Every now and then I'll play an older game that makes me go "whoa". I didn't expect a Contra game to achieve that. Yet another split-second decision to play during a long car ride, I ended up beating it five times over two days to reach all the endings. Don't get me wrong, the Contra games are all fine. They're fun, twitchy types of games that ask you to be extremely precise with your movement to the detriment of the overall experience, since you die in a single hit. That's the first big change in Hard Corps, as there isn't a whole lot of those moments. Hard Corps is far more interested in providing spectacle using better hardware than they've worked on prior. The absurdity of the physical requirements is lessened due to the absurdity of the setpieces you find yourself fighting on. I'm sure there's a lot of divisiveness in the core fanbase over whether this change was actually good, as Hard Corps is far more about pattern recogntition and understanding how all your tools can work together to take on boss fights. Most of the game is spent up against wholly unique boss monsters who usually have fairly deliberate tells for each of their attacks. I will choose this type of challenge one-hundred times over the type of difficulty offered in earlier Contra games. There's still some grievances I have with one-hit deaths and loss of power that comes with it, but you get to keep any of the upgrades you didn't have equipped when you die, which is nice, and Switch has save states, which makes the lives system optional. Regardless, the pattern-recognition style of gameplay isn't as fun when you absolutely have to die in order to better understand them. You can make adjustments in other games, but that's not really a possibility until you see how an attack works, which will usually result in getting hit and losing core abilities and precious lives. But this is all minor when put up against everything Hard Corps excels with. Not a single dull moment passes in it's 45-minute campaign. You can even unlock different stages and battles through choices which makes the prospect of learning the systems through replay more engaging. All the characters have unique weapons which can impact how you fight in a variety of ways. The game has basically no slowdown or flicker despite constantly banging out what should be too many effects. This is among one of the best action games ever made. 6/6