This game will piss you off, but not before it knocks you over with its amazing action.

User Rating: 8.5 | Contra Spirits SNES
By _Burly_ | Review Date:
Contra III: Alien Wars gets right down to the point, the Aliens attack the city, and now it's your job to save humanity, or what's left of it I guess. This is a side-scrolling shooter (sometimes an overhead shooter too) that lets, you or even a friend play through it together. Contra III just does a grand job of making the action fast and fun, your weapons are extremely devastating, adding to the power you'll feel while taking on hordes of baddies at a time. There are also no puzzles and rarely any spots in the game where you'll not encounter enemies. Konami really works their magic as levels always will seem fresh and different, which is nice since you'll be playing them over and over again if you want to beat the game. For instance, in the first level, you'll be running around the alien infested streets where everything lay in ruins, when you get to a certain part, a bomber jet comes through (not from side to side, but towards the screen) and blows the streets to smithereens, leaving a lake of fire for you to maneuver your way over through a series of grabbing onto bars and shifting your way over, to jumping on pieces of road that are left. That's just a short demonstration of the games ingenuity to not just mimic most other shooters which just place enemies in boring levels most of the time. On the multiplayer side, playing the game with a friend adds much to the excitement and is just plain fun if you know some one that's as good at video games as you are, otherwise some will feel depressed by watching your friend march through the game when you died like a couple levels back.

The boss battles are all completely amazing all in their own ways; each boss has its memorable moments, such as when you fight the huge skeleton machine. You'll be waiting in a small enclosed room, then instantly claws will rip through the background wall, then another set will rip through and they'll both tear a huge hole through the metal background wall, revealing the upper half of the machine's body. The fight will pan out through the skeleton’s various attacks of different kinds of energy beams which some will dart around the room, while he'll also do a 360 degree angle Shinque Hudoken type shot that will allow you to maneuver around and shoot him.

There are a couple features that take away from the experience Contra brings. First off, as you have seen from me so far, is that this game is the hardest game ever made or close to it, I have not beaten it yet, but I plan to some day. You'll be dieing a lot, but as you keep playing through, you'll lose less and less lives on the earlier stages, most of the time. The sounds do get pretty repetitive, since you'll be holding down the fire button almost the entire game, and the enemies don't have very many death sounds at all; either a series of explosions or yelling. It's still nice sound, it's not like you'll ever care about the repetitiveness, because you'll be so busy fighting off all the enemies. The overhead levels are very unimaginative though, other than the fact they add different game-play, but they are just hunts that you'll have to kill all of a certain type of enemy to pass them. The last thing that kind of slows the game is the actual slow down that occurs, only because there's so much action going on though.

A gorgeous game with fresh levels and fast game-play, Other than a few complaints, the game is in tip top shape, and deserves a look from anyone interested in being given a real challenge.

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