User Reviews

I've bought it on Steam, but played the ROM called Contra Spirits (Japan).sfc on Snes9x 1.61 and i've watched the translated intro and outro on YouTube.

Since i planned to play a Contra game, this time i checked if there is the rewind functionality. And there is, which is very cool.

So, this time it's a native game instead of a re-make of an arcade game. But it's still in the 16-bit era, so it kept most of the arcade garbage design. It's a 1HKO action platformer with lives and continues. But the original nihonese version at least have them unlimited. In my test run of the western version released on Steam i haven't reached even the top-down stage before a game over.

In the settings you can give yourself 7 starting lives and put the game into an "easy" mode. But the easy mode just removes some things, like additional stages for the bosses, instead of offering you the same content but with fairer balance.

Instead of the shotgun, the new king of the game is the seeker rockets gun. And it has a very strong aim. It goes so far as to make most of the game trivial. And without it it's as hard as usual. How about having some actual balance, instead of making an extremely hard game and a gun that makes the rest useless?

When you get to the vertical section, adjusting the camera turns the bottom edge into a magic murder-line. Even if the ground is one pixel away, you still instantly die. The new gimmick segments are two top-down levels with different controls. The standard directions now strafe, and you have to use shoulder buttons to rotate. It looks interesting, but the implementation is not that good. The second stage has a terrible mid-level boss. You can shoot it only when you are already dead. It opens up only to kill you and instantly hides when finished. The seekers can't reach it, and the controls are bad. The game has this weird stupid sticky climbing, that works opposite to the core run and gun fluid flow of this game. And that stickiness also makes the end-level boss terrible. In the bike stage your worst enemy is to lose the seeker gun. And then there's a stupid drawn-out fight against the engine. You have to hop from the randomly appearing / disappearing "platforms" that move and come out only for a second. So you have to constantly move left, while your goal is to shoot right. The mechanic can sound fun on paper, but it is used in a very tiny "room". If the "platforms" had longer travel time you could have more time to turn around and shoot. This fight is a giant waste of time. The second top-down level is very awkward and stupid, with its conveyor-belts made of sand. The mid-level boss after the heart just kills you. The trick is that you are actually allowed to jump on it, in this game where touching any other enemy results in death. Then there is a terrible fight against dragonalien where you have a choice between dying and not dealing any damage. Hope you've saved a lot of bombs. The last boss opens with a terrible snake mechanic. The damage is basically unavoidable. Then in the brain fight you have a mechanic of choose the form of the destructor. Eyes are pretty easy, brains do nothing, the cage is terrible, and i didn't see what the blue ones do. On harder difficulties there are even more choices.

The game has mostly nice graphics, and it steals a lot of the designs from pop-culture. All the guns are now represented by letters. It makes it easier to tell them apart, but also looks cheap. The chopper is drawn in 3//4 but its rocket is in straight profile, lol. The music is pretty bad, there's no melody, it's just some random bad sounds.

It's a super short game and the homing weapon makes most of it trivial, despite the same bad design as in the previous instalments. And then there's a bit more of bad design on top. It's not as infuriating as the versions of the first game, but it's worse than the second one and the GameBoy re-make.