Hello, friends and Hive Gamers!
Contra is a beloved franchise known for its high-difficulty run-and-gun gameplay featuring a variety of weapons that drop from the skies. And Konami and Tencent have teamed up to bring the action back in a new mobile game, Contra Returns
My first impressions with the game were its stunning similarities with Mega Man X DiVE. You take control of one of many characters you can obtain and walk, jump, and shoot your way around stages full of baddies, with an auto-aim system to make sure you hit your targets when they're way above your head.
While Contra Returns lacks dashing and wall-jumping like X-Dive, it does have a unique aiming feature where you can slide your finger off the fire button as if it were a joystick to fire in that direction, instead of just tapping it to shoot straight forward. This allows you to manually target enemies you want to hit instead of completely relying on the game's auto-target feature.
Dropping weapons of all kinds, classic Contra style, is back, with all kinds of powerups from laser guns that split beams upon hitting an enemy to high-powered flamethrowers to wipe up hoards of zombies coming at you. In addition to weapon drops, you get to equip two weapons to your character which come in a variety of types like assault and sniper rifles, or even you could equip a permanent flamethrower if you wanted to.
Each character has their own special moves, like the default hero Bill Rizer has explosive missiles that do big damage and a grenade toss that can deal massive damage to enemies on the ground if you can aim it well. But the first character you unlock, Pulse William, has a Tesla Cannon to stun enemies and a charged dash attack that can blast through lines of enemies and change your position. What's great is that leveling up special moves applies to ALL characters, so you don't have to worry about investing too heavily in one character only to replace them with a new one later.
Classic bosses from the series make their return, and it's really cool when you meet a new boss. The original sprite of them from their original game appears and it tells you which game that boss debuted in. The bosses are a highlight of the game, with them not only dropping a nostalgia bomb on you, but having new phases and powers to really spice up the gameplay.
The gameplay remains quite challenging -- I can't even imagine what it must be like to play with the mobile controls. As soon as I saw a screenshot, I tried hooking up my M1 Wireless controller to play the game. I really recommend getting a controller to play this game (and X DiVE, though that one has surprisingly fluid mobile controls) as you're going to be jumping and shooting all over the place, dodging almost bullet-hell levels of projectiles as you try to defeat your enemies.
What's great about the challenge, though, is that the game remains skill-based. What matters at the end of a stage is whether or not you had the ability to dodge your enemies and gun them down properly. And even if you use the lowest-level gear and characters (which I'm doing, to see how far I can get) you can still get through levels if your playing is good enough. At higher levels it will become more and more difficult as you'll have less room for error without upgrading more, but it's still doable.
The game has a wide variety of modes, including PVP and co-op modes. There's also a guild-like system where you can complete challenges with buddies. There's expected modes like story mode and boss challenge mode, too. My favorite of the modes, though, is "One-life Mode" where you play through a stage constantly chased by a wall of fire where everything kills you in one hit. You score based on how far you're able to get. No amount of leveling up is going to save you as it all comes down to how well you can dodge the enemy attacks and obstacles. As far as I've gotten so far (150m!) the enemies have been very easy to kill even with the most basic of weapons, so it comes down to pure platforming skill.
Sadly, you're limited to only 5 tries at One-life mode per day. And a lot of the game modes are limited this way, as well. Boss challenges can only be attempted three times a day. And there's a stamina system in place for playing story stages, so once you've played so much, you're out of luck. Sadly, there's also drops from stages to upgrade your weapons, and you'll spend your energy "raiding" stages (getting drops from them without playing), drastically reducing the amount of time you can spend actually playing new stages.
As far as I've played so far, though, there's plenty of energy early on, as well as refill charges at different times of day, and the ability to restore energy by adding friends in the game and sending each other energy, so you're not terribly limited. I haven't run out of energy yet, but I'm still only in chapter 4 of the story.
Oh, and speaking of story, there's an actual storyline here. I'm actually paying attention to it. It's not the most amazing thing ever written, but did include a plot twist I wasn't expecting already, and is decent enough that I'll keep reading instead of skipping cutscenes (which are also fully voiced, btw!)
Overall, Contra Returns is a great play full of skill-based action and classic nostalgia for those of you who played back in the 80's. I highly recommend giving it a go. Let me know what it's like to play with the touch controls if you're not using a controller!