Contra: Operation Galuga

A faithful return for a genre-defining series

Contra: Operation Galuga rebuilds the original 1987 arcade classic's core run-and-gun structure — relentless enemy waves, screen-filling bullet patterns, iconic weapon pickups — with new stages, enemies and mechanics layered on top rather than a straight remaster. WayForward, a studio with a long track record in the genre, earned a reasonably strong critical reception for the effort: 71 on Metacritic, solidly positive without being a runaway critical success. Steam's own audience is considerably warmer, Very Positive at 88.1% across roughly 805 reviews, reflecting genuine affection from a dedicated fanbase for how faithfully the moment-to-moment action captures what made the original memorable.

What earns that affection

Longtime series fans are consistently the most enthusiastic voices in the review sample, and their praise is specific rather than generic nostalgia. Multiple detailed reviews credit WayForward with genuinely understanding what made the 1987 original work, translating its relentless pacing and screen-filling threat density into a modern structure without losing the tension that made the series a genre benchmark. New content — additional stages, enemy types and mechanical wrinkles — gives returning fans real, new material to engage with rather than a pure nostalgia exercise, and the four-player local co-op mode preserves one of the series' most beloved social features for groups able to gather around a shared screen.

The two complaints that show up almost everywhere

Set against that fan goodwill, two specific issues recur with striking consistency across independent reviews, and both trace back to a mismatch between what the game promises and what it delivers. The first is online multiplayer, or rather its complete absence. Marketing for Operation Galuga explicitly promoted "co-op combat for up to 4 players," and multiple reviewers describe going in expecting online play as a baseline modern feature, only to discover the co-op modes are local and split-screen exclusively. Remote Play Together offers a technical workaround, but several reviewers describe it as a poor substitute for genuine online matchmaking, particularly frustrating for a series whose modern audience is often scattered across different households rather than sharing a couch. Available evidence doesn't show this being addressed via a later patch, meaning it remains the game's state as sold today.

The second consistent complaint is length relative to price. Multiple independent reviews cite a main campaign completable in roughly two hours, with full completion — including all achievements — taking closer to twenty for a dedicated player. Against a launch price of NZ$56.99, several reviewers explicitly argue the content on offer doesn't match a premium asking price, with more than one suggesting a fairer price point somewhere between NZ$20 and $30 based on what the game actually delivers. This isn't a complaint about the game's quality so much as its value proposition specifically — several reviewers who otherwise praise the action itself still recommend waiting for a discount on value grounds alone.

A visual and audio direction that divides its own fans

A smaller, more divided disagreement concerns presentation. WayForward rendered characters in 3D polygonal models rather than the series' classic 2D sprite work, and reception to that choice is genuinely split rather than uniformly negative — some reviewers praise the presentation, while others specifically call out every recent Contra attempt at 3D visuals as a step backward from the series' sprite-based roots. The soundtrack draws a similarly divided response, some crediting it as a genuine highlight and others describing it as comparatively forgettable next to the series' classic themes. Neither disagreement rises to the consistency of the co-op and price complaints above, but both are worth knowing about if you have strong feelings about the series' visual and audio identity specifically.

Why the co-op gap stings more than it might for other genres

It's worth explaining specifically why the missing online co-op lands as harder than it might for a different kind of game. Contra has always been, culturally, as much a social game as a solo one — the series' reputation was built partly on the specific experience of two players fighting through relentless enemy waves together, a format that made sense in arcades and living rooms decades ago but assumes a shared physical space few modern friend groups can rely on by default. Releasing a 2024 revival explicitly marketed around that co-op identity, without the online option that's been a standard baseline feature for cooperative games for well over a decade, reads to many reviewers less like an oversight and more like a genuinely strange scoping decision for a genre revival built specifically to appeal to nostalgia for shared play. That context is part of why the complaint recurs so consistently rather than being a minor footnote — it cuts against the specific selling point the marketing led with.

Verdict

Contra: Operation Galuga succeeds at the thing longtime fans most wanted from a series revival: run-and-gun action that genuinely captures what made the 1987 original a genre benchmark, executed with real care by a studio that clearly understands the assignment. Where it falls short, consistently enough across independent reviews to treat as a real pattern rather than isolated grumbling, is everything built around that core action — a complete absence of online co-op despite marketing promising exactly that, and a short campaign priced like a considerably larger release. Buy it at a discount for the action itself, gather local friends for the co-op it does support, and go in without expecting either online multiplayer or a lengthy campaign to match the asking price.