R-Type Dimensions III is a great remaster for 80s and 90s kids who haven’t yet been able to play R-Type III outside of the Nintendo ecosystem. As far as remasters go, it contains a great number of accessibility and graphical features to make it a compelling shmup for today’s players.
R-Type is a shoot ’em up (shmup) that is near and dear to my heart as a 90s kid. It competed against the likes of Gradius, Super Mega Force, and Axelay on my SNES. These shmups’ simple control schemes were often overshadowed by dramatically steep difficulty curves and punishing boss battles that reset players’ progress back to square one. R-Type Dimensions III is a remake of the SNES exclusive, R-Type III: The Third Lightning, that was re-released several times with minimal changes. With Dimensions III, KRITZELKRATZ 3000 and ININ have taken over the development helm and added a litany of much-needed quality-of-life fixes along with some graphical upgrades to make it the definitive way to play R-Type III in 2026.
I fear that, despite these welcome changes, many modern players won’t give an R-Type game a chance unless the series takes a firmer stance in its gameplay design. I’ll elaborate on that shortly.
Interestingly, R-Type III leans more into the cybernetic futurism thematic than other entries. Where other R-Type games skew grotesque with aliens and machines merged together into galactic monstrosities, R-Type III focuses more on nefarious machines. Some alien fusions make their way into the game (especially the second level), but it’s still a departure from R-Type‘s allure.
R-Type Dimensions III doesn’t add any new gameplay content – no new levels, no new ships, no new weapons. It’s a graphical remaster of the classic R-Type III. R-Type games are simple: You control a little ship, you have an extension of a weapon called a “Force” that augments your ship’s damage from the front or the back, and you make your way through dangerous levels full of bullets (bullet hell galore, folks!) and other threats that disintegrate the ship in a single hit.
Dimensions III brings forth multiple graphical changes to R-Type III, all of which are toggleable. If you want the classic 2D shmup experience, a simple button press (X on the Joy-Cons) in-game seamlessly switches from the new graphics to the classic. The enhanced graphics in Dimensions III utilize fully redesigned 3D models set in the game’s 2D plane. Backgrounds have depth and are more detailed than ever, clearly elevating the gameplay to modern shmup standards. Some visibility issues persist, but it’s still a welcome change. In my original review of Delta HD Boosted (a remake of R-Type Delta), I critiqued the enhanced graphics feeling crunchy. Dimensions III‘s graphical redesign brings the alien worlds more alive than ever.
Additionally, KRITZELKRATZ 3000 has added in a new camera angle, the “crazy” angle, that tilts the game and gives it slightly more depth at the cost of massively increased difficulty. If y’all have been wanting an ultra-difficult R-Type III experience, enable the crazy angle.
To make the game slightly easier (it’s already difficult as hell), Unlimited Lives are toggleable right from the start. I have no trouble turning these on: I was never able to reach the fourth stage in R-Type III growing up, so unlimited lives helped me not only reach that stage, but the end of the game for the first time. It’s a blessing for this feature to be added to an R-Type game. They’re hard, so being able to reach the end credits is great.
I have no issue with some accessibility and graphical options being added to R-Type Dimensions III. Frankly, they’re near-required for today’s player. Heck, 80s and 90s kids are reaching their 40s; I doubt that most of them got to the halfway point of R-Type III let alone completed the game way back when. There’s one particular level that is claustrophobic in the sense that I had to navigate through a cramped labyrinth to defeat a boss…only to go backwards through the level to fight another boss. It’s some tough stuff that was only made feasible for my experience thanks to the accessibility features that were added in Dimensions III.
I’m glad that these features were implemented in Dimensions III. In some ways, many of these (dare I say) archaic shmups need some accessibility features to be attractive for those who haven’t been exposed to R-Type prior to today.
R-Type deserves a revival. There have been several re-releases of R-Type games over the past few years, most notably Delta HD Boosted and now Dimensions III, but they haven’t been consistent in their direction. Instead, there’s been a focus on modernizing graphics (welcome additions, I’ll admit) and preserving the gameplay loop with minimal adjustments as a means of appeasing to older gamers like me. The issue here is that even with Dimensions III’s infinite lives and Delta HD Boosted’s Practice Mode, R-Type’s punishing nature defies modern gameplay conventions. Today’s roguelikes go all-in on making games difficult for the sake of difficult or onboard them with gradually increasing difficulties before going full sicko mode.
This is all happening with player-friendly UI. By player-friendly UI, I mean crystal clear hitboxes, warning notifications that can be seen from a mile away, and other elements smoothen out the difficulty curve for unfamiliar players. I say this because, despite the notion of infinite lives, Dimensions III remains difficult. Some projectiles appear out of nowhere. Enemy sprites occasionally overlap with the backgrounds in enhanced graphic mode. It still feels frustrating to lose upgrades because I was off by one or two pixels despite being sure that my position was safe.
Playing on the Nintendo Switch was mostly okay. Mostly. It wasn’t until the fourth level where the framerate declined to the point where animations became staggered and choppy in the enhanced mode. There were no issues of input lag with classic graphics, but it’s strange to feel the enhanced version being unoptimized on a modern console. I have some hopes that some of these graphical and stability quibbles will get ironed out in time, but be warned that enhanced graphics have some drawbacks.
R-Type Dimensions III is a great remaster for 80s and 90s kids who haven’t yet been able to play R-Type III outside of the Nintendo ecosystem. As far as remasters go, it contains a great number of accessibility and graphical features to make it a compelling shmup for today’s players.
