A bit of a random pick-up from me, as I wasn’t super sure I wanted to pick it up… but I did. The trailers looked kinda fun. It’s obviously a take on Contra. It’s been said that it’s by the devs of Contra 4, though I’m not sure if people say that just because it’s a WayForward game, or if it’s the same actual people working on it, but either way, there’s some good possibility of them making a good game in this style since WayForward did some amazing work on Contra 4.

So let’s go and check it out!

Developer: WayForward
Publisher: Wayforward
Release date: July 14, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (Switch version played)
Genre: Run n’ Gun

Review

There’s not “really” a story here. There’s a setting, which is basically just an excuse for you to shoot the shit out of spider/dinosaur hybrids. This is a world that had some issues with food production, so a hot scientist woman manages to create Spidersaurs, because… I guess the in-game explanation is “more legs=more meat”… though there’s a bit more to it later in the game. However, as most fictional labs featuring the cloning of dinosaurs, there’s an outbreak and the spidersaurs are causing damage in the lab. The lab is pretty large though so you (either as the cool hot punk rocker girl or the boring guy) are hired to go in and shoot the Spidersaurs to stop the outbreak. You happen to be a person that has special genetics that, when you eat spidersaur meat, you power up. There’s some spoiler-related reasons why those 2 characters are chosen to go in, of course. So yeah… there’s spidersaurs, kill them. Simple enough. The rest of the presentation is pretty nice, with a bit of a 90s vibe to it, but with very smooth 2D graphics with an ounce of cartoony and cool monster designs. All good stuff.

This is a run n’ gun shooter. If you’ve played Contra, you know exactly what you’re in for here. You move and shoot and jump. The jump is a set height, much like Contra. Shots have a certain rhythm, but you can just hold the button, no mashing required (and mashing does nothing). You can shoot in 8 directions, and if you hold ZR you can stand in place and aim, which is useful in some situations. That’s pretty much all there is to the basic controls, though you get a bit more as you progress.

As you go through a level, there’s occasional flying things that drop weapons. You have 2 weapon slots, so you can switch around based on the situation. Each weapon can be upgraded once by grabbing a second copy of the weapon, which does legitimately make them much better… but also if you get hit you lose the upgrade which is pretty hard to deal with because man this game is pretty relentless. And, if you die, you lose the weapon in your current slot entirely (it gets replaced with the regular peashooter). The thing with the weapons is that each character has their own set of weapons. Punk-rock girl’s explosion weapon is an electric ball that does good damage and chain lightning, while the dude’s explosion weapon is just a shitty short-range rocket. The girl’s spread weapon is a proper spread (3 shots at level one, 5 at level two), while the guy gets this billiard ball that does some spread on contact (kinda some ricochet shit). I feel like the guy definitely gets the short end of the stick as far as weapons, they’re basically all good (even her shield “weapon” is better).

When you finish most levels (though no all) you get to eat the meat of the boss you defeated. This gives you a new power to use in the next levels. The first meat gives you climbing, the second gives you double jump, and there’s a few others. Mostly I find that only the double jump and the dash are particularly useful. There’s a vertical web grapple that has some pretty good usage in, like, a few areas, but it’s mostly bleh. The ground pound has no good usages (except maybe a few spots where you HAVE to use it). I don’t mind the system, but I feel like having some of the powers from the start would be nice… Like the dash. I like air dashing.

The difficulty, I’d say, it pretty high. Not CRAZY, but this game will kill you, and it has some elements that are tough to deal with. The game likes to just throw a lot of enemies on screen, some that shoot shit, some that have pretty random projectile patterns. Even though you can take 3 hits, getting hits does downgrade your weapon which is pretty rough. But enemies can randomly drop healing items, so it’s not entirely hopeless either. I will say though that some bullets/enemies can be a bit hard to see since there’s so much going on in the graphics, making it easy to miss some things. I will say the boss battles are mostly well done, though I find a few attacks are a bit poorly telegraphed in some cases (the jungle level boss hits me a lot, but I might just be stupid). Also there’s limited lives, but every 20000 points (from killing enemies) gives you an extra life. One thing that does actually kinda bother me is based on the set-height jumps. There’s a few platforming segments that are a bit awful because of the climbing power-up, because you hang on ceilings, and some of them are just placed in a way that, no matter what, you will end up grabbing on to, say, a conveyor belt. But, moreso than the fairly minor problem with ceilings, is vertical segments. Because of the set height, it’s hard to sometimes, say, go back down to grab a health item or something, in some areas you just straight up can’t. But this also does the Contra thing, where, in vertical segments, the screen only scrolls up, and the bottom of the screen kills you. So some parts are just really awkward to go through. And, much like Contra, I’m sure 2-player is absolutely annoying in vertical segments unless you’re both playing perfectly. Overall though, I will say the game is certainly easier than Contra 4. While that game was good, it was also pretty rough difficulty-wise. This holds back a bit more, even though it’s still out to destroy you.

There’s not too much else to mention. There’s one thing I actually don’t understand because the game doesn’t tell you certain things. Namely, the Pod system. Before you select a level in mission select, or start an Arcade run, you choose a pod. Pods appear during levels, and breaking the pod does some mass attack in the area. It might be score-related (like lives are), but even if you end up finding a good way to control when it pops up to be in a beneficial section of a level… it’s pretty useless to do overall anyways. Otherwise… I mean, that’s it as far as gameplay, I went through everything. You run, you shoot spidersaurs, you get upgrades between levels, and when you finish the game you unlock an Arcade Mode which doesn’t have a mission select (and the game is actually a perfect length to have an arcade mode) and a speedrun mode (which actually gives you all the upgrades at the start).

One thing I hate about modern gaming is how little of a shit devs give as far as testing their games. In my mind, a game that launches glitchy and broken shouldn’t be supported, even if the problems end up being fixed at a later point. I think there’s some cases I can loosen my stance, such as digital-only games when the patch is released fast enough… Like with this game. This game did have a really bad game-breaking glitch, that I almost decided to post a negative review of the game because of. Essentially, if you got to the final level, all was fine. If the final boss killed you, however, you were fucked. Because what happened is that the level would not load any of the graphics (except some HUD elements) if you reset. Gameplay still happened, but you wouldn’t see the level, enemies, shots or your even character. Just a black screen and gameplay sounds. So when that happened to me, I re-launched the game thinking I caused this somehow, but reloading the last level from the mission select screen did the same thing. The only way to actually get to a functional version of the last level is to also play through the second-to-last level again, but then if you’re bad like me and die against the final boss again… well, do the second-to-last level, AGAIN… Yeah no… How the shit does this slip past QA? How do you release a game with a level that doesn’t fucking load? Thankfully, version 1.0.1 fixed this, now the final level properly loads. But really, the game should not have released with a bug this bad, and I was heavily considering naming this worst game of the year because of it… but I’ll be nice.

Overall

I think this game is pretty fun. Ignoring the game-breaking bug issue (which at least is fixed now), I think it has pretty solid gameplay, it mimics the classic Contra style quite well, in addition to having a few fun weapons, fun boss battles and actually cool enemy designs. I have minor issues, but they might stem from me being absolutely fucking awful at Contra.

With similar retro-style games recently, TMNT was one that I found was too long (though a great game anyways) and Pocky & Rocky Reshrined was one I thought had a perfect length. I’d put Spidersaurs around the same place as Pocky & Rocky. It has only a few levels, but that means it’s actually easily completed in a single, short sitting once you get good enough. I’d say it has pretty okay replayability because of that.

I give this one a mild recommendation. It’s pretty decently designed and it’s pretty tough. It probably won’t amaze you, but it’s fun. Get it on sale probably.