Denshattack! Review Roundup — The Skateboarding Train Game Is 2026's Surprise Indie Hit [Metacritic 88]

Spanish indie studio Undercoders launched Denshattack! on July 15, 2026 simultaneously on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. The game's pitch — you ride a gravity-defying train, pull Tony Hawk-style tricks, and grind rails through a neon-lit dystopian Japan to take down a sinister megacorporation — sounds like a meme. In practice, it earned Metacritic 88 on PC (88 on PS5, 87 on Switch 2), a 9/10 from IGN, a 5/5 from Eurogamer, and a position in OpenCritic's top 2 percentile across all reviewed games. Steam user sentiment sits at 97% positive from 317 reviews within the first two days. The word coming back from critics across the board: Denshattack! is one of the best indie games released this year.

• ▶Sources: Steam store page · Metacritic · IGN review · Eurogamer review · Rock Paper Shotgun review · Polygon review

Key Facts at a Glance

The Premise: Climate Change, Corporate Domes, and Train Outlaws

Denshattack! takes place in a near-future Japan ravaged by climate change. The Miraidō corporation has enclosed every major city under weather-resistant domes, making the train network that connects them the only lifeline between communities. Daredevil conductors who ride and fight along those routes are called Denshattackers. You play as a member of a ragtag group of outcasts who have decided to go after Miraidō by mastering the rails and winning the respect of underground gangs, zine publishers, and rival factions across Japan.

The story itself is a straightforward anti-corporate rebellion arc — Polygon called it "your standard tale of punk rock rebellion against a vaguely nefarious company." But the world it frames is inventive enough that it quickly earns buy-in. Trains here serve as transportation, weapons in duels, and a kind of social currency that builds your crew's reputation. It is, as Eurogamer's Dom Peppiatt described it, "anti-capitalist, pop-punk optimism distilled." The game draws visually and thematically from Jet Set Radio's street-culture DNA, Persona's bold aesthetic flair, and the speed-focused level structure of classic 3D Sonic games — a combination that, against all odds, coheres into something genuinely distinctive.

Developer Background: Undercoders

Undercoders is a small Spanish studio operating as Undergames S.L. Their previous work includes the satirical side-scroller SuperEpic: The Entertainment War (2019) and the exploration adventure Treasures of the Aegean (2021), both well-regarded in the indie community. Denshattack! is their first fully 3D project — an ambitious jump in scope, and a curious one for a Spanish studio to make a Japan-set cyberpunk platformer. That outsider-looking-in perspective may be part of why the game feels so playfully unencumbered by convention.

Publishing is shared between UK-based Fireshine Games (the Sold Out label behind games like Skate Story and OlliOlli World) and Boltray Games.

Gameplay: How Do Skateboarding Trains Actually Work?

The core system borrows directly from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: grinding, ollies, manuals, shove-its, and kickflips executed with stick-flick inputs, applied to a 50-ton gravity-defying locomotive. Undercoders paces out new techniques gradually rather than front-loading the complexity — you learn one move, work it into your combos, then the next is introduced. By mid-game, crane-swinging and dual-track sliding open up combo chains that can run the length of an entire level without touching the ground.

IGN's Will Borger summed it up:

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"Hitting the track and chaining tricks together in Denshattack is a joy, and a constant stream of new ideas means its excellent anime-inspired campaign never runs out of steam." — IGN, 9/10

Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio went further, arguing that Denshattack!'s level architecture outperforms its most obvious reference point:

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"You could easily make the case that Denshattack! is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made." — Polygon

Level Variety

The game rotates intelligently across different mode types across its roughly 10-hour campaign:

• ▶Score-attack arcade stages — the purest expression of the trick system
• ▶Races — shortcut hunting, opponent ramming
• ▶Open-ended city levels — objectives scattered across a district, completable in any order
• ▶Boss fights — escalating anime-scale spectacle (mecha magical girl, moving castle, mechanical worm, an army of Denshattackers)

Stages take place underwater, inside volcanoes, on a runaway ferris wheel, and across snowfields. The variety means the game rarely repeats a beat before introducing something new.

The Map: Domed Japan, Region by Region

The journey runs from the rural landscape of Kyushu through the metropolises of Osaka and Tokyo — both sealed under Miraidō's domes — up to the snowfields of Hokkaido and beyond. Each region brings a distinct visual identity and a fresh rail geometry. Urban stages feel like enormous interlocking skate parks; natural-environment stages lean into unusual physics surfaces like volcanic terrain and ocean floors.

What ties it together is what multiple reviewers flagged as exceptional level design craft. Alternate routes, hidden collectibles, secret rails, and cranes offering aerial shortcuts mean that each stage rewards multiple passes and punishes carelessness in ways that feel earned rather than arbitrary.

Review Scores

Selected critical quotes:

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"Irreverent, unpredictable, funny, and unputdownable, Denshattack! is anti-capitalist, pop-punk optimism distilled." — Eurogamer, 5/5 (Dom Peppiatt)

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"One of the fiercest, fastest, and most lovable games I've played." — The Gamer, 5/5

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"Denshattack! is, in one word, cathartic at all levels … it's a whole that never stops giving, even after the 9 to 10 hours where you would have likely seen all stages, because the reasons to come back to it are endless." — Gamereactor UK, 90/100

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"Denshattack surprises by turning the unlikely idea of train maneuvers into one of the most fun and creative titles of the year. With strong aesthetic inspiration in Persona, impeccable soundtrack and genius boss battles, the game makes up for its indie scale with pure charisma and fluidity." — Combo Infinito, 100/100

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"Denshattack isn't just a great game, it's guaranteed to be some people's all-time favorite." — Restart.run, 90/100

Community Reception

Steam's initial burst of 317 reviews resolved at 97% positive — unusually high for a first-party aggregation even in the honeymoon window following launch. One Metacritic user, AleSimo5, wrote:

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"This game does not leave you indifferent, once you start you cannot stop. The gameplay feels fantastic, each level gets better and better and you can't imagine just how crazy they will get. The art is awesome, the characters are incredible and I'm in love with the fanzines! GOTY!!!"

A note on the PlayStation trailer: Denshattack!'s launch trailer on the official PlayStation YouTube channel was caught in the broader backlash against Sony's announcement that it will stop printing physical game discs for new PlayStation titles starting January 2028. The trailer received a high volume of downvotes and comments focused on Sony's disc policy rather than the game itself — a dynamic affecting virtually every video on the PlayStation channel at this time, not specific to Denshattack!. It does not reflect sentiment toward the game, which remains strongly positive across all review platforms.

What's Included and Buying Guide

Platform notes

PC system requirements

Who should buy it?

• ▶Fans of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Jet Set Radio, or OlliOlli World: very high likelihood of enjoyment
• ▶Players who want a well-paced, roughly 10-hour indie with strong replay value from score chasing
• ▶Anyone looking for an inventive, personality-driven game that breaks from the usual release calendar formulas

Language support: English, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Catalan. Full audio in English and Japanese; all other languages have full interface and subtitle support.

Buy Denshattack! on Steam →

Verdict

Denshattack! earns its critical consensus. The absurd premise is not a gimmick — it is the game's design philosophy made literal. Undercoders built a trick system, a level language, and a momentum grammar specifically around the constraints of a train, and what results is something that feels like nothing else but is immediately intuitive to anyone who has spent time with the games it is in conversation with.

For a Spanish studio making its first fully 3D game, set in a Japan-inspired world, published globally on four platforms simultaneously, to land with this kind of critical unanimity represents exactly the kind of surprise the indie space exists to produce. Rock Paper Shotgun called it "the best thing I've played so far this year." On the current 2026 release calendar, that is a meaningful claim — and the scores support it.