While I’m always highly appreciative of Nintendo’s Indie Directs, I’ll admit that when you’re just given glimpses of gameplay for upcoming titles, it can make me a bit nervous. Given that some games that appeared to show promise haven’t quite worked out as well in practice, the early look at Denshattack made me particularly hesitant to allow excitement to grab hold of me. Something that captures the terrific looks of the likes of Jet Set Radio, has the intensity of greats like Tony Hawk and Crazy Taxi, and features what looks like non-stop action and insanity, as well as outrageous boss battles? Surely it was too much to hope for!

Well, the great news is that (for the most part) if you walked away from that early footage hoping that a game could pull all of those elements together successfully, delivering a hefty dose of hectic fun as well, Denshattack is the real deal. In terms of story, keep in mind that you’ll be battling rival gangs who all hit the rails with their tricked out train engines, performing acrobatic maneuvers at will as if they were skateboards, flipping, tricking, grinding rails, and simply doing crazy stuff. In general you’ll just be meeting new people, jawing with them a bit, taking them on, and then typically defeating them to the point that they decide to join you… and there’s not much more to know. For the most part each new territory will be exciting less for who you’ll meet, and more for the new moves and abilities you’ll get to add to your repertoire. It can be surprising that even quite a lot further in, you’ll still have new things to master, and since the tracks you’re working tend to be cumulative in what they demand, your work will be cut out for you to be on top of it all.

If the game has a slight weakness, it’s in how new elements are introduced to you and initially mastered. While you’re given a decent overview most of the time for what you’ll need to do, there’s absolutely some trial and error sometimes involved in wrapping your head around the specifics of how to ensure your success. Fortunately, for the most part this doesn’t get too aggravating, but since precision can be so important when everything is whipping by so quickly, not being fully on-board with the nuance of being successful can be frustrating. Weirdly though, my biggest problems were right at the start, with the right stick controls to perform tricks feeling like the game’s most unreliable and inconsistent element. Struggling to get the timing and precision of the various swipes needed to execute more complex tricks, I actually got held up for a little while just in the tutorial for them itself, and while I was fine once I was in the proper game, I’ll admit that I tended to flail quite a bit and just hope for the best rather than have any specific strategy in mind, since I never really found consistent success with those controls. All that said, this really does feel like it manages to take the excitement and insanity of games like Tony Hawk, Crazy Taxi, and others, put it on rails, and then consistently keep the intensity of pretty well every moment from ever dipping below an 8. The result is hectic, sometimes outright insane when it comes to boss fights in particular, and simply a load of fun that kept me coming back for more. Throw in what feels like a steal of an asking price for so much goodness, and it’s an even sweeter deal!