When Kaiser, the sole playable character of Contra: Rogue Corps’ brief demo, uses one of his ultimate moves, he grunts, “you know I had to do it ‘em” as he proceeds to get a stat buff and mow down enemies. When he uses his other special, a missile appears and launches out of thin air, prompting Kaiser to grab on and ride it straight into the ground – a la Dr. Strangelove.
Contra: Rogue Corps is, by all means, a completely moronic and asinine game that gives no fucks. But it’s precisely because of this that I find myself instantly endeared and compelled by the bizarre, unlikely sequel. The game’s absurd, messy, off-the-wall approach to just about everything is unheard of in 2019, where even comedy-driven games like Borderlands 3 feel decidedly focus-tested and cynical. Rogue Corps, by contrast, feels like the product of another era – a bona fide “b game” that isn’t afraid to throw caution to the wind if it means entertaining the ꦛplayer.
And make no mistake – Rogue Corps is a deeply entertaining game, if the short demo is anything to go off. Developer Toylogic has eschewed the franchise’s 2D roots in favor of a 3D twin-stick shooter, in the vein of unsung series gems like Neo Contra. While there’s absolutely a place for the classic Contra approach, as seen with WayForward’s phenomenal Contra 4, there are indie🦹 developers out there doing that thing better than Konami might have managed in 2019. It’s nice to see them trying something a little different, honestly.
It’s nice, too, that the game plays remarkably well. There’s a weightiness to the movements and a deliberate slowness to the physics that work in tandem to make every step, dodge, and jump feel intentional. When navigating Kaiser, it didn’t feel an🐽ything like the zippy movement of the classic games. While kind of a shock at first, I found myself digging the different direction, and being pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.
That goes ditto for the gunplay, which hews very closely to the sort of bullet hell shenanigans you might see in, say, TouHou or a Cave joint. Players are given a standard weapon that they can fire ad infinitum, some bonus weapons that eat up ammo, and special supercharged items like the Spread Shot. There’s a cooldown for weapons, but it’s very generous, and feels designed to force players to lea🦄rn the mechanics as opposed to firing off shots with wild abandon. I liked how the cooldown forced me to be accurate as I was dodging dozens of projectiles at once – it was a stressful experience that demanded I play better,ಞ and that’s always a good thing.
What’s not necessarily a good thing, however, are the visual and audio components of this game. The art direction in this thing is nice and very Jim Lee/Rob Liefeld-adjacent, but the low-resolution graphics make it all look a tad smudgy and dark. Hopefully, this can be cleared up in a patch. A patch can’t really fix the music, though, which is pretty generic and mostly non-existent, as the predominant audio of the game are gunshots and enemy screaming. Contra is known its excellent soundtr🧸acks, so this is definitely a major letdown.
Still, Contra: Rogue Corps seems promising. It’s a wild thing to see a game so flippant and genuine-feeling in 2019, especially one put by a company notorious for… well, for everything, really. We’ll see if the rest of the game keeps up that energy when i༺t hit𓂃s stores on September 24.