventually, you have opportunities to grind on specific rails or jump into the air and perform attacks against the boss’s weak points.

I absolutely loved this fight. It is creative, visually ridiculous and mechanically tied to everything the game has already taught you. More importantly, it demonstrates just how much potential the basic concept has when the developers get to go completely nuts with it.

The level design is once again the star of the show. Another level, Raiders of the Dead Ball, gives you an Indiana Jones-inspired chase sequence where a giant baseball comes rolling after you while you’re trying to navigate rails, perform tricks, wall ride and jump between platforms.

It’s ridiculous in exactly the way I want an indie game like this to be ridiculous.

Later, the game introduces wall riding, allowing your train to jump from the rails onto walls and then back onto rails. Eventually you’re moving from wall to wall, back to the track, onto a grind rail and then into another trick sequence. There is a lot going on, but the game earns that complexity by introducing each mechanic gradually.

The variety also extends to racing. One level puts you in a race where you start in 35th place and have to work your way through the pack until you’re fighting for first. Interestingly, this was one of the few levels where I immediately performed extremely well.

Once the trick system was taken out of the equation, I could focus on drifting, boosting and navigating the track, and apparently I’m considerably better at train racing than train skating.

I actually got the maximum rank on that level. That experience also showed me why the developers made the right decision not to turn the entire game into a straightforward racing game. It works as one component of the overall package, but if I had spent 20 or 30 levels doing nothing but racing, I think the novelty would have worn off much faster. The variety keeps Denshattack! moving forward.

Customization and Progression

Between levels, you have a campaign map that reminded me of the world map from classic Super Mario World. You can select individual levels, and hovering over different areas gives you information about your best score, best completion time and the number of dares you’ve completed.

There is also a garage where you can customize your train. You can change its color, select different patterns and add stickers to personalize the vehicle.

The sticker system comes through Kaoru’s Sticker Shop, where you can use spray cans earned through the campaign to purchase new designs. There are general stickers, regional designs and character-specific stickers based on people you meet throughout the game.

None of this is revolutionary, but it gives you something to work toward beyond simply completing the campaign. And for a game this focused on style, having the ability to customize your train makes perfect sense.

I’m still not entirely sure what the hell Denshattack! is.

And I mean that as a compliment. It’s a train game. It’s a skating game. It’s an arcade game. It’s an anime-inspired action game. It’s a rail-grinding game. It’s a racing game. It’s a trick game. Somehow, all of those descriptions are accurate, and yet none of them completely explain what playing it actually feels like.

The closest comparison I can make is that it takes the mentality of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the style of something like Jet Set Radio, the energy of an arcade game and then throws a fucking train into the middle of it.

I’m not particularly good at Denshattack!, and I don’t think I ever will be. But I had fun playing it, and that’s ultimately what matters. The game continually introduces new mechanics, the levels are creative, the soundtrack is excellent and the developers clearly understood that the best way to make this concept work was to fully commit to how ridiculous it is.

It isn’t perfect. The learning curve can be steep, the limited voice acting leaves some personality on the table, and I did encounter a technical bug that ruined a run. But none of those issues erase the fact that this is one of the more unique single-player experiences I’ve played this year.

Sometimes you play a game because you think you’re going to be good at it. Sometimes you play a game because you want to win. And sometimes you play a game because the idea of controlling a fucking train like Tony Hawk is too damn interesting to pass up. Denshattack! is very much the third one.