After the awfulness that was Contra: Legacy of War, it seems the next game would have to be improved and Appalooza once again were the developers to make this one. So? How did they fare out this time? I’ll give you a clue, no one remembers this game.
C: The Contra Adventure, developed by Appaloosa Interactive and published by Konami of America and was released in 1998 in the US only…see why no one remembers it.
A meteorite with an alien on it crash lands on Earth. The alien manages to find a Mayan Temple where it calls home for more aliens, ready to once again stage an invasion. Tasha from Legacy of War is assigned to infiltrate the temple and…insert anime tentacle porn. So it’s up the actual main character from Legacy of War, Ray Poward, to find Tasha and prevent the alien invasion…spoiler alert, we don’t even meet Tasha, one cutscene with her of an unknown fate and that’s it.
When you start the game, you go to a 2.5D side-scroller, just like the classic Contra games, you run and gun and it controls OK. So we got some familiarity here and whilst there are bits in the level I don’t like, for example, the bosses, it’s not that bad. The weapons are pretty cool, you get a default machine gun and you collect upgrades as usual. There’s no one hit deaths, but you have a health bar. A bit jarring for Contra standards, but it’s fine, I got used to it quickly. So all and all, it’s decent and it gets the job done for what it is.
And that ALL changes once you get to the next level, because the game shows its true colours in the form of third-person gameplay, where the graphics are a mess, the draw distance is N64 levels of horridness which means enemies can hit you from anywhere and the controls are too restrictive for a game like this. So you go into these levels, you need to shoot switches to open doors, try and shoot down enemies or you can skip them if you can get away with it and so on and so forth. Also, the levels get too long too quickly due to each level having more than one boss, each feeling like final bosses in a level and you have the urge to break your controller once you realise that this isn’t the end.
The next level will be in an overhead view and that’s when you realise that the controls REALLY don’t work for this game, as I said before, it’s too restrictive, dodging enemy fire is awkward despite there being able to strife but because the character is so sluggish it’s hard to dodge anything. Shooting anything can be awkward, you’ll have upgrades like the spreader, laser, shrapnel and homing missiles, the best way of defeating everything if you have trouble finding enemies sometimes, though the machine gun is more beneficial since it auto-aims and for this kind of game with this terrible draw distance, you’re going to need it. The smart bombs are useful, especially at bosses, because if thrown right can take a good chunk of health from bosses, otherwise, the bosses end up being frustrating and long.
The camera is way too close and in the non-2.5D levels, feel a little loose and can end up looking blurry, not giving you a chance to see enemies sometimes. There was one point where I was stuck in a room for a minute until I looked up and there was a switch to open a door to progress. How was anyone supposed to see that and the camera never shows you this.
But there are a couple of segments where you have to do precise platforming and the developers thought that the camera should be placed where you can’t properly judge the perspective of jumps and platforms, and it was at that point where I lost lives as a result. Oh, and you have three continues and if you die, it’s game over. Though the game does have a save/load feature so it at least it has a little bit of mercy.
Oh, by the way, you don’t get another 2.5D side-scroller level until the final level and that level before that is a poor homage to the interior missions in the original Contra game, though it overstays it’s welcome by being way too long for its own good.
The game’s difficulty comes from the issues of the game entirely, because I had a miserable time getting through this game, to the point where I had to use an infinite lives code to see what else this pile of mess had to offer. The answer: THE SAME SHIT up until the final level. And upon playing through the game made me realise that finishing the game would have been a miserable time and all.
The graphics are awful, a little better than Legacy of War but still blocky enough not to give a damn. The level design is poor, this also doesn’t feel like a Contra game if you take away the first and final levels, with brown and blocky levels that will visually bore you. The music…WHAT MUSIC? There’s a few and some that try to emulate a track from Contra III (which suck anyway), but during most levels, there’s none, just a void of gunfire, death and me asking myself, “Why am I playing this?”.
Also, the main character will spout out catchphrases which can either be cringy, dated or flat out make no sense at all, at one point, after shooting an enemy, he says, “Taste like chicken!” Erm, apparently Ray came out of retirement…there must have been a good reason he did retire…NAH! The developers were probably coke-fueled, played Duke Nukem and thought they could emulate his coolness, but no one can emulate Duke’s coolness…as in don’t emulate his coolness and I’m talking about Forever here.
Overall, C: The Contra Adventure is another bad Contra game, but at least it’s better than Legacy of War. But it doesn’t really matter due to the terrible 3D levels are a slap in the face after getting a decent 2D level, clunky controls, poor camera and horrible draw distance. This one is best to avoid. Thankfully though, from what I’ve heard, it gets better from here.
You can get it on the PlayStation.
And that’s it for the Contra games for the time being. Next time I check out Contra in the future, I’ll be taking a look at Contra: Shattered Soldier, Neo Contra, Contra 4, probably not Contra ReBirth due to the Wii Shop being discontinued, and Hard Corps: Uprising.
And yes, I know the month isn’t over yet and I could have reviewed a couple of more Contra games but that’s it for now. But for the next three posts (overlapping to May I might add), I’ll still be reviewing games from Konami, one is a series of games before their most iconic series that isn’t Castlevania or Contra, a series of licensed games on a popular handheld device and a series of licensed games on a popular console in the US.