Contra Rebirth Review

Difficulty – Including a Minor Gripe & Replay Value

To help bridge gaps in skill between generations, Rebirth gives you 4 difficulty levels to choose from. Even someone completely new to this genre of gaming will probably not have much trouble on Easy or Normal modes. If you’ve played any Contra games before then Hard or Insane (unlockable) is where you will want to be at.

Even hardened veterans of the series might find themselves dying an obscene number of times. Everything in the world wants you dead and the skies are abound with bullets and projectiles. The bosses in particular have some crazy attacks that at first seem to be near unavoidable. Though, with a bit of patience, once you find your way through their patterns you will be left wondering what the problem was earlier.

But wait? Doesn’t the “obscene number of deaths” contradict with the aforementioned “not much trouble”? No, and here’s why:

Although you may die often there is little consequence as you have unlimited continues. That might have you believe you can restart a stage indefinitely, but in reality you have it even easier than that! There are multiple checkpoints throughout each level and if you need to use a continue that is where you pick up from. These are usually right before boss fights or places where you are most likely to die. It’s often the case that, if you should fall to a boss, you just go at him again with a new batch of lives without needing to work up to him at all, and can repeat as much as required. Even without any skill at all you can get lucky and pass a tough section just through determination.

The unlimited continue feature completely obliterates the replay value of the game. It makes having the “limited” lives system nearly pointless. How things used to work is that when you get a game over at a certain part in the game, you are sent back to the beginning. You’d have to go through earlier parts of the game before having another go at the part that offed you. Over multiple runs you would begin to master those earlier segments, arriving at the later stages with more resources (lives, powerups) than you did before, making them easier. This simple law added a ton of replay to games as you played them over and over from the beginning, trying to get as far as possible. In Rebirth, there is no reason to go back to earlier stages, ever. The only reason you might want to is for the enjoyment of it, in which case a much better design would have had a stage select option so you wouldn’t need to go from the beginning each time you want to replay a certain stage.

Robotic llama – friend or foe?

Red Falcon has a new trick or two.

Awesome game, but you get what you pay for

Contra Rebirth is an adrenaline rush from start to end. For the low price I definitely recommend checking it out. You may yet come back to play it through from time to time with friends, adding value. The game loses value in being so short and not having much in terms of replayability but it’s a great experience from start to end and a solid investment for your Wii points.

• Classic Contra adrenaline rush awesomeness
• Low price, 1,000 Wii points
• Too short, sub 1 hour
• Limited replay value