Hard Mode - Contra: Shatterted Soldier

Are you a glutton for punishment?  Is throwing a controller through your television cathartic? NRDLNGR understands the need for a good challenge every now and then, so we've dedicated Wednesdays to the masochist in all of us. So find a comfy chair, take a deep breath, and get ready to hurl obscenities at loved ones...


When discussing difficult game franchises, it's hard to avoid bringing up Contra. Konami's bullet-riddled side-scroller is what many gamers my age cut our teeth on. The game was difficult, but rarely felt frustrating. There were a few cheap deaths to be had, I admit, but it was still fun. All it took was a friend and a Konami Code to turn an exercise in pain into an afternoon of joyful fighting over who got the spreader.

That's the thing about nostalgia.  It lies.

Contra: Shattered Soldier is an unapologetic reality check. You will not see the end of this game. There will be no credit roll. You will not unlock any extras. You will not pass go, and all you will collect are an unrelenting feeling of inadequacy and your face off the pavement. Think I'm overstating it? Go hunt down a copy and see for yourself.

There are a few things right at the start of Shattered Soldier that hint you may want to rethink your decision to play it. There are two modes, normal and easy. Don't let this fool you; these options have no true bearing on difficulty. Easy mode gives you more lives and 99 continues, but will not let you progress beyond a certain stage. Normal mode is the classic three lives, three continues we all grew up with. There is no hard mode, but to be frank, I cannot imagine what they could do to make it any worse. In the style of its predecessors, one hit from anything will kill you (although what constitutes as 'anything' gets tricky, which I'll get to in a bit), and reducing the number of lives or continues quickly becomes moot.

Don't know what happens next?  Then you're gonna die...

Shattered Soldier is, at its core, a test of memory. Pattern recognition has always been the hallmark of difficult games, and this is no exception. If you do not know where to stand or what to shoot, you will die. There is rarely any warning, and many sections are built to punish twitch reactions. You can only make it so far on instinct before the game checks in to make sure you've died at least once on a given area. By the end of it all (and by end, I mostly refer to when you've decided to give up), you will know the location of every enemy, where they shoot, how they move, and where you need to be when it all comes to a head.

Pavlovian response is only one component of this hellish nightmarescape. The second is pixel-perfect execution. This is where the game can sometimes feel cheap. As with many 3d-rendered 2d side-scrollers, making positioning calls based on game environments can be deceptive. When it comes to Shattered Soldier, any misjudgment will result in death. The game will require you to make some unforgiving jumps at times, which are only made more difficult when you can't tell exactly where you stand relative to the hazard you need to avoid. The same goes the hazards themselves. Some objects are non-lethal, but there is no way to tell but trial and error. Explosions may have sections you can come in contact with, while others must be avoided completely. This may fall into the realm of memorization, but being deceived on what can and cannot kill you always feels cheap.

So, what's the payoff to all this punishment? As with most soul-crushingly difficult games, succeeding in Shattered Soldier makes you feel like a badass. Completing whole stages without dying, while a natural product of the nature of the game, creates a feeling of invincibility. You feel unstoppable as waves of transformer-esque robots and wacky baby-mutants fall to a hail of machine gun fire and smart bombs.

It's like sweet music, barely heard over the sound of you own screaming...