Neo Contra

Neo Contra from 2004 brought the series back to the top-down view that Konami had briefly revived shortly before in Contra: Shattered Soldier, and released it exclusively for the PlayStation 2. The story takes place decades after the original games and puts a new hero named Jaguar at the center of events, though familiar faces from the series also appear and tie into the earlier storyline. Visually, the game leans on a more pronounced anime stylization of characters and enemies, and the battles are dominated by grandiose, exaggeratedly stylized mechanical constructs and mutated monsters, a shift from the rawer, more military look of the series' earlier entries.

Compared to previous entries, Neo Contra simplifies the controls closer to a modern action style with free aiming in all directions and adds a weapon-upgrade system by collecting points for defeated enemies, letting the player gradually assemble their own preferred loadout build between levels. Bosses are larger in scale, have more elaborate attack sequences, and the faster pace of the game along with a greater emphasis on flashy weapon combinations push the series closer to an action spectacle than to the hard arithmetic of limited lives and one-hit deaths typical of the series' entries from the 1990s. Two-player co-op remains intact and, together with the weapon-upgrade system, lets each of the two players build a differently specialized loadout according to their own playstyle.

Why play it: For players who want a fast, flashy, and somewhat more accessible Contra on the PlayStation 2, with its own weapon-upgrade system and more pronounced boss battles, without having to reach for the toughest and least forgiving old entries in the series.