REVIEW: Contra III - The Alien Wars (Super Probotector) 1992 SNES
	By: Konami Type: Action Players: 1 - 2 Difficulty: Hard

Are you just sick and tired of all those cute Mario games? Then get to grips with Contra 3 and slaughter big scary aliens in a style that would make even Arnold Schwarzenegger jealous! When Contra 3 came to Europe they thought that it was to violent so they replaced the two heroes with two robots (This have been done with all the other Contra games to.)! The aliens has invaded earth (original story or what!!) and the only ones that can save us are two brute men (or robots in Super Probotector ) armed to their teeth with high tech weapons like lasers, machine guns and flame throwers! Contra 3 is if you ask me the coolest game ever created. No game that I know has this many cool bosses. There are 17 of them!!! All of them are a masterpiece on it´s own, ranging from gigantic mutated turtle that fills up the whole screen and tanks to small agile ninja-robots with jetpacks.

Contra 3 is so incredible well designed and action packed that you almost think that you are in a real action movie! Okay Contra only has 6 courses but that´s enough, because they are bigger and more varied than in any other action game! The main part of the courses are just about jumping and climbing in an ordinary platform-manner but on course number 3 you get the chance of riding a futuristic motorcycle down the highway as the enemies attacks from above and later on travel with a helicopter, and don´t think that you´re just going to sit safe inside it, in the cockpit. No this is Contra, of course you hang in the helicopters missiles with one hand, shooting with the other! Later on, the helicopter fires the missile that you´re hanging from and you must defeat a huge airship boss by jumping from missile to missile. Action-packet or what? On courses 2 and 5 you instead view the action from above. Here Contra 3 uses the SNES´s rotation and scaling capabilities to create a fairly complex world. Although that these courses aren´t exactly the highlight of the game it does provide some variation from the normal platform courses.

An illustration

Just to describe how utterly cool and complex the game is I´m going to illustrate a sequence/course from the game:
You start out on the roof of a building and below you see a polluted industrial area while you battle out with some gun turrets. Next you travels along a horizontal iron-pipe while you becomes attacked by a swarm of flying creatures that tries to drag you down from the pipe to a free fall over 1000 feet to the ground and a certain doom! Survive that and you´ll face a windmill like hoovering boss that after defeat falls to the ground while exploding. You continues up and begins to climb up the side of a high building. You hear a loud "swoshing" sound, and you turn around, just to see that the windmill boss has returned. He shoot out two big legs and tries to crush you, while frequently shooting missiles after you. After a while the boss unfolds two sharp drills and tries to make nice holes in your chest. Once defeated you reach the top of the building and directly becomes attacked by a UFO-like ship that drops bombs after you. Next you break into a big tower, and begins to slowly traverse to the top while attacked by Eaglemens and gun turrets. At the top awaits a long tunnel and at the end of that a big room. When you enter the room the door behind you closes and you´re trapped together with two big boss robots, one blue and one red. You flee up the wall and hang from the ceiling. When the robots have taken a certain amount of damage the lower part of their body blows away leaving only the chest over arms and head operational, but a Contra 3 boss doesn`t give up that easy. No, instead they start jumping around by using their over arms like legs with incredible speed, just like in the Terminator movie! Don´t think that the action is over when they have been blown to pieces... As you stand there, hearing your heart beating going 100 mph, you see two huge hands appearing in the wall behind you. Two hand cuts through the solid steel like it was hot butter and begins to split the wall in two pieces. When the wall has been opened you see a 100 feet high skeleton robot looking right down at you! First it shooting out two heat seeking plasma bolts and the begins spiting huge fireballs after you. After that he closes the wall again and quickly adapts a number of timed mines on the walls! Avoid them and he´ll appear again and when defeated he starts to explodes and accidentally shuts the wall when he´s got his head inside the room and the head are being cut of. He is defeated! Was that action packed enough for ya and was only one of the total of 6 courses!

The game is also nearly ridiculously hard and if you play on the hard skillsetting it´s almost impossible to finish even after weeks of intensive play. Personally I think that  it´s great and if you can´t complete the hard skillsetting there is always the easy and normal left. I can´t understand why all games doesn´t have a rockhard hard-skillsetting it would make them last so much longer! Contra 3 certainly pressures the SNES to the max with it´s huge bosses and big explosions. Konami really how to make their Action games (Interested in more platform action go see our reviews of Konami´s two other brilliant action games: Super Castlevania and Cybernator).

The hard skillsetting will give stubborn players something to do the nearest month or so! I can´t praise this game enough so that this review doesn´t end up in a mess of different superlatives like superb, great and brilliant I will just end the review by saying that if you don´t have anything against brilliant platform/action games then go get this game!! - Mattias Liedholm 90%

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