Denshattack! masterfully fuses skateboarding mechanics with train-based gameplay

Undercoders has pulled off something that shouldn't work on paper. The studio took the freeform, trick-laden spirit of skateboarding games—the kind where players string together ollies and kickflips across warehouses and parks—and grafted it onto trains. Trains, which are the opposite of skateboards: rigid, predetermined, locked to their tracks. It sounds like asking a marching band to play improvisational jazz. Yet somehow the collision produces something electric.

The game is called Denshattack!, and it's set in a post-apocalyptic Japan where most people live in domes under the control of a megacorporation called Miraido. Outside those domes, train gangs run different regions. The protagonist is Emi Araki, a train driver who delivers ramen across the Kyushu region. One day she impresses a local Denshattack enthusiast, who sees something in her. That moment becomes the start of a journey across Japan where her talent for conducting trains helps her dominate the gangs she encounters, and they begin to follow her movement.

What Undercoders understood is that train conducting, when stripped of its mundane reality, can feel like skateboarding. Emi's train can ollie—it can twist and turn just like a board. The tracks don't always connect; sometimes they simply end. When that happens, she forces the train to leap from one track to another, the way a skater launches into the air. The controls feel natural: right trigger to jump, left trigger to slam down, right stick for flip tricks. Most levels move players from point A to point B in a linear fashion, but the studio mixes in free-form stages where you hit a score threshold or complete specific tasks, and racing sections where Emi laps around racetrack levels.

The real genius emerges in how Undercoders introduces new mechanics. Early on, Emi dislodges a Ferris wheel and rides it down a mountainside. As the campaign progresses—nine chapters, 67 stages total—she learns physics-defying techniques. She rides the wind. She learns to grind on walls. Her trains gain a swinging function that lets her hang from beams, and magnet abilities that let her travel upside down on ceiling-mounted rails. When tracks vanish entirely, she can still grind on regular rails. Underwater sections change how the train moves. She dodges falling buildings, uses a factory to construct a giant doll, takes part in a jailbreak hopping across blimps and zooming around skyscrapers.

Each region has a gang boss, and these encounters showcase the studio's inventiveness most clearly. Emi fights mechs. She battles yakuza in the clouds. The fights refuse to follow a pattern. Just when you feel you've seen what the developers can do, they throw a curveball that resets your expectations. The constraints of the premise—the fact that you're always on or near a train—seem to have forced constant creative problem-solving. Rather than limiting the game, the boundaries appear to have sharpened it.

The campaign has substantial replay value. Players can return to older levels to hunt for secrets and complete side-mission dares they missed the first time. New train types unlock, each with their own perks and cosmetic designs. Like the Tony Hawk games that inspired it, Denshattack! hooks players into chasing high scores and completing every objective. It's an indie title that proves you don't need enormous teams or multimillion-dollar budgets to make something great. Sometimes all it takes is dedication, an unexpected idea, and the willingness to let two opposing worlds amplify each other.