Tony Hawk-esque train game Denshattack was announced last summer at Gamescom, where we thought it looked pretty cool. It had a demo during Steam Next Fest, which you can still play, and just this week got one on Switch 2 as well. I tend to be intensely mid at trick-based games, so it’s no surprise I’m mid at this game, but, like so many trick-based games I’m not great at, I’m pretty into it.
You play as Emi, a delivery driver who enters the world of “Denshattackers,” folks who do what are basically skateboard tricks with trains. She has to battle her way through a series of challengers to reach the star of the scene, performing high speed, big-air spins, jumps, and flips on city-spanning tracks.
One of the reasons I’m so shit at these kinds of games is that I constantly forget which combination of button presses and stick movements do which tricks, or I get so focused on thinking about tricks that I forget about doing the basic stuff like navigating or jumping. Denshattack does a lot to offset this tendency of mine, giving you lots of warning, through colors and the UI, for when you need to do things like drift, switch tracks, or drop beneath or jump obstacles. The controls aren’t too complicated, mainly focused on your triggers and the left and right sticks. You perform tricks by holding RT and spinning your right stick; once I got the timing right, it was pretty easy to always do something while I was in the air. It all feels approachable but never simplistic, and while I might not have racked up the most points, I never felt like I had to tediously grind for tricks the way I sometimes do in other games like this.
This freed up my brain to really enjoy Denshattack’s detailed levels, or what I could grasp of that detail as I careened through them. Everything is colorful and fast-moving; tracks dip and climb, barreling through caves or rivers or cityscapes. In one level, I balanced my train atop a ferris wheel; in another, I dodged pursuing fireballs. The environment is constantly changing, giving you new navigational challenges or ramps to do tricks off of, and the levels feel worth replaying both to get a better score and to discover areas you might have missed. Also, the soundtrack rules, so it's worth hanging out in a level just to hear it all again.
The demo features a few introductory levels and a non-plot-related trick park, as well as some options for customizing your train’s style, color, and decorations. It's not terribly long, but it has plenty to explore before the full version of Denshattack comes out for PC and consoles June 17.
