Konami’s Contra series showed obvious influence from R-rated movies like Predator, Aliens, and Rambo, but the games were still fundamentally aimed at kids, so the end results were always a little sanitized. Now thirty-five years after the original Contra game, unshackled by such regulations, Iron Meat delivers run-and-gun action far more brutal and far more vicious than the original games were ever allowed to be.
Rather than dealing with alien invaders, the baddies of Iron Meat are interdimensional creatures who’ve infested the Earth with their presence. As the title suggests, many of the enemies consist of monster-mechanical hybrids, ranging from boxes with mouths, train cards with spider legs, and school buses with enormous teeth. Most enemies are not mere soldiers but gruesome body horror mutations. It’s all much gorier too, with demon mouths spewing fountains of blood and blood, and large bouncing balls which seem to consist of human remains. Even your player character often meets more violent fates when getting killed, like getting sawed in half by lasers or buzzsaws. All of this is rendered in pure pixelated glory. The game moves so fast that it’s sometimes hard to take it all in, but it’s worth pausing the game just to admire the details put in every background and every enemy in the game. It’s all accompanied by a suitable hard rock soundtrack, with alternate chiptune renditions if you’d like to go more old school.
The mechanics itself are pure Contra, blending the run-and-gun action-platforming of the NES titles with the faster pacing and stronger weaponry of the 16-bit games. It’s actually pretty gimmick free, as there’s none of the 3D stages or overhead levels or even vehicle stages that typify many other Contra games. The levels are almost always perfectly paced, tossing enough challenges and enemies at you to keep things exciting. You can hold and swap two weapons, many of which are pretty similar to the classic Contra arsenal, and even get an upgraded version if you pick up the same weapon twice.
One thing Iron Meat scales back on is the high difficulty level typical of Contra games. Easy mode gives you 30 lives, Normal gives 16, and Hard gives you 8. On the first two difficulty levels, this is usually enough to see each stage to the end without too much of a problem, and your stock even resets between each stage. The idea seems to have been that most players probably only saw the end of any Contra game by using cheat codes, and tries to make things as accommodating as possible. But those who cut their teeth on the crazy hard encounters of Hard Corps or Shattered Soldier will probably be able to handle the bosses here without breaking a sweat. Much of this is also due to enemy attacks being better telegraphed, with less need to memorize their patterns. The downside to having so many lives is that you still end up losing your current weapon when you die, so if you’re playing less than gracefully, you may end up stuck with using your basic gun in boss encounters. But even the default weapon has rapid fire and bosses aren’t too spongy so the game takes this into account.
As you gain points, you’ll unlock new skins, ranging from other types of commandos to other more bizarre characters like cyclopses and anthropomorphic bananas. There’s no gameplay differences between any of these, but it’s a nice bonus for those who want to commit themselves to mastering all nine stages
This game doesn’t seek to make many changes in the formula, so from a gameplay perspective, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before. But even the actual Contra games have long struggled to replicate why people love the earlier games. Iron Meat accomplishes that perfectly, with a distinctly gruesome style that prevents it from feeling like too much of a clone.
