Irreverent, unpredictable, funny, and unputdownable, Denshattack! proves that a commitment to aesthetic and game feel can make any game feel like even more than the sum of its parts.
What do Jet Set Radio, the PS1-era Tony Hawk’s games, Hi-Fi Rush, and OlliOlli all have in common? Well, aside from being clear influences on Denshattack!, they are all cult classics: games that remain relevant, popular, and influential way beyond their respective eras. And it looks like they’ve got another stablemate in Undercoders’ unlikely arcade grind-’em-up. Because this game is incredible.
Denshattack! review
A largely on-rails (no pun intended) ‘train skateboarding game’, Denshattack! proposes one very simple question: what would happen if you made a skateboarding game, but with a train? The result is happily absurd; a pop-punk daydream of cel-shading, high-contrast art, eclectic music, and a surprisingly decent story. The whole thing balances humour and competence with finesse. At no point does Denshattack! fall into the trap that funny games so often do; parodying something only to end up making the same mistakes itself. It’s more concerned, simply, with having a good time.
If you’re even remotely ‘online’, you’ll see this game paraded as the second coming of Jet Set Radio; the tricking, the grinding, the music, the Japanese influence, the style. You can see why those initial comparisons were made. But it’s actually more similar to the OlliOlli series – OlliOlli World, in particular. That’s mostly thanks to a similar world map that takes you in a (mostly) straight line through its various biomes, and the steep tutorialisation curve that front-loads the game. Like OlliOlli, Denshattack! is hard, revelling in how it knowingly installs that ‘just-one-more-go’ brainworm in your head from the opening minutes, if not seconds.
Here’s a Denshattack! trailer to show it in loco-motion.Watch on YouTube
Your initial few hours with Denshattack! Might end up being the most frustrating. There’s a lot to learn here, and even as someone with hundreds of hours in OlliOlli and Tony Hawk’s games, I found myself taking to the controls quite slowly. But once your fingers learn the signals and subtleties of making a train drift around corners, you can feel a third eye opening somewhere inside you. What awaits is arcade video game nirvana.
The first two worlds are dedicated to showing you the ropes (or maybe that ‘should be showing you the overhead cables’) You’ll learn how to jump, brake, drift around corners, slam onto tracks when you derail, kickflip, heelflip, do special moves, wall-ride, transfer between vert ramps, and link all your combos together with manuals. After a good few hours, you’ll be armed with everything you need to complete levels without bailing, to start linking scorestreaks together, to unlock special rails by ascending the combo multiplier ranks.
The differentiating factor here, however, is that everything is absolutely bananas. The vendors are self-confessed weirdos, living in Edo-era castles and obsessing over stickers. The customisation options are all a bit baffling; specific colour combinations and patterns with nothing but maximalist design. Every new mechanic asks you to suspend your disbelief just that little bit more, from wall-riding to ‘dream rails’ to mounting a ferris wheel. Even the end of the first world has one of the funniest and most unbelievable surprises I’ve seen in games this year. I couldn’t stop laughing – costing me a few runs against what I suppose I should call a ‘boss fight’. But the humour in Denshattack! never comes simply from guffawing at the madcap action on the screen and saying ‘haha look at the silly train!’. There’s more to it than that; it’s somehow deadly serious about its premise whilst remaining light-hearted and kind-spirited.
For example, you meet a character who is ‘a bit of a furry’ in the first world, and that’s never played for laughs. It just is. There is a clear enemies-to-friends pipeline with many of the rival train drivers you meet out in the world. There are no easy targets in Denshattack (unless you count the uber-capitalist zaibatsu that acts as the game’s primary big bad – probably an approximation of Suntory or Asahi or something). But hey; any faceless organisation suppressing human ingenuity, creativity, and spirit is fair game, really.
Image credit: Undercoders
And what better way to fight back against the sterile, soulless totem of consumerism than with graffiti, street fashion, and a whole zine-making side story? The aesthetic and presentation of Denshattack! is up there with modern Persona games: menu transitions, the cohesion of the vision, the way every character’s gimmick is turned up to 11 – it’s amazing all this is coming from an independent Spanish studio, really, and not a storied Japanese production house. The authenticity and cool factor is off the charts. This game hums with aura. And just when you think you couldn’t be more impressed with the presentation, you’ll hear a track buried in a settings menu somewhere, and you instantly make a note to add to your ‘best non-vocal playlist’ and leave it running for 10 minutes because you can’t get enough. I was often surprised to think you’re only being asked for £15.99 for the whole package.
I will admit that I wasn’t fully sold on Denshattack! in my first few hours with the game: the levels felt a bit staccato – and a bit samey – and the linear design of everything felt a bit flat. But as developer Undercoders inches you through the preamble, the training wheels start to come off: some zones have multiple routes, there are secret exits to levels, collectibles take on more meaning as currency as new shops open. It’s like leaving the first floating island in Breath of the Wild, or emerging from the Undead Burg in Dark Souls – that an arcade game can project that sense of wonder and discovery should tell you everything you need to know about how much quality has been crammed into one inconspicuous train car, here.
Image credit: Undercoders
Denshattack! accessibility options
You can remap controls for both keyboards and controllers, and adjust vibration settings. Designed with high-contrast UI and unique icons; completely playable for all types of colourblindness. Audio can be Japanese or English. Screen effects (bloom, chromatic aberration, speed lines, etc) can be adjusted from 0-100%.
If, like me, you’re incapable of moving onto the next level before making sure you’ve perfected the last one (it makes reviewing games needlessly difficult, let me tell you), Denshattack! is going to challenge you. At first, beating a level in a certain time isn’t that hard. Nor is achieving the gold-standard score. Even nabbing the collectibles and destroying whatever the goal list asks you to feels simple. But within two or three worlds, the tasks become nefarious – you may see one of the spray paint cans you need on a rail up above the starting location, but hunting it down is going to take you upwards of five attempts. Yet, for all their mischief and misdirection, these goals never feel unfair. If you fail, it’s your fault. It takes some good design and game feel to soak up that much frustration – especially if it’s 2am and you’ve been trying to do a certain level without bailing for 30 minutes, get right to the end, and flub it. “Fair enough,” I exhale, checking my watch and hitting restart again.
Whilst the recent Tony Hawk’s remakes have been fine, they felt fairly sterile – maybe that’s the influence of the corporate profit-speak pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes, but either way, they left me craving something irreverent, kooky, imbued with that rebellious spirit the original Neversoft games had by the bucketload. Denshattack! is just that, with enough of the style of Jet Set Radio and the gameplay-first artisanship of OlliOlli to make the whole thing feel refreshing and somehow original at the same time. Irreverent, unpredictable, funny, and unputdownable, Denshattack! is anti-capitalist, pop-punk optimism distilled. For what it is, where it’s come from, and what it’s trying to do, it feels almost impossible – and I cannot get enough.
A copy of Denshattack! was provided for this review by Fireshrine and Boltray Games.
