The first-ever 16-bit installment in the Contra franchise sees us in the year 2636, two years after the events of Super C, an alien invasion once again invades the Earth, this time they decide to launch a full-scale war, beginning the "Alien Wars". Bill Rizer and Lance Bean once again must defeat the alien forces and stop the invasion. The game was originally going to be titled Contra IV, as Contra Force was intended to be the third mainline Contra entry, but was delayed, causing Contra IV to be renamed to Contra III.
This is the first Contra game where the characters are no longer bare-chested; the previous entries showed them bare-chested during gameplay but not in the covers and/or title screens. Contra III is the first game to properly show the characters wearing a shirt both in the gameplay and the cover.
The graphics for a 1992 game released for the SNES look impressive. You can definitely tell that the developers attempted to make them as colorful as possible while also providing a great amount of detail on them, especially for the enemies and the explosions.
The soundtrack is one of the best in the entire Contra series. The soundtrack for this entry goes for a more cinematic side, resulting in an awesome result as expected; "It's Time for Revenge" truly makes you feel like a true badass and prove the enemies that they should definitely not mess around with Bill and Lance; "Bloody Storm" makes you sound prepared for the boss and see what will they do to stop you; meanwhile "Daredevil" is very catchy and makes you want to dance by just listening to it.
You can now have two weapons instead of one, and by pressing the X button, the other weapon will be selected and you'll be able to shoot it. This adds an ability to have more weapons, especially the ones that are the best to defeat any boss. In addition there are now bombs, which can kill all of the enemies on-screen and even make the bosses shorter to beat. This means if there are a lot of enemies on screen or a long boss and you will struggle to beat them, you can use bombs to get out of this situation. The SNES version even contains the spinning attack, meaning you can shoot if you spin if you have selected 2 machine guns at the same time. This can allow you to kill more enemies on-screen if there's a lot of them instead of just using bombs.
Like a lot of Contra games, the controls are tight and responsive; with it, you can sometimes even make Bill or Lance to some silly things and even make a weapon dance when jumping, especially the flame or laser if you press the D-pad. Yet there's another fun gameplay; responsive and tight controls, and now you can just hold the Y button for Bill and Lance to shoot the default bullets instead of having to mash it.
While the game only has 6 stages, the game still offers a good challenge to make sure the player spends several minutes trying to complete the game; with its more tight level design, different and newer bosses, and the high difficulty, it makes sure the game is not short. Levels 2 and 5 in particular are unique compared to the other levels; they're presented in an overhead perspective using the SNES' Mode 7 rendering mode, allowing for a lot of variety. In order to finish these two levels, you must find and destroy predetermined targets and then defeat the boss once all targets are destroyed.
The game contains shields, which are now shown properly instead of showing your character flashing colours. When the shield is about to run out, it becomes red, alerting you that it is about to run out. Unfortunately, only the Japanese version has the 30 lives code no matter what reason, despite it being one of the most beloved features in the previous entries. Even though it is also present in the other versions, it cannot be enabled without the use of cheat codes, mostly via Game Genie.
The boss fights are so much fun, as what would you expect from a Contra game. There are also mini-bosses in levels 1, 3, 4 and 6 before even the original bosses that don't play the level theme. A lot of them are also different, which fight differently than other mini-bosses in those levels.
This is Contra at its very best yet. Are you ready for the aggressive challenge?