Denshattack!, Undercoders’ mash-up of train track shifting and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-style stunts and sick kickflips, is far more precise and challenging than it might appear in trailers. The game’s over-the-top, campy, anime-inspired premise of driving trains around dilapidated cities where you will jump, grind, and twirl on the train tracks at high speeds may make it look like something you can simply bludgeon your way through with velocity and reckless abandon, but in actuality, many of its levels require you to take in the environment and all its hazards while also moving faster than your average high-speed transit.
I’ve put a couple of hours into the game, and have been having a blast. Denshattack’s frenetic blend of score-chasing stunts and roller-coaster track navigation feels great when you’re in the zone, swerving through different tracks and doing flips in the air, and then it feels like getting clotheslined when you’re carelessly bobbing and weaving through the environment and mistakenly send your train car flying off a track and into the side of a building.
Denshattack gives you speed and style, but isn’t so freeing that it feels like a sandbox to bulldoze your way through while doing cool tricks. When you mess up, the aftermath feels like those fast few seconds after you make a mistake while driving a car; the sudden loss of control and the realization that your vehicle is not going where you thought it was going to go.
Thankfully, the game doesn’t let these mistakes completely stop the momentum, as it sends you back to where you were in seconds, but even then, if you’re not immediately locked in you may make the same mistake again and have to go a third time. By that point, you’ve probably lost time and points. You might as well just start the whole level over, right? The beauty of scorechasing games is that there is a little parasite in the back of my brain that says I must start a level over if I screw up because I determine my self-worth by how big my number is at the end. Denshattack scratches the itch that little monster puts inside my head and lets me do it by riding around in anime trains. That’s pretty dope, if you ask me.
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