Developer: JoyMasher Publisher: The Arcade Crew

Here comes the copycat.

Making an “homage” or “spiritual successor” is a double-edged sword. There’s a built-in audience, as fans of the original game will naturally want to check out what you’re making. However, your game will be automatically compared to the original, and woe to you if your game falls short.

Blazing Chrome is a “spiritual successor” to the Contra series, and I put those words in quotes because they’re not a compliment. Chrome borrows heavily from several games in the series (including the little-known Hard Corps: Uprising), and then throws in dashes of Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken and a sprinkle of Battletoads. The result is a game that looks fantastic, is incredibly frustrating to play, and feels like it was stitched together from better games than itself.

Run and Gun

Blazing Chrome is all about side-scrolling running and shooting.

There’s some kind of story in there about evil robots taking over the world or whatever, but you’re not here for Shakespeare. You’re here to shoot things, and you will do plenty of that in Blazing Chrome, just like you did in all the Contra games that came before it.

You’ll also do all the typical Contra things, like collect different weapons, hang from girders, ride speeder bikes, and even change up perspective.





If you’ve spent any time with Contra 3 or Hard Corps: Uprising (there’s that game again), this will all feel familiar.

Bullet Sponge

Blazing Chrome makes several design mistakes that tank what could have been an awesome gameplay experience, and enemy design is the biggest one. The enemies themselves are all right, although there are too many jumpers (more on that in a bit), but they share one fatal flaw: every single enemy, even the weakest ones, take several hits to kill.

This may not seem like a big deal, but this allows enemies to spawn and swarm the screen faster than you can kill them, which leads to a lot of cheap deaths. It also leads to most of the weapons feeling underpowered, especially the machine gun you start with. None of the official Contra games have bullet sponge enemies, but this game is full of them.

Another issue is the jumping enemies.

These enemies can quickly close the distance on you, which is a real problem given how many shots they can take before they die. The dogs (bottom pic) are the worst: they’re major bullet sponges, and they spawn quickly. You will die many cheap, unavoidable deaths at the hands of these dogs, and it will drive you bonkers.

Weapon Inbalance

Since all the enemies require multiple hits, There are really only two useful weapons in the game: the grenade launcher and the attack bot.

The grenade launcher kills almost every enemy (except bosses) in one hit, and has a small blast radius that takes out nearby enemies. The attack bot gives you a floating companion turret that fires regular bullets, which essentially doubles your firepower. These weapons give you a fighting chance in most situations, so they will quickly become your go-to pickups.

There are two other weapons: a powerful-but-clumsy laser, and a flame thrower-type weapon that’s a direct copy of the flamethrower from Contra 3 but isn’t nearly as powerful. There’s no spread shot, which is a surprise. Spread guns are a Contra staple, so I was surprised that they’re nowhere to be found in this game.

Even though the grenade launcher is the best weapon in the game, it has an interesting flaw: it sometimes refuses to fire. There were several times in the game where I would hit the fire button with the weapon equipped and nothing came out. I’m not sure if it was a bug or I was just doing something wrong, but this led to more unavoidable deaths.

Copycat

In the very first level of Blazing Chrome, you hang from a girder while killing giant flies with a flamethrower, a very obvious callback to the most famous level from Contra 3.

A little later in the game, you find yourself on a speeder bike, blowing away enemies and shooting down helicopters, again, just like in Contra 3.

At one point, you fight through a desert level that looks a whole lot like the desert level in Hard Corps: Uprising, down to the sand worms:

In level 3, you find yourself fighting in a cramped hallway that looks suspiciously like the fourth level from Super C:

In the fifth level, you assault a winter fortress at high speed on your speeder bike, much like the fifth level of Cybernator (Assault Suits Valken in Japan):

You then hop over pits and walls on your speeder, just like the speeder sequences in the original Battletoads:

I get that this is game is supposed to be a love letter to old-school action games, but all this copying makes the game feel like an album of cover songs rather than something original.

Slowdown

The game ran smoothly for the most part on my Switch, but I hit two areas with massive slowdown.

In the battle with the above mini-boss (stage 4 – he shows up twice) the game slows down badly, to the point that it feels like it’s chugging along at half speed. Even the music slows down. It’s so bad that I wondered if it was done on purpose as some kind of weird nod to the old Contra games. The game hits slowdown in parts of level 5 as well, but it isn’t as bad.

I don’t know if the slowdown is a Switch-only issue, but I did see one twitter complaint from an Xbox One player complaining about slowdown, so be prepared to see it regardless of which platform you decide to get it for.

Hard as Contra?

The Contra games are famous for being difficult. Blazing Chrome also wants to be famous for being difficult, and it succeeds, but at a steep price, because all the things that make the game hard also make it not much fun to play.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: what makes this game hard is the weak weapons, combined with the swarming enemies and the projectiles that constantly fill the screen. You will die over and over in this game, not because you’re bad, but because there is literally no escape. It’s cheap and it feels unfair. This is a beatable game – I got through it eventually – but I can see a lot of people giving up on it and moving on to something else.

Visuals

Blazing Chrome nails the look of sixteen-bit shooters perfectly. It’s a little on the gray side, especially in the beginning levels, but it wouldn’t look out of place running on a Super NES. Kudos to the dev team for nailing that part of the design.

Sound

Sound is a mixed bag. The sound effects are very good. The music, however, is good but not great; there’s not much here that is memorable. The soundtrack feels very 80s (especially the end credits song), and definitely sounds like Super NES music, but the original Contra series soundtracks are much better. There’s nothing here that sticks in your head; even as I write this, I’m struggling to remember any music from the game. That definitely falls short of the Contra games, some of which has music that can stay in your head for decades.

Verdict

Blazing Chrome is a decent game that, with a few tweaks, could have been great. It tries too hard to be Contra and ends up feeling more like a clone than an original game. Is it worth the money? For me, it’s hard to recommend, when the games that it copies (the original Contras and Hard Corps: Uprising) are also available for the same price. If you really want to check it out, wait for a sale.

That’s why I give Blazing Chrome by JoyMasher and The Arcade Crew my rating of

Special Note: Hard Corps: Uprising

I’ve mentioned Hard Corps: Uprising several times in this review, but there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it, so let me give you a short intro.

This game was made by Arc System Works (the developers behind the Guilty Gear games and BlazBlue) and published by Konami in 2010. It is 100% a Contra game (the Konami code even works with it), but for reasons I’ll never understand, Konami refuses to put the Contra title on it, killing potential sales. They also refuse to port it to the Switch, so the only places you can play it are on PlayStation 3 and the Xbox One (I have the XBone version). If you’re looking for a great action game and you have one of those platforms, check this game out. Many Contra fans (myself included) think it’s one of the best games in the series, and doesn’t cost a penny more than Blazing Chrome.

What did you think of Musume’s Blazing Chrome Switch Review? Will you be picking up the game? Do you wish there was a good Contra game on the Switch? Let us know over on Twitter or Discord and why not check out more of Musume’s reviews!

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