Denshattack! Accessibility Review

I cannot overstate how cool of a game Denshattack is.

Denshattack is fundamentally an on rails skateboarding game, with colourful anime aesthetics and Japanese trains. However, scratch beneath that surface and it becomes apparent that Denshattack is also an elaborate pop punk adventure about fighting back against capitalism, resisting corporate control, fighting mechs, and surviving the climate crisis.

For me, the best place to start talking about Denshattack in terms of accessibility is the way that the game differs from a standard skateboarding game, by virtue of being on rails.

You core game controls, at least initially, involve drifting around corners and timing your drift exit for boosts, jumping in the air, changing between tracks (on the ground or in the air), braking (to avoid on track obstacles), honking your horn (to startle track blockages), and slamming down from the air to the ground to dodge underneath aerial obstacles. While additional abilities such as rail grinding and manuals are introduced over time, the core moveset feels pretty familiar to most skating video games, at least initially.

The big difference is, obviously, that you are locked onto rails. Most levels in the game consist of a single lap with branching paths available, allowing players freedom to choose how they tackle their overall journey, but don’t allow them to stray entirely off the path.

This comes with a lot of accessibility benefits. As a player with poor hand eye coordination I find that by virtue of being on rails, it’s way easier for me to land tricks successfully in Denshattack. I don’t have to worry about whether I am pitched too high or too low, and my train snaps into place as it returns to the correct landing position left through right after a successful trick. As long as I don’t overextend by trying to attempt too many tricks in one jump, it’s pretty manageable not to wipe out when trying to land a trick.

There is still an initial learning curve, but it’s mostly about learning not to over extend how many trick attempts you’re doing. You can succeed with smaller combos than you might expect, particularly once you learn to do manuals toward the end of the first region, and as a result it becomes much easier to get score multipliers going. Landing your tricks into manuals is one of the earliest ways that a player can earn combo multipliers, which go a long way to quickly improving your point scores on levels.

Each individual level is very easy to complete and simply progress through if you just want to go through the story, with most of the game’s challenge being found in completing optional side objectives. You’re challenged to complete each level quickly, score points from tricks, complete level specific bonus objectives (called Dares), and pick up collectables mid race. 

You can pause at any time to double check your list of Dares, for a reminder of the level specific objectives you’re looking out for.

Falling off the track or crashing mid run doesn’t lose you progress on your objectives, but you do need to complete a full attempt at the level and see it’s finish line without restarting in order to get credit for any of the completed Dares. Denshattack has very generous mid level checkpointing, and you’ll still have all of your checkpointed points when resetting to a checkpoint after a crash, but you will lose any active score multiplier combo. Crashing however doesn’t reset the amount of time you’ve spent attempting a lavel, so if you’re aiming for the gold rank on getting a low completion time you may wish to fully reset a run after a couple of crashes.

Objectives can be spread out across multiple attempts at a level. You don’t need to get the maximum score ranking and the fastest time rating on a level in the same attempt, which makes it possible to focus on single priorities at a time, and makes it way easier to go chasing after all the gold rankings.

Moving on to some of the more traditional accessibility aspects of the game, Denshattack features Text, UI, and Icons which are all pretty large by default, and text in game is fairly high contrast.

The game offers the ability to reduce Camera Shake, Blur, Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, and Speed Line intensity via sliders for visual comfort.

Any information that’s conveyed via colour is also conveyed via icons for colourblind players, such as the different paths in one of the early levels with branching objective directions.

All audio cues in Denshattack also have a visual cue to accompany them.

Denshattack also features sliders for audio customisation, subtitles, and options for speaker names and subtitle backgrounds.

While most dialogue in Denshattack only progresses when you press a button, some cutscenes do progress automatically at their own pace.

In terms of making replayability feel like it respects the player’s time autosaves are frequent, as are mid level checkpoints. Level restarts are fairly fast as well, with the option to set a button hold combination to reset the level without needing to open the pause menu and navigate to the restart button.

When trying to explain Denshattack, it’s easy to undersell what makes this game so interesting. On the surface it’s an on rails skateboarding game with anime art and some trains. That alone would be enough for this game to be extremely up my alley, but it’s more than the sum of its parts.

For me I think when the game really clicked was when I hit the first boss fight. Sure I was doing rail grinds, tricks, and jumps, but I was stringing them together to build a high enough combo meter that I would unlock invisible rainbow roads in the sky, which I could then use to catch up with a giant train mech, jump over its attacks, steal one of its rocket fists, and fly that through a post apocalyptic city to try and defeat the mech with a big uppercut. The game is often mechanically a skateboarding game, but the scale and scope of the action makes it into something much more ambitious.

Denshattack is something pretty special.