Denshattack Makes a Kickflipping Bullet Train the Best Idea of the Year

The core of Denshattack is a trick system that hides real depth behind an approachable surface. You build speed, launch off ramps and rail ends, and flick the right stick to spin, flip, and rotate your train mid-air. Small inputs earn small points; stringing together longer, more elaborate rotations pushes your score into the thousands, and landing cleanly into a manual lets you carry a combo forward and keep the multiplier alive. The result is a scoring loop with the same addictive push-your-luck rhythm as the great skateboarding games, where the tension between cashing out a combo and holding it one trick longer is the whole point.

Crucially, the movement expands steadily rather than dumping everything on you at once. New verbs, wall-grinding, monorail riding, and a growing vocabulary of aerial options, are introduced one at a time and woven in so smoothly that you are competent before you realize the toolkit has doubled. That pacing is one of the game's quiet strengths. It keeps the learning curve from ever feeling like a wall, and it means the moment-to-moment feel keeps changing across a campaign that stretches well past the point most novelty games would have collapsed.

The stage design does a lot of the heavy lifting. Across its long list of levels, the game refuses to settle into a single template. Some tracks are straightforward point-to-point sprints, others are races against rival crews, others are pure high-score arenas, and others open out into loose sandbox spaces with a handful of objectives to tackle in any order. Boss encounters break the rhythm entirely, throwing you at giant anime-robot spectacles and mechanical monstrosities that demand you read a pattern while still keeping your train moving. The variety is the game's insurance policy against monotony, and it mostly pays off.

Accessibility is handled with real care. Story progression stays reachable even if you never fully master the trick system, so players who want to ride the spectacle and follow the plot are not locked out. For everyone else, an escalating set of optional challenges called Dares hangs bronze, silver, and gold targets over each stage, giving the score-chasers a reason to run a level ten more times and inch toward a cleaner, faster, higher line. The skill ceiling here is enormous, and the game is smart about letting you engage with as much or as little of it as you like.

It is also longer than it has any right to be. Reaching the credits takes somewhere in the region of a dozen hours, and the campaign sustains that length by constantly reinventing what a given stage is asking of you. The flip side of all that variety is that not every idea lands with equal force. A few of the alternative trains you unlock feel more like garnish than genuine options, rarely earning a permanent place in your rotation, and the game's flirtations with real-world creator cameos sit awkwardly against everything around them. There is also a fair critical case, voiced by some outlets, that the spectacle can outrun its own systems, and that the game does not always make the fullest use of its themes and setting. If you never catch the specific itch of chasing a perfect run, some of the deeper trick vocabulary may stay politely unexplored.

None of that dulls the central pleasure much. When a stage clicks and you thread a long, unbroken chain of grinds, flips, and wall-runs into a clean landing, Denshattack delivers a rush that very few games of any budget manage. The fundamentals are that good.

Visually, Denshattack runs on pure exuberance. The domed cities of its ruined Japan are drenched in color and motion, all neon signage, tangled elevated track, and backdrops that seem designed first and foremost to blur beautifully as you tear past them. It is a game that understands speed as an aesthetic, not just a mechanic, and it stages its stages accordingly, with sightlines and set-pieces built to make a fast, tricky line look as good as it feels.

The cast and the bosses lean hard into anime maximalism and are all the better for it. Emi and her growing crew, including a punk named Yamagata and a driver piloting an outsized train mech, are drawn with enough personality and sharp enough dialogue that the story stretches between levels land with more weight than the premise promises. The boss designs, from towering robot figures to writhing mechanical worms, are gleeful, oversized spectacle, and they give the game its biggest visual exclamation points.

The soundtrack deserves its own paragraph, because it is doing an extraordinary amount of work. This is high-energy, propulsive music built to match the controlled chaos of a train mid-kickflip, and it does more than accompany the action; it pulls you into the flow state the game is chasing. Several reviewers singled the score out as a standout, and it is easy to hear why. Turn it up, and the whole thing tips from impressive into genuinely intoxicating.