Review: Denshattack! - A Boss You'll Actually Want to Work For

Review copy provided by Fireshine Games, thank you very much!

Isn't it true that every year, suddenly around the middle of it, an indie game appears that's a bit crazy and comes out of nowhere, gets good reviews usually accompanied by claims like: "in a perfect world this would be a Game of the Year nominee" and even though not many people play it, those who do say exactly the same thing? Well, meet Denshattack! - this year's 2026 version of that game.

Subway Surfer 8

The game opens with a cutscene explaining the post-apocalyptic future in which the game takes place, a disaster-stricken Japan that continues to maintain a metropolis only inside giant domes - and then cuts the video mid-way in a manner that emphasizes it doesn't really care about anything except giving you energetic gameplay in an unprecedented way and tons, but tons of trains. Sometimes when a game does this, it's actually a sign of a cheap, shallow product that's too arcade-y - even though Denshattack! is completely arcade-y, that's absolutely not the case with it. The game takes the gameplay you know from Endless Runners like Subway Surfer, adds tons of mechanics to it and makes it viable as a full-length game (and much longer than you'd think, but we'll get to that soon). 

It's not just that the game adds the ability to perform tricks with every jump that earn you points and open hidden paths in each level, it's that each level is truly crafted with care, introducing new mechanics in almost every one of them. The level design here is masterful, whether it's giant tracks that function as a sort of "small open world" with missions that require you to change your route each time to reach the area where you complete them, or standard racing tracks where you can ram other trains on your way to first place, or time-limited stages where you need to achieve the highest score and explore areas with tons of secrets like an abandoned mall for example. The creativity in level design reaches its peak in the boss stages that appear at the end of each area in the game - and here it's worth stopping and not spoiling because each one is among the best 10 minutes you'll play this year. These stages are masterfully constructed and use all the mechanics the game has to offer in such a clever way. All these things create addictive gameplay for all the right reasons, and made me want to return every day to this excessive dopamine rush with a train that knows how to do flips in the air to cool sounds and tons of popping points.

 If you've ever played the Persona games, you can see a clear influence here, and I have to say the game adapted the series' style to this psychotic thing we got here in a way that feels like it has enough personality to stand on its own. Even though the game is far from being a graphical showcase even for the previous decade - the performance still impressed me, having to process so much happening on screen. In almost every section of a stage you'll be moving at high speed, with tons of things happening in the background from breaking glass to sharks jumping at you from the sea, all while you're doing flips in the air with the joystick and the points on the side are jumping too. The performance remains stable throughout, and even when my eyes found the screen already too cluttered, the performance didn't suffer.

Israel Railways Has Too Many Delays, Denshattack! Has Too Much of Everything

No one can take away the fact that Denshattack! has the most fun gameplay of the year, except epilepsy patients (who must stay away from this game much more than fire). The game's foundation is so insane that I happily pressed the replay button on stages just to complete all the missions in each level, raise my score a notch or finish in a faster time. Completely justifiably, the game's creators fell in love with what they created here - and from there celebrated that love way too much. Denshattack! simply has too much of everything. One of them is too many things on screen, something that even created an overwhelming feeling in me and made me want to take a break every so often to rest. Another area is the stages - the game has no less than 9 chapters, each divided into about 8 stages. That's a ton of stages, which despite being innovative, already feel like too many at some point. One of the innovations is ice, which refreshes the train's movement a bit but would have been better if it wasn't there at all and the game had ended as one super energetic, fun and focused train ride for every second. The padding of the stages makes the game feel stretched - an antithesis to the fast and refreshing gameplay it creates.

 Another huge dissonance is between how the game dismisses the story's existence at the beginning, versus how much it tries to push it on us in a way that really confused me. On one hand the game is aware that the player just wants to do tricks with the train, on the other hand it forces us to listen to dialogue at the start of each level, or enter a sauna with the characters to learn more about them. It's not that the game's writing is terrible and certainly not annoying because of the character design - it's annoying mainly because of the illogic between how much the game doesn't want you to focus on the story versus how much it actually deals with it, which makes it feel stuck like a bone in your throat. And yet, the story did grab me a few times and did enhance my experience - which can't be said at all about its Collectibles. It's insanely fun to collect them all during the stages, but the game's customization options are disappointing and truly pointless. The game does try to do something interesting with some of the things you collect, but the attempt comes out lame and I didn't really see any meaningful change after I used the things that were unlocked. I think it nicely sums up this paragraph that all the things that bothered me in the game are very, very small - but like almost every aspect of the game, here too there are too many of them. 

And Good Luck to the Competition in the Soundtrack Category This Year

The game's soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. Look, I'm not Samuel and I don't have enough knowledge to delve into which composer composed what in the game and what game from the 80s he once composed and how moving that he's back. I can only say that the game's soundtrack is a masterpiece. The match between how energetic the game is and the melodies that change in each stage is excellent, and raises the fun of jumping between tracks to the maximum even in the game's less interesting stages (and there aren't many of those at all). In general, the sound here needs to receive honorable mention for how central a role it plays in making the gameplay addictive, because every action sounds so good and tickles the ears in a way that I'm really bummed I'm currently writing a review and not flying on the rails in some random city in Japan. By the way, it's important to note that the game has a map where the stages are scattered - and it's an accurate map of Japan with all the major cities, some of which also appear as later or earlier stages.

The Bottom Line

Denshattack! takes the addictive gameplay of games like Subway Surfer and builds enough mechanics on top of it to be a full PC game, insanely creative, energetic, fun and much more addictive than the original. It sometimes feels like too much and stretched out - but no one can take away from it that it's one of the most fun games released so far in the last decade.