When Konami tried to develop Contra into a twin-stick 3D action game almost five years ago, things didn’t go well. Problems with rhythm, visual style, and even organization buried a Contra: Rogue Corps that no one remembers. Now it’s time to try again and leave most of these mistakes behind, but without going back to the pixel style. And to achieve this, the Japanese have relied on the last studio that understood these elite warriors: WayForward (responsible for the great Contra 4 for DS on the twentieth anniversary of the franchise).
Cons: Operation Galuga is intended as a reboot of the series in modern times. It starts from the NES original and introduces all the changes they saw fit, starting with the appearance and weapons, but returns to the side action game Run & Gun in 2.5D and the Me against the world -Confrontation back. Old Bill Rizer and Lance Bean (or Probotectors RD008 and RC011 if you were in old, censorious Europe) must start their fight again against the thousands of Red Falcon terrorists and the aliens behind them. The story begins and ends the same (no, there’s no shame if the script was written 37 years ago) as it paves the way for a future installment retelling the alien wars.
In between, the villains’ motivations have evolved around technology that mixes gravity fields and wormholes. They made it as excessive as possible, in keeping with the theatrical performances of the voice actors (in English but always with lyrics in Spanish) and the characters they portray. The tightening of the script serves to give more weight to Galuga’s natives and, importantly, expand the roster of playable characters. Because honestly, no one comes to a contra to find out what’s happening, just to shoot without knowing who or why.
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This means that Galuga looks the same every now and then. It starts again in the jungle screen, then moves on to the waterfall climb screen and culminates inside the giant alien. Enough of the nostalgia appeals, because the old ones are the most boring screens and the new ones are much better. Unlike Contra Evolve, it is not a remake, but even those that represent past environments are modified. And they got rid of vertical 2D for those inside the base. In return, there are more levels about vehicles, which, however, are the least convincing to me. And although they all have the same base, the placement of elements such as platforms, enemies and real holds creates a feeling of variety. All of them are relatively long screens for this format, and so the eight screens included gave me over an hour and a half of gameplay on normal difficulty. Special mention goes to the new bosses or some reworked versions of the old ones because they are fun to kill.
It’s important to talk about difficulty, and here WayForward has embodied it. At the beginning three levels (I don’t know if there will be more after completing the difficulty as I haven’t completed it yet, we will update the text) and above that two life systems. The classic “One Touch, One Life” and the one inherited from Megadrive that allows you to have multiple touches. Variety for every audience and perfectly integrated. As for the difference between normal and heavy, it lies in the accuracy of the enemy’s shots, namely “But the grenade just went where I jumped.” Blessed love-hate relationship. The balance between enemies, weapons, movement speed, health and demands is very good, creating a cocktail with an ideal rhythm for the demands of a contra.
Contra: Operation Galuga’s gameplay is as it should be, bringing everything you’re used to and adding strategic twists. The downside is that they only went for auto recording and I would have liked to combine it with the option to manually press the button at high speed to improve performance. The weapons are the same as always, so some new ones are missing, but they have added an overload system and another perk system that you have to constantly work with. Overloading the weapon causes a temporary special effect, such as: B. a protective barrier with M or a slowing of time with L. They are of little use until you combine them with the advantage of restoring a fragment of life after burning a weapon, then you will be able to start targeting the To come to taste, to consume them. Since there are lots of them thrown at you and you can even request one from time to time, there is no rush. There are general perks and others that give each character an additional ability, such as Bill being untouchable while sprinting. The other point of this combination is the choice of characters, because although they all behave almost the same, there are some personal abilities that can be a big plus or rather a big disadvantage.
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Be careful when burning coins for random benefits, because the same money is also needed to purchase characters and secret game modes. And you don’t win that much per game, so it will take many hours to get everything. That’s not a problem because you already know that the screens in a Contra repeat themselves a thousand times. That’s what the arcade mode is for and the challenges, which are nothing, nothing easy. These two modes serve to test yourself in the genre and learn how to suffer. By the way, I completed half of the story mode in multiplayer, as the series requires, and the experience was average, as jumping weapons while picking up new ones and putting down old ones is very confusing.
Well, it seems that everything is going quite well with the new Konami and WayForward, right? Well, not everything. Because Cons: Operation Galuga is as ugly as it gets. When the American studio released Contra 4, it was amazed at what it had achieved on the Nintendo DS. But there it was, in its territory, in the pixel. His 3D visual recreations don’t even enter the realm of art and make use of this militaristic exaggeration in the graphics as well; Not even technically, since technically it has become very general and “plastic”, a problem that the Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp also has. Nor does it penetrate the ear, because we have gone from an epic soundtrack of the 80s to another that goes unnoticed if not for the remix of the classic combined with old effects that remain like patches.
Would Contra: Operation Galuga be a better game if it were displayed in 2D pixel style? I don’t think the jump to 3D graphics is the problem, but rather the implementation. But at least Konami and WayForward got into the rhythm of the game well, knew how to integrate the current life and advantage system so as not to be penalized so much by the difficulty, and got some well-designed screens and bosses to lay a good foundation for it that the series can establish itself again and the Alien Wars break out again.
