The general polish wasn’t quite there and you had to be an annoyingly high distance over a platform in order to land on it, but this game is the only Contra game I know of that has the openness that the first one has. I love Contra 3 and Hard Corp but the presentation is way more squeezed in compared to the first one. Contra 4 uses the top screen to open up the area and the grapple system is cool. It’s a shame that co op requires each DS to have a copy of the game.