It’s safe to say Contra passed on its crown as run-and-gun royalty a long time ago. The last truly great entry was 2011’s Hard Corps: Uprising—an unrecognizable-as-Contra game which doesn’t even bear the series name—and even before that point, Contra had muddled through multiple halfhearted reinventions in between quality games. I approached Operation Galuga with embers of optimism: It's by WayForward, developers of 2007's exceptional Contra 4, but its insistence on new playable characters with special abilities, perks bought with in-game currency, and an overhauled 3D look had me wary of another misguided attempt to complicate a formula defined by its simplicity... Read more.
