Imagine a Sonic Adventure game. One of the good levels. On rails, flipping between lanes, going a billion miles an hour, maybe being chased by a large sea mammal. Now imagine you could do Tony Hawk aerial tricks, and got a balance meter when you were grinding along those rails and doing board-slide tricks. Then lovingly apply a bold cel-shaded coat of paint akin to Jet Set Radio. THEN JUMP IN YOUR TRAIN! Because you play the whole game from a Japanese railway car, it’s on rails because you’re driving a train. That’s Denshattack!, and it rules.

Denshattack! is a joy. It’s set in post-apocalyptic Japan where the protagonist Emi delivers ramen by rail. The world was destroyed by a climate disaster, and most of society retreated into corporate-controlled domes connected by a ultra-high-speed vacuum-track train, but you wouldn’t know it from the outside, the world is full of bright blue skies, lush forests, jungles, caves, snowy mountain slopes, but also the wreckage of modern society. Emi is immediately introduced to the underground community of Denshattack! – an extreme competitive train-based combat artform – and you’re off.

The game is broken up into 9 chapters with 6-8 levels per chapter, and like any good game like this each chapter follows the general format of Introduce Region & Regional Gang -> Introduce New Mechanic -> Couple levels to get you familiar with the new mechanic -> Challenge level to prove you’ve mastered the new mechanic -> Insane anime boss fight. Levels are – understandably – mostly linear (you’re literally on train tracks), but they really went nuts working within this limitation. The linear levels are laid out like massive rollercoasters: you’re constantly hopping from track to track, drifting around tight corners, grinding rails, doing aerial tricks, going up vert ramps, and eventually several even more absurd modes of transport which I won’t get into.

Sprinkled among these largely-linear levels are a couple other styles:

  • “Objective” levels, where you’re given 3-4 specific goals around the track. Like, go over to this corner and trick off four towers, then go to this other area and pop balloons on the track. Do the objectives in whatever order you want as fast as possible and brake to end.
  • “Race” levels, where you’re racing against CPU train cars on a loop, boosting and drifting around corners to go faster, finding shortcuts, and trying to get to first place across 3 laps.
  • “Arena” levels which work like a THPS time trial level, where you’ve got 2 minutes to set as high of a score as possible in a tightly looped arena.

Then you’ve got the boss levels, which are these huge set-piece anime boss fights against the region’s Denshattack! Gang Boss. The bosses and the boss fights themselves draw heavily from pretty typical goofy anime tropes, but it’s done incredibly sincerely and rules. Also following anime tropes, Emi is such a lovable extrovert that upon defeating the boss with the power of friendship (and trains), the boss has no choice but to join your anti-capitalist eco-terrorism campaign against the evil corporate overlords.

For score-chasing enjoyers, every track gives medals according to 3 scoring metrics: overall trick score, completion time, and “dares”. Score and time are pretty straightforward, but dares are a combination of collectibles and little per-track unique challenges. Like any THPS-adjacent game every track has a ton of different collectibles strewn across it: spray-cans for cosmetic unlocks, cogs for new train models, and film rolls for your zines. Challenges are almost all some kind of special unique thing you have to do at some point of the level, like “scare the bats in the cave” (by honking), or “chain 2 advanced tricks off the vert ramps”, or “bounce off the zeppelin”, or any number of other ludicrous demands.

One nice aspect here is that the game is largely no-fail. If you fly off the map or beef a jump or trick too hard on a rail or run into a wall, it’s fine. You lose your combo, you lose some time (so, don’t expect any gold medals), but it just slaps you back on the track and sends you off to try again. The only types of levels you can completely fail are races (you have to get a podium finish) and arenas (they have a minimum score threshold to hit). So it’s however hard you want it to be. If you want to keep retrying for higher scores, awesome, go for it. If you want to breeze through the game and not worry about your score, fine, game doesn’t care. Let it be however challenging you want it to be.

It’s goofy, it’s silly, it has a low skill floor and crazy high skill ceiling. It’s incredibly fast-paced, and still manages to be parseable and beautiful despite everything moving past you at a jillion miles an hour.

I have exactly three nit-picky complaints with the game:

  1. It is a crime that they put the horn on R3 by default. You need the right stick for tricks. You should be doing tricks at basically all times. Sometimes you need to be doing a trick and honk your horn for a Dare, and that’s incredibly awkward. But you can remap it in settings. (Y is good, or a Bumper of your choosing, or a paddle if you’ve got ’em.)
  2. The world map desperately needs a simple list view with scores. The game’s map is a stylistic rendition of Japan with one long (largely) straight line dotted by the each of the levels, bosses, shops, cutscenes, etc. You can tab back and forth between regions, and you can sorta “hop” bends in the line by pushing hard enough, but when I’m doing post-game score chasing and achievement cleanup I don’t want a fancy menu, I want a simple list that tells me what I need to do and where. Alas.
  3. The game never stops adding new mechanics. You get at least one new “main” mechanic every chapter, sometimes multiple like at the start, and in the back half of the game you start getting the ability to buy alternate train cars that give you mods like + trick execution speed / - manual duration (so you can trick a lot, but it’s harder to maintain a chain). By the end of the game it’s a little much. It’s not completely overwhelming, but it’s a lot, at the end of the game they’re throwing EVERYTHING at you.

These issues are incredibly easy to look past. This game rules. Highly recommended. It’s out on everything, but I played it on Game Pass, I recommend it regardless of price.