For months, I’ve been keeping an eye out for Denshattack!, an enticingly loud stunt-action game that’s somewhere between an autorunner and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, if Tony Hawk was an electric locomotive and not a man of mortal flesh. I played it last year and was instantly smitten with its speedy, tricksy rail riding, and now that there’s a newly released Steam demo, perhaps you will be too.
I’ve had a go, and while the playable story bits – in which your unsatisfied ramen delivery girl embarks on a career of competitive train flipping – are still enjoyably breakneck, there’s also a purely stunt-focused score attack mode that’s given me a fresh appreciation for the depth of Denshattack!!’s tricks system.
In contrast to these opening campaign stages, where you learn the basics of jumping and twisting your carriage on linear A-to-B runs, this mode is a looping maze of grindrails, halfpipes, and rideable walls. Both a proving ground and training facility, which is useful, because most of the aerial tricks in Denshattack!!! demand such complex yet precise flicks of the gamepad’s right stick that I’m not certain all of them are possible without undergoing some manner of cybernetic thumb joint surgery.
Attribution
It’s good fun, though, thrashing a fat, blocky engine around like with such pace and aplomb that it almost starts to look graceful. It still feels like the campaign is the place to go for big, silly set pieces and an even greater sense of barely-holding-together speed, where tricks are mostly grabbed in the brief windows where you’re not dodging track hazards, or barrelling along atop a commandeered Ferris wheel. But there’s something more quintessentially Hawkian about the score attack mode, and it’s not just the animal brain desire to make a bigger number on the next run than the last one.
There’s a real mastery to be pursued here, I reckon. One measured less in combo multipliers and more in the physical spectacle of perfectly timed 720s, or grinds so clean they wouldn’t nudge the bubble on a spirit level. Pure athleticism, if you don’t count the traction motor.
Anyhow, the Denshattack!!!! demo is out now. There’s still no word of a release date beyond “Spring 2026,” as far as I can tell, so hopefully it doesn’t get the Steam Machine treatment. In the meantime, you can also read Malindy Hetfeld’s chat with David Jaumandreu, studio director at developers Undercoders, about its influences from rhythm games and Japanese rail transit.
