Contra: Shattered Soldier

After years of dormancy for the legendary Contra series, Konami brought it back in the form of Contra: Shattered Soldier, which preserved the brutal difficulty and run-and-gun action of the classic entries, but set it in a darker, more mature sci-fi story with more pronounced violence and gore, earning the game a stricter age rating. Players once again control mercenaries Bill and Lance, who after years in prison get a chance at pardon in exchange for eliminating an alien threat, and progress through classic scrolling stages full of giant bosses, mechanical enemies, and extremely dense waves of gunfire.

A major change from the older entries was limiting the arsenal to a fixed set of weapons, between which the player switches depending on the situation, and which can be charged for a stronger attack by holding the trigger, turning the choice of the right type of fire against a specific boss into a puzzle of its own. The game introduced a performance rating system based on accuracy and speed of kills, motivating players to replay and memorize stages in order to achieve the highest possible score, in the spirit of the arcade tradition; only a sufficiently high rating unlocked the game's true ending. Two-player co-op on a single console was retained, and in practice it was among the most enjoyable ways to actually finish the game.

The visual side combined pre-rendered backgrounds with detailed 3D models of characters and bosses, giving the game a visually striking, cinematic feel while retaining two-dimensional gameplay. The soundtrack relied on brisk, electronically tinged themes, including variations on the series' classic melodies. The difficulty was deliberately extreme and uncompromising, in keeping with the series' tradition, but at the same time limited its accessibility to new players. Shattered Soldier is still valued today as one of the best returns of a classic arcade series to modern hardware, and proof that the run-and-gun shooter genre still has its firm place even in the era of 3D action. The entry also brought the series back into the awareness of a new generation of players and paved the way for the following title, Neo Contra, released two years later.