Thanks to Clear River Games for the review code
Title: R-TYPE Delta HD Boosted
System: Switch (eShop)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 11/20/2025
Prelude
In the first 3D R-Type game, you take control of the R-9 and two other ships as you set out to stop a Bydo invasion! This game would establish a lot of series staples that would go on to be used in the two R-Type Final games, while also refining a lot of the fun mechanics from the original trilogy.
Here in Boosted, we have a few new things added to the mix. A brand new arrangement soundtrack, redone assets for an HD mode, a slightly expanded screen option for better visibility, and the removal of all slowdown to represent the original in-development vision of the game. All of the prior Boosted games have been Saturn emulations, while this appears to be a partial port based on mostly complete source code, making this the first time a Playstation game has been covered in this manner by City Connection.
Presentation
Upon booting the game you get this really neat intro movie, albeit not the original PS1 movie, sadly. Rather you have a recreation of it in the style of R-Type Final 2, which looks pretty darn cool seeing it with the modern R-Type visuals. Afterward you boot into the game and get a near-identical menu to that of the PS1 original; you have the ability to toggle the visual screen options here, the OST from the original score to the arranged score, and even a sound test to play around with. If you played the original Delta, the menu is pretty much the same with no overlay from any sort of emulator present at all, unlike the S-Tribute titles.
Upon choosing a visual style and OST, plus registering your player if you haven’t already, you jump into the game, where you can see how these options differ from one another. Annoyingly there doesn’t seem to be any way to just toggle this all in-game without having to go back to the options menu after quitting your run, so you have to fiddle around every time. Anywho, there’s the original low resolution graphics (which are the PS1 polygons) and a higher resolution (which upscales them decently based on source code), plus a slightly expanded view that helps show incoming enemies from the sides, or a full 16:9 that stretches the image badly.
All the visual options looked fine enough to me, but neither of them cover up HD Boosted’s biggest failing, something I only really noticed upon reaching Stages 3 and 4: this port is weirdly inaccurate. Yes, deleting slowdown will change timing, I get that. But some visual effects I remembered from the OG game just didn’t show up at all, or had weird quirks that weren’t there before, even in low res mode. It was like some stuff was outright forgotten and it makes me wonder if the source code used was that of a near-final prototype or something. It really comes off as sloppy and makes the whole port job feel shoddy as a result, unfortunately, and the slowdown removal even impacts the game balance in a detrimental way.
Thankfully the audio side of HD Boosted is a lot better. We have a new arranged OST consisting of tracks from older R-Type composers, and the OG soundtrack to Delta is one of my favorites in the series. It isn’t as high-octane as the Arcade duology, but the moodiness Delta goes for fits the mood of the game pretty darn well, moreso than I felt the OSTs from Final 1 or 2 ever did. The removal of the slowdown did screw up how one of the songs was synced with the stage, however.
Still, most of the Boosted games had arranged OSTs that I considered hit or miss, and while Wolf Fang’s was pretty OK, this is by far the best arranged OST to come out of the Boosted lineup; not a single arranged track feels off or insufferable to listen to, and all of the songs I heard were faithful enough to their original counterparts that they were enjoyable. It still doesn’t surpass the original score, but it compliments it very well.
Gameplay
In R-Type Delta, you choose between one of three ships, each with their own different set of weapons. While the Final games would include over a hundred ships, you just have three here, but they’re all pretty fun to use. From the usual R-9, to a ship using tentacle attacks ala X-Multiply, to another ship that shakes things up with the usual weaponry, they’re all fairly different and worth experimenting with to find a favorite.
Upon starting the game, you have this brief intro cutscene showing a lot of stats, which seems unskippable and pretty obnoxious to deal with every time, but you can actually get past it by using a cheat code. In fact, R-Type Delta HD Boosted retains all the cheat codes from the original game that I could find, and they all work as they would in that original game. So if you really want to destroy the game and remove most semblance of fun, you can just get invincibility over and over again.
Yet if I did that, this wouldn’t be much of a review now, would it? So I played the actual game, gave many dozens of run attempts, and generally had a good time, even though the aforementioned framerate lock led to the removal of all slowdown. Let’s just start off with that, since the original R-Type Delta had a fluctuating framerate as per most games of the time, where if a lot of stuff happened on screen, then the game would slow down, and if not much was going on, the game would get close to its target framerate. A lot of shooter reissues keep these original framerates in reissues because the game is either designed with the slowdown in mind or the gameplay loop would just be a complete trainwreck without it, and R-Type Delta HD just decides to aim for a locked 60 all the time.
On paper this sounds brilliant; a game being smoothly enhanced, everything feeling responsive and very fun, (indeed, I didn’t have any input lag issues here) and a great upgrade that keeps the game balance intact. Unfortunately, despite Irem’s original vision being a locked 60 FPS, it sure seems like the final PS1 version had to have been made with some awareness of the limitations. The third stage, a giant mecha that plays a lot like the battleship levels from older games, becomes incredibly difficult due to how much faster everything is now, even on the easiest difficulty option. When I can easily tell the actual difficulty differences in the first two stages, go “yeah that makes sense”, only for the third stage to feel way too fast and chaotic, that’s quite the spike.
Like with all things R-Type though, trial and error will eventually get you to memorize the stage enough to get the hang of things, but it feels incredibly weird when going onto Stage 4, things settle back down a bit, and the game goes back to feeling more balanced with its trial and error. Then later stages hit you like a ton of bricks and your speed options feel way too fast, even at the default speed of 2 sometimes.
There were also some instances where my attempts on PS1 led me to encountering some enemies and parts of a level that just flat out didn’t exist in HD Boosted; whether that was due to deliberate tweaking for the 60FPS or a glitch remains uncertain, but for what should have been a great faithful port, these weird oddities just do not lead to that at all. If you manage to reach the ending, you’ll also encounter quite the desynced scene with missing visual effects for no reason whatsoever.
All of this leads to HD Boosted’s gameplay additions feeling rather sloppy. And they mostly are. Thankfully, the core gameplay of R-Type Delta is still intact, so the game manages to be pretty good fun despite all these issues, and nowhere near the trainwreck of say, Zero Gunner 2-. You have your usual force pod system and different weapon types, with each of the weapons varying based on what ship you chose. Each weapon has its own use for certain situations, and you can even do a super charged attack to help out in a pinch.
The bosses still remain by and large fantastic, and the new Delta Weapon would add the ultimate finishing move that would later go on to be used in Final and Final 2, where upon your force pod coming into enough contact with the enemies, you can unleash a devastating screen clear move, also dependent on your ship type. The scoring still remains fun, there are plenty of unlockables to get, (mostly requiring you to play the game for a certain amount hours) and there’s even a legitimately helpful practice mode where you can jump into a stage you reached and keep trying it over and over again without running out of continues, long before you get the playtime requirements needed to unlock more continues in the main game.
This helped me practice Stage 3 dozens of times before I was finally able to get used to the Boosted version and clear it. Ultimately, there’s still a lot of R-Type fun to be had, but R-Type Delta is beyond legendary and an excellent game, and this point just barely misses the mark in that aspect. There’s also a complete lack of online leaderboards, which is unfortunate.
Conclusion
In conclusion, what should have been a slam dunk port of one of the best PS1 shooters ever is barred down by some really baffling decisions that sucked some of my enjoyment out of the game. Missing visual aspects, minor weird bugs, a desync with a stage, removed slowdown spiking the difficulty of some stages to absurd degrees, it all just comes together to make one of the best shooters just another pretty decent one.
Yes, the game is still very playable, it still responds well, still has an outstanding OST, and still is a darn good game of R-Type, but such errors are pretty darn ridiculous and should not still be happening in retro reissues near the year of 2026. Literally all of this could have been fixed away by making an OG mode of sorts that restores the slowdown and missing visual effects for those who like the methodical flow of the original Delta.
When most of the game is super authentic to the PS1 original, it just makes no sense to me for a lot of other aspects to be so grossly wrong. Add in the lack of anything like online leaderboards, and this while this was still a lot of fun for me to revisit, it ain’t the treatment R-Type Delta deserved.
I give R-Type Delta HD Boosted a 7 out of 10.