Denshattack! review – time to get on board with kickflipping trains

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.

While it might feel like a mismatch to have serious worldbuilding alongside a ludicrous premise, Denshattack! rests on the shoulders of giants. Colourful, counter-culture platformers have been around for a long time. So have dystopian racers; Denshattack! has a lot in common with Redline, the cult classic anime about underground racing with an intergalactic, pompadour-wielding cast. The effect is a marriage of silly and substance, with the game’s overwhelming, in-your-face visuals paving the way for a surprisingly hardcore experience. Prepare to crash, explosively and often.

You start out simple, with a single train and a few levels showing you the ropes. Undercoders have decided to introduce the game’s mechanics over several hours, which goes some way towards smoothing out the difficulty curve and allows you to start experimenting with tricks from the starting line. What begins as a fairly straightforward progression of courses quickly opens up to offer races, score attacks, and challenge levels, the highlight of which are the boss battles. Launching giant baseballs towards a tunnelling mole-train is a spectacle, as is tearing through the skies on a mythical rainbow railroad to escape a vinyl record-powered castle.

There’s an exhilaration to the world of the Denshattackers. The whole experience is a zany trip across the islands of Japan, as if Wacky Races did an advert for the Japanese tourist board. One level asks you to honk through a traditional kabuki theatre performance. Another wanted me to deliver bowls of ramen in the spirit of seminal racing manga Initial D. Every inch of the game is saturated with Japanese culture past and present, an impressive feat from its Barcelona-based developers.

But while the level design is fantastic, the real pleasure is just how good it feels to play. Anyone with a passing fondness for classic skating games will recognise the hallmarks of the genre, but when viewed through the lens of extreme public transport, they feel reinvigorated. There’s something about chaining combos while watching a spray-painted oblong dance across the screen that is hard to fault.

If it had been released in the early 2000s I doubt Denshattack! would have made waves. But in an era of remakes, remasters and sequels, I think weird games are as satisfying to discover as nailing that perfect landing feels to play – and they should be celebrated for daring to be nonsensical. Go forth and engage in some multitrack drifting.