My brother only had two of the three Konami ReBirth games, so I never got to play this one until now:

This is a side-scrolling run and gun. Sure, you can jump, and sure, there are platforms and pitfalls, but similar to Midnight Wanderers from Three Wonders, the focus is more on taking out the hordes of enemies that get thrown your way. With that said, there’s more to this game than mindless enemies running at you from both sides of the screen: there’s actual level design here, too. Sure, the arrangement of platforms is simplistic enough, but it’s the addition of the 8-way-shooting enemy right there that gives the game its challenge and fun factor. It may not be the best example of level design, but it helps show how even simple applications of level design can prevent a game from being repetitive without having to introduce entirely new things for the sake of “variety.”

Oh, and let’s not forget that the game has infinite continues, which automatically makes it better than the entire classic Contra trilogy (and Contra: Hard Corps). It doesn’t save your progress though; only unlocks and option settings, so if you need to stop in the middle of the game, you’ll either need to leave it paused for a while or start over.

Unfortunately, this game has some problems. In the very first level, there are bits of metal falling from the ceiling, leaving fire trails and exploding when they hit the ground. These are purely background effects, but they’re so numerous that they make it hard to see the small purple projectiles that will actually hurt you, even though said projectiles are technically on the layer in front of the other effects. Not a very good first impression. The game also very frequently likes to spam cannon fodder (enemies that just walk in a straight line) from the sides of the screen constantly, and they only really serve two purposes: 1) pretend like there’s stuff going on during the empty parts of levels, and 2) come in for a cheap hit when you’re dealing with the actual level design. What’s worse is that each enemy’s death effect is also an explosion, resulting in that much more clutter on screen. In fact, if you combine this with the fact that dying causes you to respawn right where you are in the level with a couple seconds of invincibility, you’ll see that the game has the same problem as Broforce, in that the devs seemed to use the death mechanic as a free pass to scatter cheap hits throughout the game.

Stage 2 is the nostalgia stage: the first half is very similar to the first stage in Contra III, just with the mini-boss from the first stage in Contra 1, and with a new bat enemy that comes at you from behind and blends in with the normal crowd of enemies coming at you from behind. You can technically see those bat enemies in the background before they attack, but only if you know to look for them among the carnage (it’s kinda hard to see the bat stick out its head and take flight when it’s blocked by three cannon fodder soldiers and two explosions, with four more enemies attacking you from the other side of the screen). The second half of stage 2 is reminiscent of the vertical mini-boss from stage 3 in Contra III, just without the whole “position yourself precisely between the boss’s legs” part. To be fair, the mid-boss and main boss of this level are original (I think; I never made it very far in Contra: Hard Corps).

Stage 3 puts you on an in-motion truck (falling onto the road kills you) where you have to defend yourself from waves of enemies. The mid-boss of this stage is also the first part where it became obvious to me that the devs never intended for players to be able to react to anything on their first try. Sure, each wave of projectiles has a way to get past them unscathed, but they come out so fast that you won’t have time to figure out what that way is until after a couple game overs, especially since there’s no way to do short hops: pushing the jump button means you’re committed to doing a full jump. Also, the one attack with slow moving projectiles doesn’t make it clear what the only correct path is and which other paths will trap you between the projectiles and the border of the screen. Oh, and let’s not forget the flurry of missiles that shows up right before the mid-boss does; I’m still not sure how to get past them unscathed. At least the checkpoint is right after those missiles, right before the mid-boss. The main boss follows in the same vein, with one attack shooting a flurry of projectiles at only the bottom part of the truck, followed by a stream of missiles that you need to shoot downward to hit. This is also a good example of my belief that the game wasn’t really designed around these controls: you need to shoot down to hit the missiles, but if you hold down, you duck and aim to the side, so you need to jump and hold down because if you hold down and jump, you drop below the platform you’re on and hit the lasers. You also can’t shoot diagonally without also walking forward, which also means that, if you’re ducking, you can’t turn around without standing back up. Each of those details isn’t really a problem in isolation, but combined, you can start to see how the game is deviously designed to appear solid before stabbing you in the back.

The first part of stage 4 restricts your movement even further by having you cling to a single metal rod that constantly moves down (and sometimes side to side), but if you can keep the homing missile weapon that shows up at the beginning, it’s really easy (especially since, like stage 3, there’s no constant barrage of cannon fodder). The mid-boss decides to break form by having the formerly-background-effect explosions actually hurt you this time. The second part of stage 4 goes back to being more of a platformer with level design, but there’s also no cannon fodder enemies being spawned constantly! It might have been the best part of the game, except now there are foreground objects obscuring your vision, potentially blocking enemies and other hazards from your view. Plus, the main boss goes back to being rather unfair: spiked blocks constantly come from the ceiling, and the only way to avoid damage is to wait for the boss to punch them away (and the boss’s punch also hurts you), but enemies can also spawn from broken blocks, and when you combine having to avoid the boss’s punch and the enemies and the fact that you only have 1/5th of the screen to do this in since the boss decided to punch the right side for the third time in a row, I’m not even sure if this boss can be beaten without getting hit, with the possible exception of being extremely lucky. Even on Normal mode, it took all 7 of my lives just to scrape by this part.

Stage 5 decides to break the game’s streak of not-having-cannon-fodder-enemies by having cannon fodder enemies show up again. It’s not too bad until you get to the heart boss, which is now at the top of a staircase with each step separated by a bottomless pit. The boss also still spams normal enemies at you, so the only surefire way to defeat it without getting hit is to walk back and forth on a single step (since, again, you can’t shoot diagonally without walking, and jumping will just get you hit by the enemies walking on the ceiling) and occasionally aim up if you see an enemy about to slip past your defenses. I won, but my thumb started to hurt. After this, the game decides to introduce the only enemy in the game that you can stand on without getting hurt, but once you make it past them, you get a surprisingly forgiving boss fight that resembles the boss of stage 3 from Contra 1, except a worm comes out of its sides instead of more projectiles, and even though more of those stand-on-able enemies show up as cannon fodder, it seems like players might actually be able to react to the boss’s attacks, with deaths actually being the player’s fault. Either that, or it just has way less health than all the other bosses; all I know is that I beat it on my first try, only dying a couple times.

After that is a checkpoint and the actual final boss. Rather than have any kind of visual indication for which attack is coming, the boss’s pattern is instead conveyed by which angle the camera rotates toward. Its attacks mostly consist of throwing a bunch of junk at you, with one pattern just having the junk orbit around itself, meaning you can’t damage it due to all the junk in the way, before it throws it all out randomly and moves on to its next attack. The upside-down attack is probably the worst one since not only is the boss once again behind unkillable junk, but you also need to watch for which one is about to charge into the ground, and when it collides, more junk ricochets off randomly and can be hard to dodge.

Lastly, I want to point out the game’s hard mode. In theory, it’s everything a hard mode should be: enemy HP and attack strength are unaltered, with the changes instead being with enemy placement and giving bosses an extra attack. In practice, this serves to exacerbate the game’s existing problems of clutter and cheap hits (the stage 2 boss’s punch move suddenly gets much faster, meaning you’ll be hit by it on your way back down from jumping over the last punch). I decided to give up trying hard mode during the latter half of stage three, where dying at the wrong time causes the game to respawn you on a platform that’ll get destroyed in a couple frames, causing you to fall down and die again.

So, do I think this game is worth five U.S. Dollars? Maybe, but just barely. It’s always nice to play a game that has actual level design (especially after playing a long streak of games that, well…don’t), but while old-school design certainly has its merits, nobody is going to be impressed by how many sprites the Wii can display on screen at once. I would say to wait for a sale, but the Wii Shop Channel isn’t known for having sales, and besides, the service was shut down anyway, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend buying an entire Wii just for this game. EDIT: Whoops, apparently the game was ten dollars! Yikes.