Back in the day, when I was young, and the Nintendo Entertainment System was the only console you needed; Contra was the must-have action title that was every bit as compelling as Gears of War is today.  Contra was challenging, had two player co-op, tight controls, and great visuals relative to the competition.  Well, it seems that Konami still cherishes those glorious days, because Contra 4 is virtually identical to the original games in the series in practically every respect.  Your ability to enjoy Contra 4 will therefore be dependent on your reverence for exceedingly difficult two dimensional shooter action that feels so much like one of the classic Contra games; it could have been developed 20 years ago.

Contra 4’s graphics are vibrant and attractive despite resembling the arcade titles of yesteryear.

That’s not saying that newcomers won’t find anything to enjoy with Contra 4, and it’s surprising how good the game looks and plays after all these years.  In addition to the standard jump and shoot mechanics, players are given a grappling hook that allows the levels to take advantage of the dual-screen setup by latching on to designated areas of the map, allowing the player to instantly carry themselves up to the other screen.  Players collect weapon power ups, and can alternate between any two modes of fire at a time with the X button.  On Easy mode, you only get to experience 7 of the 9 levels, and will get the most powerful version of every weapon every time with a single pickup.  Medium and Hard difficulties, however, use an upgrade system that allows players to improve upon each of the game’s weapons by finding two of the same item.  It’s a good system that adds a bit of depth to an otherwise straightforward experience.  Another helpful game play mechanic is the ability to hold down the Right shoulder button to lock your character in place while shooting in any direction, which is vastly superior to the old method of shooting downwards, which required the player to jump. 

The levels are attractive and frenetic, despite being strictly two dimensional.  In particular, boss battles are impressive in scale and take advantage of the dual screen capability of the system.  Contra 4 has players revisiting familiar locations, which have appeared in other iterations of the series, but while the locations are familiar, it feels incredibly nostalgic rather than copied or ripped-off.  The sound is highly reminiscent of classic Nintendo games, featuring enhanced remixes of Contra’s standards with some limited speech clips thrown into the mix (which purists can turn off.)  All and all,  Contra 4 presents an audio/visual package that is familiar enough to appeal to fans of the classic Contra games, while capitalizing on the modern hardware enough to let it stand alongside other modern 2D games as an equal.        

One of the things that you can’t help but notice when playing Contra 4 is that old school 2D action games are really, really hard by modern standards.  In fact, most games used to be a whole hell of a lot more challenging than recent 3D action titles, and this trend is something Contra 4 unabashedly revisits.  Not all of this difficulty is intentional, though.  There are some problems that arise from bullets seemingly changing their trajectory as they pass from one screen to the next, but it doesn’t really happen enough to diminish the ultimately positive experience of having two screens.