Denshattack! review: the summer's best game is in love with Sega Dreamcast

The 'Tony Hawk meets Jet Set Radio… but you're a train' pitch that's followed Denshattack! around since it was announced is surprisingly accurate, and if that sentence alone gets your palms sweating, then this is one indie you shouldn't sleep on. In fact, I'd go further, because in a year that's already packed with remakes, revivals and sequels, Denshattack! feels like exactly the kind of gloriously daft original idea games have been crying out for. It taps into the same colourful arcade energy that gaming throws up just when we need some fun, whether it’s Crazy Taxi or SSX Tricky – an era when games were happy to be loud, stylish and just a little bit ridiculous.

The setup is wonderfully odd. In the future, trains have evolved into stunt machines; gangs battle for prestige across Japan's rail network; and your locomotive can leap off the tracks, flip through the air, grind rails, and, in one early moment, ride atop a Ferris wheel. Trains in Denshattack! generally ignore all the rules of public transport, which I’m sure will frustrate fans of Transport Fever. It sounds completely absurd written down, but after about five minutes I stop questioning any of it – the bright green commuter trains cartwheel through the sky, rivals pose dramatically before races like anime heroes, engines plastered in cartoon graffiti, and somehow the whole thing feels completely believable because Denshattack! commits to its weird little universe with so much confidence.

It helps that the art direction is fantastic, blending cel-shaded pop art with chunky late-'90s Sega styling with a Persona influence in the menus and story scenes. There’s a definite Persona influence to the UI and story panels, while when it all starts moving, Denshattack! is an acid-coloured mix of bold Japanese lettering and exaggerated speed lines that punctuate the screen. The trains squash and stretch with speed, sparks fly everywhere, trick effects explode across the screen, and every jump has a lovely exaggerated weightlessness before you slam and snap back onto the rails.

It's always my fault

Later tracks become sprawling tangles of rails looping over, under and around one another, and the camera has a habit of throwing itself into dramatic angles just as you're trying to work out which junction you're supposed to hit next. There were plenty of moments when I found myself muttering that a missed turn wasn't my fault, only to replay the stage and realise... actually, it probably was. That's Denshattack! all over. The visual noise can be overwhelming at first, as can the wealth of moves, abilities, and complex combos you’ll need to master the game, but there's an underlying logic to every course and move set, and learning that rhythm and mastering the controls become part of the fun.

Getting started is straightforward, despite the concept of riding a stunt train through anime-style Japan. The basic moves include jumping to switch tracks, a drift bar needs to be timed and hit through corners, riding boost panels offers extra speed, grinding rails earns bonus points, flicking the right stick on rails or in the air unleashes tricks, and on you go. Within minutes I was bouncing between routes, flipping into rivals during races, riding walls and seeking alternate lines through every course while waggling the stick for stunts and tricks, which was satisfying but also largely skill-less on my part, as I soon discovered Denshattack! is classically easy to get into and hard to master.

There’s a story to keep things on track – sorry – which sees Emi, a rebellious and bored ramen delivery worker embracing the Denshattack movement, confronting the Mido Corporation, and uniting the gangs of Japan who control railways to free undomed wastelands, but it mostly exists to glue everything together, and that's absolutely fine. Rival gangs, eccentric mechanics, and overenthusiastic side-kicks bounce from one competition to the next with enough personality to keep things moving, and nobody involved seems remotely interested in explaining why trains have become extreme-sports stars.

In fact, you don't truly grasp Denshattack! by gliding through the story once and moving on. You replay tracks, discover shortcuts, shave seconds off your time. realise there's another grind rail route or a better combo to learn if you hit a jump half a second sooner. Eventually I stopped thinking about the controls and started reacting instinctively, and suddenly I was able to chain together tricks that seemed impossible a couple of hours earlier. In fact, the game’s approach is closer to those fingerboards that were all the rage in the 2000s – you don’t bash at buttons here but gently flick the sticks and tap the triggers, which enables Denshattack! To scoot away from Tony Hawk’s shadow and find its own feel.

That's where the comparisons to old-school arcade games really start making sense, because Denshattack! isn't padded out with endless collectables or sprawling open worlds. The aim of this game isn’t to passively explore but to observably master its nuances; it wants you to get better, score bigger and just have fun. Every replay reveals something new, whether that's a hidden shortcut, a cleaner racing line or simply the confidence to attempt one more ridiculous combo, and it's hard to put down.

There's plenty to keep you replaying beyond just ‘getting good’, such as new trains to unlock, each with its own strengths and weaknesses: some are built for speed, others make grinding easier, some sacrifice combo potential for stability and so forth. Choosing the right train becomes surprisingly important once challenges start demanding higher scores or faster completion times, and it's another layer of strategy that stops progression from becoming repetitive, as dipping back in and replaying previous tracks with new trains feels different.

Denshattack! delivers a spectacle

Boss battles bring the spectacle and sign of each map area with an arcade flourish. Early bosses include one rival who transforms her train into a giant mecha; another starts launching enormous baseballs across the track that you can smash back with perfectly timed trick combos. Later encounters become increasingly chaotic spectacles full of environmental hazards and over-the-top anime theatrics. They're ridiculous, inventive and exactly the sort of thing you'd hope to see in a game about stunt trains – what am I writing? If nothing else, Denshattack! is gloriously eccentric.

Between those set pieces, the game mixes things up nicely. Standard races are probably still my favourites, mostly because they're the closest thing here to SSX Tricky, throwing rivals onto compact, looping tracks where boosting, wall riding, and barging opponents off the ideal line become wonderfully frantic. Elsewhere, you'll tackle score-attack events, delivery missions, demolition challenges, and stunt competitions.

The only real frustration beyond the occasionally overexcited camera mentioned earlier is readability. Some of the busiest environments pile so much detail – bombastic type and manga effects – onto the screen that important junctions can get lost in the spectacle, especially during faster races. It's never enough to spoil the experience, and indeed, without it Denshattack! will be worse off, but there were definitely moments when I wished the game trusted its excellent track design and dialled back the visual fireworks just a little to let me see what was coming next.

Still, I found it very difficult to stay annoyed for long, because Denshattack! nails something that's surprisingly rare these days – it's fun simply messing about. I lost entire evenings replaying tracks I'd already completed, not because I needed another unlock, but because I wanted to see whether I could pull off one cleaner combo or find another hidden route. That's such an old-school feeling, one I haven't had all that often recently, and while nostalgia is a dangerous thing and can mask issues, go see Bubsy 4D; that’s not the case here.

Denshattack! does have a learning curve, and it could be seen as an issue, but I’d prefer to embrace the challenge rather than blame the design choice for offering genuine depth instead of a simple stylistic nod to the Naughties. The controls are involved and the camera can muddy things, but you will spend hours chasing flawless runs, and that's exactly what makes Denshattack! so good, as every faster time feels earned, a new ridiculous combo more satisfying than the last, and each replay leaves you convinced the next run will finally be the perfect one.

Original ideas like this don't come around very often, and while Denshattack! borrows the best bits from Tony Hawk, Jet Set Radio and a little from SSX, it throws them onto a railway, wraps the whole thing in one of the year's best art styles, and somehow makes it all work. It's gloriously weird, endlessly replayable and one of 2026's most joyful surprises.