Blazing Chrome

Contra meets Metal Slug and this awesome game comes up!!! I love how it preserves the spirit of the 90s games of its type, how you MUST play over and over again to memorize the enemies attack and or movement pratrons. This kind of difficulty and play-and-memorize setting is the spirit of the 90s!!! I enjoy the game a lot and I am very happy on how it is.... However there are some..... movements that are odd to the style, i.e. if you want to go to a lower platform the character will roll(sometimes to an enemy) instead of going down as spected... I also miss the super bomb that erase all the enemies from the screen.... it could be very useful sometimes anywhere... Super awesome game and a must-have if you played Contra 3 or any MetalSlug!!

It'd take more time to point out everything great about this game, rather than pinpoint the few, but noticeable flaws, so I guess I'll stick with the latter. Sometimes, the controls can be very stiff. This is especially noticeable with the melee characters. You will probably find yourself dying because your slash can't keep up with the amount of enemies. Since this mechanic was possibly a nod to Sayuri's in Hard Corps: Uprising, it was a bummer that it wasn't as fluid (which let you attack as fast as you could press the button. It unfortunately allowed you to cheese bosses, but also didn't affect the majority of the game). The midair dashes don't seem to consistently work, either. It's almost like you have to be at a specific height before the dash can happen. The roll doesn't feel as useful as it could be. With the Contra predecessors, you would get invincibility frames during these 'dodges,' but not here. It kills the potential of being able to reposition your character in crucial moments. After having beat the game a few times, an option to skip the credits would be nice. I'm at the point where I just say, "Screw the leaderboards, time to alt+F4." This is nitpicking, but two of the coolest video filters also happen to have large, distracting TV borders. It'd be cool to have the option to turn the borders on/off.

This is one of those games that makes you believe that an executive over at Neo Geo suddenly realized that they made an epic game 20 years ago and forgot to release it. This game pays tribute to arcade games from the past, and it improves on these titles in every possible way. If you like games like Metal Slug, Contra, Battle Toads, Space Harrier, and Shock Troopers, you are going to love this game. It offers quite a challenge, even on normal mode, but the fact that you get endless continues makes it extremely easy to restart, which really helps you progress. Keep in mind that this is one of those games where you die ... a lot ... but it offers just enough challenge to keep you motivated to play just one more level. I guarantee you that if I ever found this game in an arcade, I would spend every penny I had on it.

I'm a lifelong Contra fan, having beaten many of the games in the series, so I know my stuff on this genre. Blazing Chrome is a valiant effort in recapturing the feel of a largely lost genre though it's not without its faults. Graphically it's perfect for what it wants to be. Not like those indie titles that do the 'retro' thing but then spoil the effect with the kind of impossibly smooth animation that could only exist today, BC feels authentic to the age they're going for. No complaints here. This also includes the sound effects, intentionally designed to sound like simplistic speech patterns on a primitive sound chip. The gameplay is fast, fluid, and very challenging, as one would expect, tasking the player with memorizing enemy patterns to ever have a shot at success. A Run n' Gun veteran can tell you that Contra and Metal Slug each had their own feel and this one is solidly into Contra territory, and seems to be based heavily on Contra: Hard Corps. The game's main weakness is in the reliance on dodging, a function requiring you to press Down+Jump to perform a roll that makes you momentarily invulnerable. Down+Jump is consistently a terrible control for any function, especially in a fast paced game where you frequently want to jump immediately out of a duck. The result is often an unwanted dodge that will often cost you a life. This could have easily been assigned its own specific button which would greatly improve the quality of life in playing. Eliminating one of the weapon swap buttons, for example, in favor of this would have been ideal since a 'next' and 'previous' swap feature is too awkward for a game this twitch, anyway. Gameplay at times also seems poorly balanced, the devs not seeming to understand that cannon fodder enemies shouldn't take so many shots to bring down in those kinds of numbers. It's not insurmountable but it's more frustrating than fun. Overall this game is a decent homage to Contra but still has a bit to learn about the genre.

Pretty fun game, looks and sounds good considering that the retro pixelated look is actually quite chunky, in moments I wasn't beeing able to easily distinguish between what's what (especially the fly-through-tunnel levels). I was not impressed with the controls, felt quite awkward playing on the controller having to do a 2 button forward roll instead of just a single button roll etc. The game apparently has 4 characters which are really only 2 characters with different make-up on. The boss rush mode I didn't really care about & the 'mirror mode' can't really be clasified as replay value - it's the same thing but from right to left. So, 5 missions and a little boss finale + boss rush mode is all that you get. If, like me, you are a fan of these Contra like run'n'gun games definitely get it - but on a sale.