Contra Force Review

What if Contra, but Force?

This is a follow up to Contra, of course, by Konami.But is it a sequel? Kind of? It’s the third Contra game to be released in the US but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the Contra-verse. There are no aliens here, only human terrorists jerks. There were a lot of those in the 80’s and 90’s. Ever notice that?

Contra Force (or C-Force) is a rag tag band of ex military members who are, basically, The A-Team here. They aren’t an official group, but they work for the officials. The officials in this universe are “Intelligence”. I guess. I say that because according to our informant Fox, the Head Of Intelligence is under threat by the enemy. Literally. The bad guys are called D.N.M.E. The enemy. It’s silly. It’s goofy. It’s nearly a Steven Segal movie.

Game play is Contra, but different. The game still has it’s side scrolling bits, but it also introduces some top down segments as well. You’ll see those in Contra III on the SNES. It’s similar to that, but not Mode 7 and all that jazz. More like, Zelda with Contra. It kind of works of.

One thing this game does differently is, much like the first TMNT game, you can swap your characters out at any time by going to the pause screen. Each character has their own flavor of strengths and weaknesses so you need to factor that stuff in. But you can also assign one character to be a computer controlled backup. They’ll pop in for about 5 seconds, be generally not too helpful, and then pop out again. You can call em back anytime you want.

If, however, any characters health bar drops down to zero, that’s it. They’re gone. Kaput. Pushing up daisies. Taking a dirt nap. You know. D-e-d.

It’s a neat new feature I didn’t really find out about till it was too alte.

Graphics are good. A little more on the cartoony side than the first two Contra games but they aren’t bad. Listening to the story you know this game doesn’t take itself too seriously and I think that’s reflected in the graphics. Characters look ok, enemies are good, the portraits are nice. The stages are all pretty good and even the overhead segments don’t look too bad.

The music is, well, generic. That’s about the best I can say for it. It’s not really bad, it’s not really good. The thing with these Konami action games, your Contra, Jackal, TMNT, etc, is that you can almost swap soundtrack between them and the untrained ear wouldn’t even notice. TMNT does have some more funky stuff in it but you get the idea. It’s almost like they had this bin of 50 songs already done and they just pulled em out of that for these games.

So. Is good? Is bad? I say… is good.