Bought and finished this today. It ended up being better than I expected. Originally the bland artstyle made this look like a quickly thrown together effort, but the game exhibited more personality and craziness than I though it would. The first stage is typical run and shoot Contra, but after that they start throwing stage gimmicks that fits with Contra III/Hard Corps. In terms of difficulty, the NORMAL setting seems about the same as Contra III if not a bit easier. It may be worth checking out if you're a Contra fan, but if not then you could probably find better things to spend your $10 on.
Quick rundown:
+Inventive level design that's on par with the later entries
+Good remixes of classic themes (but barely any new material)
+Nonsensical story complete with nonsensical dialogue
+Unlockable characters
+Normal difficulty seems fair. Everything appears to be dodgable.
+HARD mode is sufficiently hard
-Artstyle comes off as a bit cheap (but there's some nice old school effects thrown in)
-Visually it's a bit on the soft side
-Only five stages plus final boss
-Final boss is pretty lame
-No new weapons (no C-missile, flame, or bombs either)
-No leaderboards!
