It leaves you totally confused as to what you're doing and how you're supposed to actually do it.
The game follows a boy who stumbles across a man in a spaceship with a pet cat who ends up crash landing them somewhere and sends you out to retrieve the ship's power cells.
When you start the game you're introduced to the inside of the spaceship where the man and the cat aren't really doing anything. There wasn't even any dialogue or anything. I was completely perplexed. It took me several minutes to work out that I was supposed to poke the screen to advance the story. Why would getting the game to actually start need to be so out of reach?
Then the ship lands in a town park were your character, Terry, enters the ship, making himself with his pre-rendered sprites look completely out of place in the 8-bit control room. I'm not sure what motivated Suda51 to use these two styles, I wouldn't have complained if they'd have just stuck with one or the other.
Once you get past the opening scenes you're washed up on a remote island where you find the first power cell and are introduced to the combat system, as the captain tells you from the top screen. The combat system is a complete farce, to be honest. You have to be standing two pixels away from an enemy to actually hit them, which is a pain getting there because entering combat mode(which is annoying to get in and out of) slows your character's movement down and once you're in range you won't be able to attack without taking heavy damage. It's also a complete mystery as to why you can't use special attacks while holding a weapon. Then, of course there's the sticker system which can be used to summon the cat from the spaceship, who is completely useless, and do more things like change enemies into undefeatable collossuses that kill you instantly.
Then, once you've defeated an enemy and drained your health, you don't just walk over food or press A next to it to replenish your health, you collect it then go into the inventory screen, go to the food section, select the food item, then tell the game that you want to eat it. What's more, you can only eat a certain amount of food before your stomach fills up and you have to wait for it to empty. The only reason I can think they made it like that was for realism, but surely realism gets thrown out the window when you're on a desert island after a spaceship crash, doesn't it?
Finally, once you find the ship, which has hidden itself inside a pirate vessel, you'll have to visit a small island to find the next power cell. You have to talk to locals who explain that there's a temple on the island where something is kept, which is presumed to be the power cell. Next thing you know, the villages suddenly turn on you completely unexpected. There was no real reason for it. Not even a cutscene to show what I'd done wrong, they just suddenly wanted to attack me, even the man who tried to sell me a better weapon. Was there some glitch in the programming that bypassed the villagers turning evil? I just didn't know what was supposed to be going on. By this time, I just gave up.
So, in the end, Contact is far too deeply flawed to be worth buying. It completely changes itself randomly and becomes impossible to play.