Denshattack!

Densha is Japanese for “train.” Add “attack” and you have the title and the entire pitch: a single-player 3D arcade platformer where you ollie, kickflip, and grind a train across a stylized, dystopian Japan. It sounds like an idea someone pitched at 2 a.m. It’s built like a game someone refused to ship until the timing felt exactly right.

The developer is Undercoders, and Fireshine Games and Boltray Games share publishing duties. The influences are obvious, and the studio doesn’t hide them. The trick system comes straight from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater: chain moves, hold the combo, stick the landing, bank the multiplier. The attitude comes from Jet Set Radio, along with the bright, graffiti-style palette and the crew of rebellious outcasts fighting a faceless megacorp. Here the villain is the Miraidō corporation. The name leans on mirai, Japanese for “future,” and the game’s politics are about that subtle.

What separates Denshattack! from the growing pile of nostalgic extreme-sports revivals is the vehicle. A skateboard is light and forgiving. A train has mass and length, and it runs on rails. Undercoders uses those properties to rework familiar mechanics. Grinding stops being an occasional bonus and becomes the backbone of the level design. Airtime becomes a question of committing a very large object to a very specific landing.

Denshattack! launched July 15, 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, priced at $14.99. It holds an 88 on Metacritic, a strong result for an original IP with a premise this odd. It suggests the arcade score-attack genre can still find an audience when the execution is sharp.

• Trick-Driven Movement: Ollies, kickflips, flips, and rail grinds make up the whole move set. Every trick feeds a combo, and every combo feeds the score.
• Combo Multipliers & Clean Landings: Chaining tricks raises the multiplier, but only a clean landing banks it. Botch the touchdown and the run collapses. That risk has always been the genre’s best source of tension.
• A Region-by-Region Campaign: The story moves north from Kyushu to Hokkaido, through neon cities, open meadows, volcanic terrain, and ocean routes.
• Train-vs-Train Boss Battles: Rival gangs come first, then increasingly elaborate bosses built around reimagined trains.
• Progression & Customization: A climb from rookie to legendary Denshattacker, unlocking skins and other customization options for the train along the way.
• Serious Accessibility Options: Full controller support, a keyboard-only control option, camera comfort settings, dedicated audio settings, and support for ten languages.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is simple, and simple loops are hard to get right. Enter a level, pick a line, and string tricks together along rails and through the air while the multiplier climbs. Land cleanly, bank the score, and go again. The scoring system asks one question: can you hold it together a little longer? Nearly every design decision in Denshattack! exists to make that question harder to answer and more tempting to try.

The train is what makes it work. In Tony Hawk, the skater is a small figure in a large space, always hunting for the next surface to extend a combo. Here the rails form the backbone of the level, so the usual rhythm flips. The game isn’t about searching for a rail to keep the combo alive. It’s about deciding when to leave one, trading guaranteed momentum for airtime, flips, and a much riskier landing. That change keeps the borrowed mechanics from feeling borrowed. The decision space is genuinely different, even if the button vocabulary is familiar.

Onboarding Friction

This is where Denshattack! will lose some players, and it’s the game’s most legitimate weakness. The trick system is deep, and that depth comes with input combos that take real practice. The learning curve is steep, and the criticism is fair. Before the game lets anyone feel fluent, it asks them to absorb a lot of inputs. Players who grew up on THPS will find their muscle memory transfers. Everyone else hits a wall.

It’s arguably the right wall. Arcade score-chasers depend on a wide gap between a beginner’s run and an expert’s run, and a game that narrowed that gap would give little reason to replay it. The cost is real, though. For a while, frustration can outpace fun, and players without a genre background may quit before the game clicks.

Level Design: Set Pieces vs. Score Challenges

Levels alternate between high-speed set pieces and score challenges. The set pieces are the spectacle, over-the-top sequences that hurl the train through elaborate scenery at full speed. The score challenges are the core of the game. That’s where a route gets replayed twenty times to remove one mistake from a combo.

The alternation is good pacing. Set pieces deliver adrenaline, while score challenges demand careful thinking even as the train speeds up. The regional structure helps as well. The campaign is literally a journey north from Kyushu to Hokkaido, which gives a physical sense of progress. Moving from neon cities to meadows to volcanoes to coastlines also keeps the scenery and the level geometry from going stale.

The cost of all that speed is the game’s central tension: the world is easy to miss while blasting through it. Undercoders built a stylish, detailed version of dystopian Japan, then designed a game that punishes anyone who stops to look at it. That tension is real but not fatal. Taking in the scenery requires making one’s own pauses, because the core design rarely provides one.

Boss Battles

The bosses are where Denshattack! goes from clever to memorable. Rival gangs serve as the mid-level opposition. The headline fights pit the player against reimagined trains in encounters that keep growing more elaborate. Boss fights are notoriously awkward in score-driven games, because the mechanics are built for self-expression rather than combat. Treating each fight as an escalating set piece solves much of that problem. Each one works as a high-pressure test of what the region taught, and the spectacle is the reward for passing it.

Story and Progression

The narrative is thin: a rebellious crew, an evil corporation, and a climb from rookie to legend. It’s simple, and deliberately so. Still, it’s about as much story as a game in the Jet Set Radio mold needs. Nobody played Jet Set Radio for its plot either. The story exists to deliver attitude and give a reason to keep heading north. It does that job and nothing more.

Progression mostly rewards with ways to express yourself, such as skins and other customization for the train. In a game this skill-driven, that’s the right kind of reward. The real progress happens in the player’s hands, and the cosmetics just show it off. The bigger omission is structural: this is a single-player game. THPS built a lot of its long-term appeal on couch score battles, and Denshattack! offers no equivalent.

The art direction makes the strongest first impression. A colorful dystopia is a tricky tone to pull off, pairing a saturated palette with a premise about corporate control. Denshattack! leans into that contrast the same way Jet Set Radio did: the world is oppressive, and the player is the paint splashed across it. The regions are distinct enough to identify at a glance, which matters when everything moves too fast to read details.

The sharp visuals and the soundtrack are the game’s most immediate strengths, and the music matters more here than in most genres. In a score-chaser, the soundtrack sets the tempo, and the tracklist sounds built for exactly that job.

The options menu earns real credit. Camera comfort settings are essential, not a courtesy, in a game where a train flips through 3D space at speed. Without them, a meaningful share of players would risk motion sickness. The keyboard-only mode, audio settings, and ten-language support add up to an options suite that many larger studios still don’t match.

On the technical side, the design leans hardest on game feel, the responsiveness and weight of every input. For a game that lives or dies on landing timing, that’s the performance metric that counts, and it’s the one the design is clearly built around.

Steam (PC & Steam Deck)

On PC there’s a choice between full controller support and a keyboard-only control scheme. The keyboard-only mode is a welcome accessibility option. However, a trick game built on input combos maps most naturally to a gamepad, and newcomers already facing a steep curve should learn on a controller.

The Steam Deck Verified badge means Valve has confirmed the game works with the Deck’s built-in controls and display out of the box. Short, repeatable score challenges also suit handheld play well. For many players, the Deck may be the best way to play.

Nintendo Switch 2

Switch 2 is the natural console home for portable play. The score-challenge structure fits the “one more run” habit of handheld gaming, since a short commute covers several attempts at a route. The combo inputs reward a full-size controller, so serious score-chasers should plan on docked play or a Pro Controller. Because the game is so demanding about timing, frame stability matters more than visual fidelity on any portable platform, whether choosing between Deck and Switch 2 or anything else.

Denshattack! works because it understands exactly what it’s borrowing and why that material worked. The premise gets players in the door. The combo system is why they stay. Its flaws are real: a steep opening, a story that barely exists, and a pace that blurs the scenery Undercoders clearly worked hard on. These are the costs of a game that knows what it is and won’t dilute itself to widen its audience — costs that matter, and that keep it short of the genre’s very top tier.

Undercoders didn’t reinvent the arcade trick game. It found a new vehicle for it and rebuilt the mechanics around that vehicle’s physics instead of reskinning a skateboard. That’s harder than it looks, and the result is a solid, distinctive entry that earns a recommendation for genre fans — with the caveat that the wall at the start is real.