DenshAttack! Review – Review – Nintendo World Report

Denshattack is the kind of high-concept, wackadoo nonsense I want to see emerge from video games more often. The hook here is you control a train through a brightly colored climate-ravaged Japanese future while jumping up and down doing increasingly ridiculous tricks and flips. And it’s all set to a story where your fledgling new train driver tries to take down a nefarious corporation. This game is consistently high energy in a way that never really slows down as you blaze through numerous stages across various chapters set all throughout this bubbly dystopian Japan.

The levels are all on tracks focusing on speed and goal accumulation. You want to finish stages quickly, avoiding crashing your train as much as possible. Each stage features a variety of goals, including basic ones focused on speed and how many points you earn from tricks. The other goals are sometimes as simple as not crashing that often and sometimes more complicated and involving performing specific actions in levels. A lot of them happen organically, with some helpful in-level notifications letting you know when you start to trigger one. I found myself doing initial runs through stages and returning to old ones in bulk later on, especially once you can customize your train more.

You execute tricks by jumping up in the air via a button press or ramp and then flicking the right stick to perform flips. At face value, it sounds very Tony Hawk-coded, but the parallels to the extreme sports video games of the world peter out over time though. As someone who was initially sold on this game as “Tony Hawk but you’re a train,” it doesn’t fully follow through on that promise. If anything, this feels like a 3D Sonic game as you cascade ahead through fast-moving levels, making quick decisions to survive and thrive. The speed feels equal parts blazing and fair. Turns and obstacles and jumps are sign-posted cleanly on screen so you can recognize patterns even as the going gets fast.

But all the comparisons you can make (I’ve tried to limit my old game comparisons here, but when a game wears its inspirations on its sleeve and in marketing, it’s tough!) fade away because honestly, Denshattack carves out a unique place of its own. It has similarities to other ideas but this bizarre world leads to a game with a style all its own. The gameplay stays fresh enough throughout, with varying locales, frantic boss battles, and interesting goals to complete.

Denshattack’s energy is infectious, especially in front of the bop-filled soundtrack featuring delectable tracks from a variety of composers, including Tee Lopes, 2 Mello, and Shoji Meguro. The game runs well on Switch 2, keeping a consistent frame rate that helps to highlight the speed and the colorful visuals. What pulls me back from being fully over the moon is the on-rails nature. While it’s fun to blaze through levels on train tracks while doing sick tricks and occasionally rolling around off the track, it never totally opens up. This means that the levels that have this boundless creativity in their bones in the audio and visuals turn out to be less freeform and more about perfecting your run. That might be what some folks want more of, but I kept hoping for more room for experimentation than was ever present in the majority of the levels.

Denshattack is still overly playful, filled with a lot of delightfully bizarre moments and a wealth of gameplay twists and turns. It’s oozing with style and succeeds in driving home the lunacy of a kickflipping train home with a well thought-out arsenal of tricks and enough variety to make this on-rails sonata a pleasing tune of a video game. In some ways, this might be my favorite 3D Sonic game. In other ways, it’s a sequel to Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. The comparisons can carry on, but Denshattack endures beyond it because it doesn’t neatly fit a specific comparison or stereotype. Denshattack is Denshattack.