One of the biggest examples of "style over substance."

First of all, I want to give this game some credit for all the great things it does. The gameplay has converted into the 16-bit in probably the best way possible, just like earlier games controls are responsive; sounds and effects makes it pretty juicy. Overall it's pretty fun to play. Visually it's one of the best-looking games on SNES and just reading about the technical wizardry behind it makes me respect even more to all the details. As you can guess, music is great too.

I don't want to get too much into the details that were good in previous games so I'm going to talk about one of the most surprising things about this game for me: cinematic presentation. It has many over-the-top scenes and they're great, on presentation, it feels like a cheesy B-movie and that's what I want to see from Contra.

So what makes this game a disappointment for me? As you may expect the difficulty and stages. Earlier games weren't all that fair we all know that but their difficulty comes from their goal to push your reflexes to their limits. They're hard but you just have to learn how to dance with the controls, you need to think about your character's hitbox and your play style. But Contra 3 wants you to memorize levels not learn them. Unlike its predecessors, you probably won't understand how to react against certain obstacles at first and you will die then you will restart and play the sections you've played before over and over again, trial and error can be an amazing thing in games if you do it right but it's also something like a dangerous lab equipment, you can always blow it to your face just like this game does, you have limited continues and you just get sick of the game after a while, you must play it with save states or else it will become a torture (that is if you playing for completing it of course, it's fine for few minutes fun).

Also, these stages aren't as great as before, the first stage is iconic, and classic run and gun ones are fine but the remaining ones, or what I call "idea levels", are just some "You know what would be cool?" style levels were not handled in a good way. That grappling mechanic had so much potential but it isn't as responsive as it should be and the learning curve of that isn't some perfect line it's just a messy graphic.
I'm not a big fan of top-down sections in Super C, I still prefer the pseudo-3d mini game-like sections in Contra but I think that was implemented pretty well. In this, it's one of the most frustrating top-down shooters ever. Surprisingly they're pretty bad with graphics and like I said before there are ideas, most of them just plays with characters' position in a pretty stupid way, and of course, they're not implemented well therefore they are just confusing and frustrating to play.

Bosses are nice, while they're also trial and error based, they're much more acceptable than overall stage design because all of them are beatable with fast reflexes but you won't get them on the first try so it's the same thing in the end. I think we can see that certain elements don't come together very well in these bosses like climbing of course. Also to see the real final boss you need to beat this game hard so... Just forget about it, it's not worth it.

Another thing to note is the lack of codes, IIRC there aren't any codes in the NA version and while I don't like to use it except Konami code I think it hurts the "brainless fun" part of the game

I think with that you can now understand why I called this a "style over substance" game, you can just go on and play it for fun, you're in for a visual and auditory treat but you won't get the depth of previous games, it's clear that they did tried to make the scope bigger so they just sacrificed the depth but in games like this I think less is better most of the time and sadly this is one of the biggest proofs of that.

Simply put, this is just System Shock with "relatively" modern gameplay. I said relatively because the game has clunky gameplay that doesn't feel like a 2023 game, it's definitely not on par with modern shooters (Of course not including shitfests like Cyberpunk). Not only that but also shitty AI, pixel-perfect jumps, lack of juice (except explosions those are great), enemies and grenades coming out of nowhere, etc hurts the game so much. The visuals are pretty good, I liked how they knew their limitations and went on with a "Retro x Modern" art style, and the sounds are decent enough. Level and puzzle designs are amazing but they're exactly the same as the original game and that makes me question the purpose of this remake, nearly everything worth mentioning about this is from the original. Still, considering the development hell this game has been through I think the team did a nice job with this but it could've been much better.

There are three answers to the question, "What makes good hard games fun?" IMO. First of all, they are reliable, and second is they're giving the player some advantages and making the game "fair" and the last one is getting the consequences of mini decisions you made (of course, I'm not including things like challenges, etc.). And Ikaruga IS reliable. Your main concern is not some input delay or thinking about if you're hitting the boss or not; the gameplay is responsive (and juicy!). The game gives you advantages like the center of the player is a hitbox etc., and the PC version has a continue option, but this is still an arcade game, so it may frustrate you on some occasions. And, of course, the thing that makes this game great as it is: "color-changing" mechanic. It's so simple, yet it's so deep, and it does make you those mini decisions and get their consequences like, "yes you're immune to the blue projectiles but is it worth it to spend your limited boss time?". The ost is pretty good, the sounds are decent, game looks nice and the story is surprisingly fun to read!