Genre : Shooter
Developer: M2
Publisher: Konami
Players: 1 – 2
Retail Price: 1000 Wii Points ($10)
Availability: WiiWare
If you’ve ever played a Contra game, you’ve had your ass handed to you. It’s a fact of life. The series remembered for a handful of reasons but its difficulty is the jewel set atop the crown. Contra Rebirth is the second installment of Konami’s line of WiiWare reimaginings and it certainly looks and feels like a member of the family, but only if you dive right into the highest available difficulty setting. Rebirth is otherwise a cakewalk; a would-be hoping to rub elbows with the elite by simply wearing their clothes… ironic in a game where the main characters are shirtless.
Rebirth’s story continues the saga of series stalwart Bill Rizer, who is awakened from stasis in the year 2633 and given a new mission. Tasked with chasing down and defeating Colonel Salamander, Rizer pursues Earth’s current ruler through time and back to the year 1973 to prevent the destruction of the then-infantile Contra program, thus saving mankind from their current enslavement. All in a day’s work, right?
Expect to see this guy's bullet patterns in your sleep
The mission begins as only Contra can: a hole is blown into the side of an invading starcraft as you leap from your helicopter and into the fray. This tongue-in-cheek silliness pervades the entire title. Enemies explode in a fiery blast when defeated; Bill growls “Let’s Party!” when deployed. It’s 80s action-kitsch applied with a wink and a smile, and it’s done quite well. The attitude is only half the battle, however. Contra is about more than bandannas flapping in the wind and tough-guy catchphrases. It’s about shootin’ some damn aliens.
And shoot some damn aliens you will. You’ll also shoot enemy soldiers, bionic owls, a cybernetic samurai and robotic ostriches. The bad news for you is they won’t go down without a fight. Enemies have apparent access to unlimited amounts of ammunition and aren’t afraid to discharge it in your direction. Also, it’s one hit kills all the way folks. The initial shock of seeing the chaos can be overwhelming — there are bullets everywhere. But this does well to hide the clever, and ultimately manageable level design. Like its old-school brethren, Rebirth is slightly more about pattern memorization and patience than it is about twitch-reflex.
Shirtless travel through the atmosphere? Ahh, the power of testosterone
Enemies are deliberately placed to provide maximum discomfort for you. Success comes at the price of failure, a price paid multiple times over without the presence of absolute luck. There are several set-piece moments where an enemy will unexpectedly leap out and nail you but not enough to degrade the integrity of the level design. Each of the five levels is capped with a boss battle, most of which are challenging but fall short of remarkable by a fair margin. Like the levels, pattern memorization is the key to achieving victory. You can continue after losing all your lives, but expect to replay the entire level, minibosses and all should you meet your demise. As stated before, victory comes at a price to be paid in full, and multiple times.
Completionists and masochists will be glad to know there are two characters and a “Nightmare” level of difficulty to unlock. The game is relatively short — the five levels won’t take more than three hours to play through on normal difficulty, especially if you’re attentive to the patterns — but Rebirth isn’t a game looking to provide an epic, mind-altering journey. Its mission instead is to hearken back to a simpler time, when games were about mowing down unlimited waves of enemies with a constant stream of machine-gun fire, or somersaulting through the vacuum of space and into battle without a second thought to the realism involved.
