 STEAM DRUNK! A week ago, I looked at SoulSera, a game advertised as a spiritual sequel to Actraiser, but unfortunately, it only amounts to a half-assed platformer mashed together with a tower defense game you might find in the Google Play Store for a dollar. Here we have another quote-unquote spiritual sequel in Blazing Chrome, available for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One, which very clearly and obviously takes influence from the 16-bit-era Contra games, like Contra 3, The Alien Wars for Super Nintendo, and Contra Hardcore for Sega Genesis. And first of all, right away, the visuals are spot-on. It leans a lot closer to the Genesis visual style, in fact, it even calls to mind some treasure games like Alien Soldier as well, especially with how some of the bosses look. But yeah, we've got Blood Red Skies, mashed-up buildings, tons of fire and brimstone, carnage everywhere, and some really inspired enemy design. One major strength those older Contra games had going for them were the bosses, and the mini-bosses too for that matter, and Blazing Chrome nails it with some spectacular-looking battles. And it's not just the visual aspect of it either. The patterns that you have to deal with are well done, and I particularly enjoy how some of the bosses are revealed in segments, like this guy here. You start out just fighting its weird, elongated neck, then shortly after, you gotta deal with the whole thing. It's almost like this dude couldn't wait to try and kill you, so it stuck its neck out before it was ready. I love stuff like that. As far as the actual gameplay goes, it's pure Contra through and through, one-hit deaths and all. There's four playable characters, although two have to be unlocked. You can carry three additional weapons alongside your regular machine gun, those being a laser, a grenade launcher, and kind of a plasma beam thing. There's also vehicles you can commandeer that add to your firepower, calling to mine games like Metal Slug, and there's other additional stuff here too, like segments where you're zipping around in a jetpack. I should also mention that you can hold the right trigger button, and it'll lock your aim while keeping your character standing still, so that's cool. And there's also a roll maneuver you can do to avoid enemies. There's four levels to choose from Mega Man style, so you can play them in whatever order you'd like. And I always appreciate that, because if you get frustrated with this one, you can still see a good portion of the game. There's at least one more after completing those four levels, and I'm honestly not sure if there's anything after that, because holy crap, this game is hard. And that brings me to the difficulty settings. Easy gives you seven lives, normal, five, and hard three, with hard mode unlocking, only if you're able to beat the game on normal. Easy and normal have unlimited continues, and hard only has one. When you die, you keep right on truck and right where you left off, but if you have to continue, you start at the last checkpoint. And yeah, like I said, and like you might expect, Blazing Chrome is a really tough challenge, even on easy. It is, uh, not easy. What helps mitigate the difficulty a bit is that this game is two-player co-op, but not online, only old-school couch co-op for now. And that's perfectly fine with me, but yeah, even with a second player, this game is tough anyway you slice it. I like to refer to these kinds of games as pick-up-and-die games, meaning that they have a certain accessibility and immediacy to them, but the difficulty curve is such that you only learn the game by dying. You pick up on patterns, you see what killed you, and you remember it for the next time. I understand that's not everyone's cup of tea, but just bear in mind, that's the kind of experience you're getting yourself into here. The thing is, though, this game can be just flat-out unfair at times, like for example, this monster that spews stuff into the air, you have to really be precise. When you predict each projectile's trajectory because it flies off-screen and STAYS off-screen for like a second and a half, an eternity in this game, before it reappears again seemingly from nowhere. I'm just saying, there's the good kind of frustrating, and there's certain patterns here that are frustrating for the wrong reasons. Despite that, though, Blazing Chrome is a TREMENDOUS game. The gameplay is well balanced for the most part, and all the weapons are useful in their own way, the controls are spot-on, I played this game on PC and played it on a variety of different controllers, and it worked great with all of them, and the visuals and sound here are top-notch, as you can see. Although, just a personal preference, I really get tired of the shaky camera stuff. It's just unnecessary. I wish they'd do away with that. I mean, you'd be able to see the awesome backgrounds and sprite work that much more clearly. But yeah, if you dig games like Contra, then I mean, you've already got this game and you've already played it, so you don't need to listen to some guy on the internet to tell you to play it. But if you've just got this one on your wishlist and you're just waiting for it to go on sale, then I hope you can see that this game is well worth checking out. It's a well-made game that's high on both style and substance. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.