A few weeks back, Mega Cat Studios sent over a press kit for Bite The Bullet that left me with more questions than answers. Here was a game that looked like a modern-day Contra (something we sorely need mind you) but in a box stuffed to the brim with all manner of snacks. After spending some time with Bite The Bullet it all now makes sense.

On the surface, Bite The Bullet looks like a Contra clone, and that’s something I’m not at all against. Much of the screenshots and press materials also paint that sort of picture, but instead of some traditional run-and-gun shooter, Bite The Bullet pulls from a lot of different games. And as the old saying goes when you are a Jack-of-all-Trades you tend to be a master of none. But before we can get there we need to understand just what sort of game Bite The Bullet is.

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The game’s story (the strongest thing the game has going for it) places you in the shoes of two corporate mercenaries: Chewie and Chewella. If those names sound nuts then you are not alone, although they do make perfect sense. During character selection the screen will shift for a fraction of a second to show each character go from buff boi’s to big old fatties. You see, Bite The Bullet is all about stuffing you face; stuffing your face with people!

DarwinCorp, the massive evil corporation that runs what’s left of Earth, hire the pair to extract data and DNA from the remnants that roam the Earth. These can be in the form of plants, metals, or even sentient life, or what’s left of it in its hideous mutated forms. To extract this data you shoot enemies and once dazed you can feast on them thanks to some sort on implant that lets you extract what you need.

Look, you can eat freaking robots and that at least is worth a few review points on its own. So far, Bite The Bullet seems like the Contra clone I said it wasn’t only with an eating mechanic, and it is up to a point. You shoot lots of guns, find new a different guns throughout a stage, and shoot baddies. But the eating bit means that Bite The Bullet, while probably falling into the run-and-gun genre, is a fairly slow affair.

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Sure, you can just shoot dead everything in your path but I wouldn’t suggest it. Bite The Bullet also features an RPG system that requires you to feed to pump up your stats on a Final Fantasy sort of tech tree. This opens up new powers, abilities, and perks, but it all felt a bit confusing for a run-and-gun. It feels a little like playing Tetris but every other round it turns into a baseball management sim for a few minutes. Sure, I get the idea but slowing down the action doesn’t feel all that great.

Kill and baddie and you lose all that sweet XP of which you will need. But don’t think that you can just eat everything as you will be locked into what is essentially a class system that asks you to eat only zombified humans and to ignore the metal and plant-based life. If you do eat something not in your class base you’ll risk throwing up. Thankfully you will be able to customize your style and eat how you want thanks to XP expenditure, but it just feels like I’m doing maths at the end of each stage before I can get to the playstyle that fits me best.

Some people may find this customizing a lot of fun, I sure do in certain type of games, but I just feel that here it serves the point of being the carrot on a stick. If I stick it out just a little longer I’ll be able to play the game how I want. But while eating does slow things down it can impact the way the game plays as eating really bad stuff will see you turn into a walking blob. This isn’t a negative as one might think as being fat does slow you down, but it also means you are a bit more durable than your beefcake brethren.

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There is a lot going on here that might pull people in or turn people away, but it’s how the game plays that is usually the big kicker for me. Bite The Bullet looks great, has super interesting idea, but the controls end up holding it back, especially with all the start and stops the game has. Your characters simply feel too loose. It’s almost as if you have ice skates on which isn’t great in a run-and-gun that requires precise jumping and shooting.

This isn’t helped when the stages can be utterly massive and feeling more like a Metroidvania inspired game. It’s pretty easy to get lost on a stage like I was playing some Euro-platformer from the early ’90s. When you have a game mechanic that already slows down the game and you introduce large levels, you end up with the chance to bore players, especially early on in the adventure.

There is a lot of cool and interesting things going on in Bite The Bullet and I’ll be the first to commend the developers for taking chances, but I just could never shake the feeling while playing that I’d rather just be playing Contra. And that’s sort of the worst thing for a game that draws inspiration from other games. Still, there are going to be a lot of people that really love this one, they just probably aren’t the traditional run-and-gun Contra fans the marketing seems to want to draw in.

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“Bite The Bullet is a technically solid title that brings some interesting concepts to the table, but pacing issues and fiddly controls hold it back.”

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Final Score:

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