Contra: Shattered Soldier (PS2) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
556A playthrough of Konami's 2002 run-and-gun shooter for the Sony PlayStation 2, Contra: Shattered Soldier.
Played through on the normal difficulty level. At the end of the credits, I've added the special bonus movie that gets added to the Gallery as a special reward for finishing the game with an S rank.
It's no secret that by the end of the 32-bit generation, thanks to the efforts of developer Appaloosa, the Contra name was in all but tatters. Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure were at best lackluster, mediocre action games that in no way deserved to bear the Contra moniker.
Thankfully, Konami decided to take back hold of the reins and they handled the development in-house, just like had always been done for Contra games *until* the 32-bit titles. Clearly, it was the right decision.
If you've ever played Legacy of War or The Contra Adventure, you probably remember how awkward they felt to play, and how they ignored everything that make the series so famous and well-loved to begin with. Contra: Shattered Soldier does not suffer from that problem.
It looks and plays much more like the 16-bit era titles than anything else. The entire game is played from the traditional 2D-style side-scrolling perspective and it plays like a run-and-gun platformer. Like a Contra game, even. And it is very insistent on reminding you of how much it is like the classic old Contra games that it knows you love - there is more than just a bit of "inspiration" from Contra III: The Alien Wars here - but after the beating that the series' reputation took in the latter-half of the 90s, we needed to be reminded of how good the series was, and we needed assurances that Konami still had the ability to deliver the goods.
If you have played Contra III, Shattered Soldier will immediately feel familiar to you. The graphics look good in their understated, very brown sort-of-way (and the animation looks great!) - remember it is a fairly early PS2 release - but it doesn't hold back when it comes to the explosions, nor does it shy away from some displays of fairly graphic violence. Granted, it is part of a series that is based entirely on gunplay, but this is the first game where you can watch your enemies flail as they burn to death or get sucked through a meat grinder. There are a lot of impressive special effects that the game pulls off, and many of the (several) set pieces are exciting thanks to how well put together they are, both in concept and in presentation. The sound is right on par with the visuals, too, with a soundtrack that mixes heavy rock with techno - it sounds a lot like how I imagined Contra: Hard Corps should have sounded.
The gameplay is tight, and it's also quite difficult. The Contra gold-star standard of one-hit deaths is in full effect here, and to get the best ending, you can't die a single time during the game. But, just like the NES and SNES games, it's never impossibly hard. There is a sense of order to be found in the chaos, and the patterns can be learned with some careful observation. The aim-lock buttons mapped to the shoulder buttons are a God send, though, and the alternate firing modes give you a lot more versatility in how you want to handle any situation - especially since you now have access to any of the three guns at any time, no power-ups needed.
I really loved Contra: Shattered Soldier. I bought it at full-price not long after it came out and I played it to death. I will admit that I still prefer Contra III over Shattered Soldier - I found the dirtier, bloodier, "grittier" tone of Shattered Soldier to be a bit off-putting - but there's no denying that it succeeds brilliantly at reclaiming some measure of the series' squandered credibility.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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