"I like this game. What a lame tagline this is."

The 9 means it's good.

First thing’s first, and let’s get it out of the way now: you don’t have to worry about this game falling into the traps of the past polygonal Contras. For those of you left out of the loop, the last two titles, Contra: Legacy of War, and C: The Contra Adventure, were made by a different developer: Appaloosa. If there’s any justice in the world, these developers are out on America’s sidewalks panhandling for loose change and sleeping on vomit-encrusted park benches; spend no more time thinking about how it would have been entirely possible for them to kill the series three times in a row, because they’re gone.

Shattered Soldier gives itself a fair storyline for a balls-out action game of this caliber: player one from the original Contra game has been charged with killing player two and subsequently destroying 80% of humanity with a satellite weapon. Some destructive office politics seem to be at hand. Player one, Bill, is cryogenically frozen for his crimes against humanity. When the remaining 20% of the world finds that they have a problem with an enemy commander wreaking general havoc, they decide to thaw out Bill and kick him out the door to stop the threat; he’s just that awesome. Accompanying him is a female robot, Lucia, who is programmed to be an unstoppable killing machine.

And so, the first level begins with a crash landing as you’re kicked out of your plane with guns blazing. Here’s where the fun begins. Contra plays exactly like its 8 and 16-bit counterparts, where you’re locked on one plane of movement and must scroll to the side, jumping and ducking all manners of deadly projectiles. Essentially, it is a 2d game rendered with 3d graphics.

The few differences that actually stand out are changes for the better. Gone is the weapon system from past Contras, where one holds a special gun picked up until he dies. The reason this was nixed is fairly obvious to me: it never made sense to me that if you were having trouble with the game, it would compensate by taking away your good guns and making things harder. We get a better system: there are six guns you have available to you at any time. Three of them are automatic, and can be cycled between at any time: your standard machinegun, a devastating short-range flamethrower, and the tactical diver mines. The other three require you to actually charge up the attack with a separate button, but are significantly beefier as a result. The machinegun fires out a pod that sprays gunfire in every direction, the flamethrower fires off a giant blast of laser, and the mines will unleash a swarm of homing missiles. There’s no spread gun; stop whining and get over it.

This does a lot to add some strategy into the combat and allow you to switch your tactics in taking down an opponent on the fly. A group of enemies might be better dealt with by a swarm of homing missiles, but larger enemies will soak them up. You could gain some height and try to fire off some mines, or just ransack something with a machinegun.

The trend of Contra similarities continues, especially in terms of the game’s feel. Progress through a stage, fight things, and make every attempt not to die. Big armored behemoths will descend from the sky, chase you, or simply burst through a wall and force you to dodge everything they throw at you if you ever hope to kill them. The confrontations are merciless, and the difficulty curve is almost nonexistent. The game is very sink-or swim. Contra: SS marks a return of “old school” gameplay, and in Contra, this means that every battle consists of the following pattern:


1. A fearsome looking enemy appears.
2. Aforementioned enemy attacks you.
3. You flounder about for a brief half-second in a futile attempt to dodge the attack.
4. Predictably, you die.
5. Knowing what this attack is, it is demystified; you dodge it the next time it comes around.
6. Repeat step 2 until all enemy attacks are exhausted.
7. Having learned all attack patterns, victory is assured.
8. When you meet a new enemy, repeat step one.


It’s easy to lose a lot of players like this. Not everyone has the patience to persist at a game that’s so wholeheartedly determined to kill him or her with every new encounter; intuition only goes so far. This has prompted nearly every review to this point to say something akin to “well, it’s really hard.” It is to a degree. When you’ve learned the game, it becomes easy; obviously, if you know that enemy X’s trump card is a cascading set of missiles that can be dodged by standing on top of its thick armor once it retreats, you’re not going to die. Until that point, however, every avalanche of fiery death will kill you, and it will of course seem very hard.

Of course, there’s some great incentive to keep playing. Most of this involves the graphics, which bring Contra’s humongous bosses to life. Every manner of enemy is rendered here in a massive amount of detail. The first boss is an excellent example: at first, it looks much like the turtle boss from Contra III, that is until you finally blow its head off, at which point it turns around to reveal a massive and sickening human head that spews acidic vomit at you in between releasing disgusting insects and lightning balls. Outside of that, Contra’s bosses are a joy to fight, as they continually go from one attack pattern to another, firing missiles, shooting building-tall lasers, or just from attempting to smash you with their massive girth. Make no mistake: there are a lot of bosses; some claim that there are too many now, and that there are hardly any segments of dispatching the cannon-fodder troops now that the game’s become one long boss parade. With the excitement and beauty that these massive beasts bring to the game, I can hardly wish that they were replaced by easily dispatched waves of enemies.

There are some faults to Contra: SS, however. As an evolution of the Contra series, it hasn’t adopted some of the highest points of the series. Although you can choose which order you’d like to tackle the first four levels in, Contra: SS does not borrow the branching paths that existed in Contra: Hard Corps for the Genesis. Similarly, it doesn’t use Contra: HC’s character selection, which gave each of the four characters four weapons that were different from everybody else’s. The game, though longer than several other Contra games, is very short compared to the other action titles on the market; different characters and branching paths would have done worlds to boost this game’s replay.

In the end though, this is mostly everything we could have hoped for. Contra: Shattered Soldier is a beautiful and ingenious action game with a great challenge and an excellent hard-rock score whose only failure comes in that it can’t be turned up. Shattered Soldier did right what Contra games were known and loved for doing, and brought some life back to a series that most considered dead in the wake of the last two games. It’s fully deserving of the Contra name, and comes off better than some of the games that helped make that name so legendary.

Just don’t get too discouraged when you die, because you will. Often.

9
Excellently done: a true action game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/03, Updated 01/06/03