A Brainless Journey Through the Jungle

Konami really wanted to push their games into the 3D realm. 3D was considered “the future” for gaming, and every franchise has to make its way there eventually. Some, like the Super Mario SeriesHe's the world's most famous plumber and the biggest face in Nintendo's stable, a character so ubiquitous you already knew we were talking about Mario even before we said his name., made the jump with aplomb. Others, though, did not. And it’s not like Konami could continue releasing games in 2D now that the 3D revolution had begun. They tried that with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and that game (at least in the U.S.) ended up being critically and commercially reviled upon its release (although within a couple of years everyone started hailing it as a masterpiece). No, there was no other way to go than 3D. They just needed a team that could pull it off.

For some reason Konami thought Appaloosa Interactive was the team that could pull it off for ContraStarted by Konami in 1988 the run-n-gun platform series Contra was, for a time, one of the flagship franchises for the company.. They thought that despite the fact that Appaloosa’s first attempt at bringing the series into 3D, Contra: Legacy of War, was met with shrugs from both critics and audiences. It wasn’t necessarily bad (although I felt it was terrible), but no one really felt that having the Contra name attached to the game did it any favors. There were expectations about how the game would look, play, and feel, and Contra: Legacy of War had none of that.

So for their next attempt, Appaloosa had to go back to the drawing board and make the game more like classic Contra. More of the look, the feel, the gameplay that would hearken back to the Contra of yore. Some sections of the game were designed to play like the old school titles, including the classic 2D perspective of the original games. Others played more like sections of Contra: Legacy of War, blending the gameplay styles together into something meant to feel more consistent in its perspective. It was ambitious, in a way, but that ambition still felt wasted.

In some ways I feel like the second attempt does work better than the first (if only by degrees). The opening stage of the game does feel pretty solid, a throwback to the stage design of Contra III: The Alien Wars, with the hero, Ray, running and gunning down the street, blasting soldiers, tanks, and turrets as he makes his way through a blasted out city. Playing this first stage I almost felt like I got what Appaloosa was trying to do. It wasn’t as good of a stage as anything in that third, official Contra title, but it did at least show that the classic gameplay could be brought into (faux) 3D realm if the team had the desire. I liked it well enough for what it was.

Sadly things quickly fall apart from here. The next few stages are all behind the back, 3D affairs much more inline with the gameplay of Contra: Legacy of War. With the aliens (that crashed onto Earth via an asteroid) taking over an old temple in the South American jungles, Ray has to blast his way into the temple, and then through it, to clear out the aliens, and this is where the gameplay gets really stale. It doesn’t feel good. Hell, it doesn’t even feel like Contra, and you can see why so many reviewers were so negative towards this title when it was released.

A lot of the issue comes from how the stages are composed. They’re long, tedious, bland mazes of hallways that connect with little in the way of rhyme or reason. Ray goes back and forth through sections, then ends up in large arenas where he has to kill everything as the enemies slowly swarm in from all sides. Then he can progress to do it again, and then again, until everything is killed and the day is saved. It’s very brainless, without much you need to do besides wander around and shoot.

And hey, that’s Contra, in a way. Mindless action as you run and shoot. Except in the good games of the series you had to be ever mindful of everything around you because enemies would come from all sides, running and shooting at you constantly, and any bit of damage would spell a lost life. Not so in C: The Contra Adventure, because none of that applies. Ray has a health meter, so he can take damage and not die. But that’s even if you take damage, which is unlikely, because the enemy AI is even more brainless than the game play. Enemies don’t really seem to know you’re there, so they wander around, randomly shooting, only occasionally getting at all close to you as if by sheer happenstance. Even on the Hardest difficulty the game struggles to make its enemies at all challenging, especially in all of these 3D sections (of which there are many).

I want to say the idiotic AI was programmed this way so that the gameplay could be manageable. For many stages the camera is fixed very close to Ray’s back (as it was in Contra: Legacy of War) making it hard to see dangers in front of you, let alone anything behind you. If the enemies were more aggressive there would likely be no way to get your hero safely through the dangers on all sides (and the couple of stages that actually do zoom out the camera tend to show that, yes, it’s much easier to avoid damage when you can see it coming). That’s a kind reading of it because, perhaps, the game is made the way it is because Appaloosa just couldn’t make the enemies smart. I guess it could go either way.

Compounding on this, the game is just plain ugly. It’s a lot of stages of drab brown and grey textures with little in the way of detail. The whole slog through the jungle temple feels endless, taking up two-thirds of the runtime of the game as you wander through these long sections of game with the same drab colors, the same boring textures, all while the same enemies come at you over and over again. It’s boring to look at, which only makes sense since it’s also boring to play.

The game does finally find some life when Ray ends up launched into space to take on the aliens on their turf. We get a much more interesting zero-G section with Ray riding in an elevator as aliens come at him, forcing him to move around in the full 2D space, floating and shooting. The section goes on a little too long, if I’m being honest, but it was at least something new for this game and I appreciated the team at least taking a swing at new gameplay even if it’s not entirely perfect.

This then leads into a classic-style fortress stage. I appreciated the throwback vibe of the stage, but it didn’t have anywhere near the challenge I expected from something that was so clearly trying to be like a version of Contra we knew from before. This also extends to the final stage, the battle through to the final alien along another 2D classic, platforming stage, and even here it just felt too easy. I was playing on the hardest difficulty and, even crappy as I am at these games, I never felt challenged. This game might have the Contra name, and it might even take passing swings at the Contra gameplay, but it absolutely doesn’t have the style or difficulty of the Contra experience.

Konami gave Appaloosa two attempts to get Contra into 3D and both of those fizzled out, with C: The Contra Adventure, putting the nail in the coffin for this collaboration. After this Konami went internal for development of a follow-up and Contra: Shattered Soldier would come out four years later to try and redeem the series. Credit where it’s due, Appaloosa did try, they just failed to hit the mark hard enough that Konami decided if anyone was gonna fail it would have to be themselves instead.