Contra: Legacy of War (1996). Play online

Summary

Contra: Legacy of War was the series' first plunge into true three‑dimensional action, and it even kept the original human protagonists for its European and Australian releases – a rare move after years of the Probotector name. The game shipped with a pair of red‑cyan anaglyph glasses, letting players glimpse a stereoscopic effect that Konami flaunted at the 1996 E3, though critics later dismissed it as a cheap gimmick.

Played from a tilted isometric perspective, the title lets you choose among four identical‑type soldiers distinguished only by their weapon load‑outs. The control scheme adds strafing, auto‑aim for airborne foes, and the option to save progress on a memory card, while jumps feel less tight than the classic somersault hops.

Reviews were split: GameSpot and GamePro praised the familiar fast‑blasting feel and the variety of weapons and enemy types, but flagged sluggish jumps, occasional slowdown, and over‑bright level art as frustrating. The 3‑D glasses were largely ignored or panned as unimpressive, and the game’s ambitious leap into 32‑bit polygons earned a middling 64% aggregate score.

Storyline

In Contra: Legacy of War, the world faces a new threat from Colonel Bassad, a power‑hungry dictator who has built an army of soldiers, robots and alien mutants. He has also forged an alliance with a mysterious alien entity to further his bid for global domination. The player controls Ray Poward, returning from Hard Corps, who is joined by three fresh Hard Corps recruits: Tasha, a tough female mercenary; CD‑288, a combat robot; and Bubba, an alien ally. Together they storm Bassad’s mountain stronghold, battling through his mechanized forces.
At the summit they destroy Bassad’s armored pod and are pulled into his mind for a surreal final showdown. With the dictator finally defeated, the team is thrust into the alien entity itself, revealed to be a small living planet. They shatter the planet, and the surviving crew drifts away in space as a lone alien bug scuttles into the darkness.