Denshattack Review: Tony Hawk Mechanics on Trains
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Denshattack! is developed by Barcelona-based studio Undercoders and set in a post-climate-disaster Japan where people live in corporate-owned domed cities and rival gangs battle on the country's famously extensive rail network.
- Protagonist Emi aspires to become the best "Denshattacker," with gameplay combining Tony Hawk's Pro Skater trick mechanics (grinding, flipping, spinning) with the counter-culture anti-establishment aesthetic of Jet Set Radio.
- Undercoders built the level design around Japanese cultural touchstones, including stages built around kabuki theatre performances and ramen delivery in the spirit of racing manga Initial D.
- The game introduces mechanics gradually over several hours before opening up to races, score attacks, challenge levels, and boss fights — including launching giant baseballs at a tunnelling mole-train and escaping a vinyl record-powered castle.
- The reviewer positions Denshattack! within the lineage of dystopian racers, drawing explicit comparison to cult anime Redline about underground racing with a pompadour-wielding intergalactic cast.
- The reviewer argues that in an era dominated by remakes, remasters and sequels, weird games like Denshattack! "should be celebrated for daring to be nonsensical" — and notes the title would not have stood out had it shipped in the early 2000s.
Why it matters: Denshattack! is a rare non-sequel, non-remake release in a market saturated with remasters — Barcelona-based Undercoders applies skating physics to rail infrastructure to deliver something genuinely fresh. Players tired of iterative franchises get a genre-blending oddity whose kabuki and Initial D-inspired levels reward cultural literacy alongside trick combos.
