The greatest follow-up to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater does not involve any skateboards. And it’s not a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game, either. It does involve kickflipping a train, though. Denshattack is weird. And pretty awesome.
Look, this is going to take some explaining: in the world of Denshattack, there’s a crazy sport where people perform insane tricks using trains while racing around circuits that involve tracks, grinding on rails and crazy jumps. All of this takes place in a kind of post-apocalyptic world where the wealthy live inside domes due to climate damage, and everyone else deals with the shitty air outside. For a bunch of crazy reasons, trains have become the de facto method of travel for the common, outside-dome folk.
REVIEW AT A GLANCE
Developer: Undercoders
Publisher: Fireshine Games, Boltray Games
Reviewed On: PS5
Available On: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2
Release Date: 15 July, 2026
Price (UK): £15.99
Genre: Tony Hawk’s Pro Train
Review Code: Provided by Fireshine Games
Quick Take:
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with trains shouldn’t work nearly this well. Frantic, kinetic and gloriously ridiculous, Denshattack is finger-blisteringly good fun.
That brings us to Emi, deliverer of ramen and train driver extraordinaire. She winds up learning about Denshattack, the crazy sport of train tricks, and enthusiastically enters into the world with the goal of being the best at flipping trains and battling ludicrous bosses.
It feels a lot like playing a Tony Hawk’s game: you jump, perform flip tricks by flicking the right stick, grind on rails, use manuals to link tricks together and try to complete objectives like collecting spray cans. The big difference is that the action is on-rails. You can take different paths and jump between rails, but you’re always running along preset routes.
There’s a bit of a wall to break through first, and that’s the controls and the speed at which things hurtle toward your face. Even in the first couple of tutorial levels, the game is teaching you a lot of controls you need to master. More importantly, the levels are fast and you have to do quite a bit: hold the drift button and release it at the right time, perform tricks, use a downward smash when the warning icon pops up, look ahead and notice closed lanes that must be jumped or evaded. All of this is done at high speed and amidst a screen awash with colour and chaos. It can be difficult to get it all nailed.
And the game piles on a lot more as you play. Now you’re juggling manuals, being able to do wallrides at certain points, leaving the rails to slide around in tunnels, honking the horn sometimes to change tracks and so on.
It’s a barrage of information being fired at your face from a machine gun. It’s why I bounced off the game the first time I played it and failed to go back while I was dealing with a nasty elbow/back/shoulder injury. The human brain doesn’t feel designed to parse this much stuff coming at this sort of speed… until it does. It clicks. A couple of levels in, things are coming together into a chaotic cacophony of controls, fingers dancing around the pad to produce sick combos. Denshattack is like Tony Hawk’s because it’s aiming for that magic flow state where it’s no longer pressing buttons; it’s ballet. But with a train. Somehow. It’s frantic, kinetic, chaotic, finger-blisteringly good fun.
And it isn’t like you have to master it to move on. Each level has medals awarded for completion time and trick score, along with objectives like collecting spray cans, performing a certain trick somewhere, finding a hidden exit, gathering up tickets and much, much more. But to progress the story, all you have to do is cross the finish line. So your first run is more like a recon mission before you swing back around for another run or 10 in a bid to do even better. The game is made to be played, then mastered, then humiliated by the kind of player whose callouses could be used as sandpaper and whose patience is infinite.
The boss battles are another highlight in a game that already has so many highlights it’s in danger of becoming blinding. Whether it’s chasing down a mech made of many trains, batting back giant baseballs being lobbed at you, or taking down a giant castle with legs from the inside, the boss battles feel epic.
The constant escalation is probably Denshattack’s greatest trick. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on what the game can throw at you, it comes up with some new bit of lunacy. One level had me riding along the top of a Ferris wheel. Another sent me through a cursed forest where strange demons were causing sections of track to appear around me. There’s a giant casino filled with enormous slot machines, while other stages let you abandon the rails entirely and drive around the inside of tunnels, climbing up the walls and even onto the ceiling to dodge obstacles. Even smaller ideas, like performing tricks on track selectors to change your route, help ensure the game rarely feels like it’s simply recycling the same courses with different backgrounds.
That inventiveness also applies to the mechanics themselves. Denshattack keeps layering new ideas on top of what you’ve already learned, which is both a blessing and part of the problem. Wallrides, tunnel driving and other new techniques give you more toys to play with and more ways to express yourself, but every addition is another thing to think about while the screen is already exploding with colour, warning signs, obstacles and opportunities to trick. It makes later stages even more demanding to read, but I’d much rather have a game constantly throwing new ideas at me than one that exhausts its bag of tricks after the opening hour.
There’s always something going on. New level types, too — sometimes it’s just getting from A to B; other times you’re on a time limit on a circuit with multiple routes where the only goal is to score trick points. Another style of event gives you three big objectives, and you have to follow the different routes to get to them and get it all done as quickly as possible.
Eventually, you’re also able to start buying different trains, giving you a little more control over how you want to approach things. Rather than Emi being permanently welded to the same machine, you can start picking trains that better suit what you’re trying to do. It’s another small layer on top of the medal chasing and repeated runs, and another excuse to experiment rather than simply finding one route through a level and calling it done.
A massive part of the reason Denshattack is so awesome is the presentation. Bright, colourful and buttery smooth are the words that immediately spring to mind. The visuals have a gorgeous hand-drawn vibe, while the cutscenes, which are mostly static images, feature some anime-inspired art and good voice acting. It’s the music that pounds away in the background that does it for me, though. It has a classic Sega style — bouncy, fast-paced and catchier than a cold. Even better, the entire four hours of music (yes, four hours) is available on YouTube for free.
I’ve not discussed the story much yet, and that’s because I think it’s the weakest part of the game. It’s far from bad, and it’s definitely not the weakest due to a lack of effort. Emi is a high-energy lead character who stumbles into Denshattack and quickly reveals herself as a prodigy of the sport, so she teams up with another character to explore this new world of train-sanity. That inevitably brings her into confrontation with the gangs and bosses of the region.
The story’s biggest problem for me is that Emi rarely feels like she has much resistance around her. She’s incredibly good at Denshattack almost immediately, and the people she meets tend to quickly become part of a growing hype squad, telling her how amazing she is. Rivals get beaten, attitudes soften and, before long, Emi has another admirer following her around. There’s absolutely an infectious Saturday-morning-anime quality to all of this, and I suspect plenty of people will find Emi’s endless enthusiasm charming, but I wanted a little more friction. When almost everyone around your protagonist is constantly reinforcing how brilliant they are, it becomes harder for their victories to feel quite as meaningful.
In Conclusion…
Denshattack was not on my radar. It pulled into the station like a train that had vanished from the timetable, catching me entirely off-guard. But sometimes those games that derail you are the absolute best, and that’s the case here, because Denshattack is fucking awesome.
I don’t know what drugs were involved in the creation of this utterly bizarre concept. What I do know is that the resulting slice of madness is a blur of colour and hugely fun action. Sure, when you get knocked out of that zen-like state, it’s kind of like crashing straight into a wall, but that brief moment of frustration drives the game, driving you to jump back in and master what you just cocked up.
Absolutely fantastic. Play it.
