Contra: Operation Galuga

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Contra Run & Gun Bundle, along with Contra Anniversary Collection. It is also included in Contra x Castlevania Bundle, along with Castlevania Dominus Collection.)

The Contra series of Action-Platformers has generally not been well-regarded past the 16-bit era. While the first few games in the franchise are notorious for being punishingly hard, they are at least respected for featuring quality action-packed gameplay with some incredibly creative design choices. In the time since, seemingly everyone agrees that things have only gone downhill.

I don’t entirely agree with this narrative – I enjoyed Contra: Shattered Soldier on the PlayStation 2, and Contra 4 on the Nintendo DS was genuinely great. However 2019’s disastrous Contra: Rogue Corps had people seriously wondering if Konami had even the slightest grasp on what made Contra great in the first place. Or to be more accurate, the developers Konami hands the license to, as Konami themselves hasn’t developed a new Contra game since 2004’s Neo Contra.

Contra: Operation Galuga is no different in this regard, with development being handled by Contra 4’s developer, WayForward. And while this game is billed as a re-imagining of the first Contra game, it is in virtually every way an entirely new thing – although some levels and bosses are loosely based on content from the original Contra, this game otherwise features new gameplay, new graphics and sound, and a new story.

Ugh, yeah, this game does have a story, and players who opt to play the game’s story mode will be treated to the worst sort of schlock imaginable, and it doesn’t even have the decency to be self-aware about just how awful it all is. One-dimensional characters and an uninteresting plot will make you wish you could just skip past all of it, and thankfully you can – selecting arcade mode does little to alter the gameplay, and basically just acts as an easy way to skip the terrible cutscenes and terrible conversations. Sadly, you’ll still be stuck with horrendously long loading times for each of the game’s levels.

While Contra: Operation Galuga does feature slightly-cartoony modern 3D visuals, there’s very little about them that are particularly impressive or even all that interesting until you get to the game’s later levels, and even then the visual style of this game has nothing on the H.R. Giger-inspired horrors we saw in the earliest games in the Contra series. It’s certainly not bad, but it’s nothing you’re likely to remember a few years from now.

The visuals and story are backed by a decent but not especially memorable cinematic soundtrack, and absolutely terrible voice acting that I might almost think is deliberately so if not for the fact that it’s not quite over-the-top enough to be a deliberate self-parody.

When it comes to the gameplay, Contra: Operation Galuga does a few interesting things that separate it from the rest of the series. First is a powerful special move that has players sacrifice one of their weapon upgrades for a weapon-specific one-time attack, something that doesn’t really seem like the best trade-off but since you do get weapon upgrades frequently and can only carry two at once, it seems like something that could have its uses at times.

Second is a new perk system, where players can spend points earned through gameplay to buy passive upgrades that can be equipped up to two at a time. This is a great idea in theory, but it practice the points you earn for this are slow enough to accrue that you won’t be unlocking many of these (even if you took advantage of the launch bonus to start with extra points), and the game is short (2-3 hours) and not especially difficult even without these perks thanks to multiple tweaks made to the gameplay, so by the time you actually start racking up these perks you likely won’t really need them any more.

While much of the new content here seems pointless or misguided, the core gameplay is still fairly decent, and the two-tier weapon upgrades actually provide some great firepower options without ever being so overpowering that you’ll feel invincible… at least not for very long before you get knocked down a peg. The challenge level here is much more reasonable than the original games, but it’s not a cakewalk.

In the end, I think Contra: Operation Galuga tries a lot of different things to reinvent and modernize the classic that started a series that has since kinda’ lost its way, and many of these new elements either don’t work as intended or are outright bad. And yet, for all its faults, this game still manages to nail the core Action-Platformer gameplay pretty well. The result is a game that probably won’t be remembered among the best games in the Contra franchise, but it’s far from the worst of the lot.

tl;dr – Contra: Operation Galuga is a re-imagining of the first game in the Action-Platformer series, and while it stumbles in many areas (nasty load times, terrible story, disposable new gameplay elements), the core gameplay is still solid. Fans of the genre and the Contra series specifically will want to play this game, though I doubt they’ll find it to be among their favorites in the genre.

Grade: B-

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