This Contra game is a sequel to the SNES Contra game, Alien Wars. As with Konami's Castlevania adaptation for the Genesis, Konami once again shows it knows how to utilize the Sega's strengths to design a fun game around the system that may not of had the power of the SNES, but still had some good qualities. Suffice to say, they took advantage of the fact that Genesis games could move faster thanks to a faster processor. So this Contra is fast! It is also hard and throws in a few new wrinkles to make an interesting and fun game...though not as good as Alien Wars.
The story has a faction trying to recover an alien cell from the last Contra game to do strange experiments on. They use robots to create distractions and use the cell to create monstrosities in their attempt to overthrow the government! So, the Hard Corps are called in! It consists of a guy, a gal, a werewolf and a robot named Brownie! Brownie is easily the best character and a glimpse of what all the characters are in the original Japanese versions of the Contra games as all the heroes are supposed to be robots.
It plays like Contra somewhat, but I also feel this one is more like a Gunstar Heroes than Contra as a lot of your old standby weapons are no longer present. New to this game are a character select and the ability to make decisions at certain points of the game that lead to different endings. There are a couple of driving stages, and other things not usually found in a Contra game so it has some new stuff, but like other Contra games it is still a bit on the short side.
I enjoyed this one, but I still prefer the Contra game for the SNES to this one. This one did some different things that make it a fun and different game from previous entries, but at the same time it did get annoying as some of the bosses take forever to kill. It does have a nice conclusion on a rocket and you finally get to take out this one annoying character really easily, but a few more stages would have been nice too. Though if they did that, they would have to give us unlimited continues as this one is pretty Hard!