Developed/Published by: Undercoders / Fireshine Games
Released: 15/07/2026
Completed: 18/08/2026
Completion: Finished it.
Are video games still… cool? I was trying to think about this. Being old, I remember the 90s and the era of the PlayStation, all Lara Croft on the cover of The Face and Wipeout demo kiosks at clubs, and when I think about it, the era of video games being actively cool feels like it ended with the Dreamcast. Maybe it’s a limited way of looking at things–connecting video games to youth and music culture via games like Rez and Jet Set Radio–but once you get into the PS3 and Xbox era… doesn’t it all feel a bit less organic, more corporate?
I know, I know. “Cool” is so completely undefinable, and so completely subjective and contextual. And it’s not like Sega weren’t a huge corporation (certainly Sony’s “cool” was a marketing effort.) But when I look at Jet Set Radio, I just see something that’s… cool. It makes it look effortless.
Denshattack! wants to reclaim that cool.
The thing about Jet Set Radio is that it’s… not actually that great? In fact, when I played it a few years ago on PlayStation Vita I was struck by how close it skirts to “actively bad.” The stiff, awkward controls. The horrible camera. The overall clumsiness. Awful enemies and boss battles. You never get to feel mastery, you never reach flow; ironically, you never ever feel cool playing it.
But the overall package is so incredible that it never tips you over into complete rejection (at least for me, anyway.) It’s perhaps the peak of style over substance, and therefore a valid swan song to the era of games being cool. It gets away with it.
Denshattack! does not.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Denshattack!–apart from some issues I had getting comfortable with the controls–has none of the rough edges you find with Jet Set Radio. It’s an incredibly efficient and focused bit of game design, really determined to give you all of the heights of mastery and pleasure with as little friction as possible. But it’s too focused, too efficient, and in slathering on a particular style of cool it comes across as pastiche. Denshattack! can never live up to the Jet Set Radio we have in our minds, because… how could it?
The design sounds good. Denshattack!’s core is, rather than Jet Set Radio, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, just that instead of being a skater in a skate park, you’re a train on a track, with the (silly, intentionally unexplained but completely accepted) ability to jump in the air and do tricks. Levels are a mix of A to B courses, levels where you have objectives and have to loop them till you’re done, race courses, trick courses (the closest in style to Tony Hawks’ skate parks) and boss battles. It’s a lot of variety!
The problem is that… and it sounds sort of stupidly obvious to say this… you’re a train on a track. You’re propelling forward at all times, and you don’t have many “interesting decisions” to make. Yes, you can switch tracks here and there, but there is none of the immediate, constant decision making in Tony Hawk’s; where to move next, which trick to pull, how to actually manufacture a long chain. Here, the track always flows towards you, and the level furniture that flows in your direction are the sum of your options.
It’s obvious that the developers know this, so the game–which is astonishingly long, with over sixty levels–introduces new mechanics throughout. The game doesn’t honestly feel that much like Tony Hawk’s once you’re a little way into it, instead feeling much more like a cross between a rhythm action game and the more dexterity-testing style of Metroidvania; it’s not “chain tricks” but “chain abilities, and trick between them.”
Like the worst examples of the Metroidvania, however, the problem is that you end up with what feels like forty things to do spread all across the controller, clicking shoulder buttons here and pushing other things elsewhere in rapid succession or you fail. This doesn’t create interesting situations or interactions, just lists of things to do in order. At least in a Metroidvania the abilities are there to be used on things you saw earlier, or traversal you have to work out; here again it’s more like a rhythm action game. It comes towards you. Do the move. Now this one.
Denshattack!, as a result, never transcends “fine.” There’s a few hours, I think, where after the controls click, it’s actively fun! But before long it feels very rote; rather than the sense you’re on a train to adventure, it feels more like you’ve clocked in at the video game factory and you’re stood at a conveyor belt, having to perform a set, pre-arranged actions as they flows towards you.
With the game as long as it is, Denshattack! is not so much “too much of a good thing” as “too much of a… thing.” There are many, many sicknesses in the video games industry now but the requirement that games be stuffed with content is absolutely one of them. I understand the impetus. Publishers want big numbers; players want as much bang for their buck as they can get, and Steam and other platforms absolutely incentivise high hour counts.
But in a game like Denshattack!, where the core design is slight, and the games it references are shorter with levels built around replayability… it feels like a completely wrong assumption was made by the team here. Every level has a bunch of stuff to do, to collect, and medals to get for either doing it as fast as possible, or with the highest score, but it’s just not that interesting to go back to do it! You can’t make a beeline to a particular item you missed, or find a favourite part of the level and trick that… even the micro decisions of movement you’d make in a track-based racing game are all missing. I still kept thinking, “Oh, I could go back to gold medal earlier levels with all my new skills” but there’s no particularly strong reason to do so–there’s so much content that you’re far better pushing forward.
Long, and I mean long before I was done with this I was bored out of my mind. It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of setting and narrative layered on that is simply not compelling either. There’s a good heart here–a cheerful anime protagonist gets together a rag-tag group of gangs to take down a corporation that’s been exploiting Japan–but much like the game’s design, it’s a fine enough idea without enough meat to actually support an actual… story.
I hate to be all Robert McKee here but a story needs, you know… characters with wants and needs in conflict, and scenes need to reflect that. In Denshattack!, nothing happens! Characters stand around and spout platitudes at each other in every cutscene. It’s all plot and no story, and it’s simply very dull. It feels so egregious because I can feel the game’s certainty that actually really amazing stuff happens. During the levels there are big moments (explosions, kaiju battles, all sorts) and there’s this drive towards a huge, powerful climax that really put me in mind of the climax of Hi-Fi Rush–everyone coming together in this beautiful, moving moment… but it’s completely flat because the characters were just… well, they were about as deep as the billboards you’d fly past on a train.
I think after attempting to beat Titanium Court to death for what it did to me, you might say I’m just being cruel now. That I’m punishing Denshattack! for simply offering too much, and for not nailing every aspect. And, well, maybe that’s fair. Denshattack! is… fine, and it’s only that it goes on for so long that made it such a miserable slog.
But I think game developers have got to learn to edit. Denshattack! is a perfectly fine experience if it’s four or six hours and I can go back and replay the levels if I want; I think I’d have come out overall positive on it, even. So if there’s one lesson from this I want to impress: cut what you’re making down to a diamond. No one wants the rest of the rock!!!
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: I mentioned the controls needing to click; if you think you’re the kind of person who could play this and stop before you’re tired of it, it’s worth saying that I found the controls utterly frustrating when I started. Rather than go for a classic Tony Hawks’ style system–d-pad, buttons–it goes with double analogues and triggers, and there’s a learning curve because of the issue of track switching: you have to tap left or right on the left thumbstick to switch tracks, but meanwhile when tricking you’re moving the right thumbstick left and right, and at least for my brain it felt like I should have been switching tracks during tricks but you’re not.
In something like Tony Hawks’ you’re initiating a “state change” via button presses (e.g. ”I am holding trick button, so pushing left means trick; when I release trick button, pushing left means move left”) and here you don’t have that anchor, so I was constantly messing up at first. It does become normal after a point, so it’s not something I can exactly ding the game for any more than I already have, but I was really close to giving this up at the point when it started to click.
