Thanks to ININ Games for the review code
Title: R-Type Dimensions III
System: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: $34.99
Release Date: 05/19/2026
Prelude
I’m cutting out the usual mystery and will just say it straight; R-Type Dimensions III is a bad remake. A catastrophic remake.
I don’t like using harsh words like that so early in a review, but the more I played R-Type Dimensions III, the angrier I became and the more the entire project left my soul completely and utterly crushed. We had a good foundation back in the XBLA era for the first two games, (That’s why Dimensions II doesn’t exist, R-Type II was part of Dimensions) which later became an outstanding modern port on Switch/PS4/PC, and so the idea of following up that wonderful set of remakes with one for the under appreciated R-Type III was pretty darn appealing to me. Sure, it’s another case of Leo getting skipped over, but had this been done akin to the first two games I think III would have fit better than Leo’s pseudo-spinoff nature, anyhow.
Outside of a pretty terrible GBA port, R-Type III has only been reissued on consoles via the Wii VC, long since delisted. The GBA port looked good from a glance, but suffered from abysmal audio and a lot of inaccuracies, even though it still kinda felt like R-type. You could at least feel it was what the GBA’s potential might unleashed visually, if only the actual port job was good. Surely Dimensions III, coming out in the year 2026, would not suffer a similar fate if not worse. Surely decades of time and a foundation of prior R-Type remakes makes this an easy win. Surely even despite a really high price, this will be a great way to play R-Type III and maybe even replace the SNES for many similar to how Dimensions replaced the Arcade originals.
Boot up the game, and you’ll see a german developer credited, KRITZELKRATZ 3000, and the credits show nobody from the original Dimensions team worked on programming this game.
Buckle up, it’s gonna get real bumpy.
Presentation
The first thing you see upon booting the game is a crappy recreation of the pretty fancy zoom in effect of the game’s title. You can move the menu cursor around while this animation is playing. The SNES version had a lovely background with a nice red tone, while here in Dimensions III you get a dull as sin blue background that’s fairly static, not a great first impression.
Still, going into the options menu, you have a few different screen options to mess around with, from various different video filters akin to the first Dimensions, (although no fancy border this time) and a sound test to listen to both the original SNES version of the game’s OST and a fully remixed score.
This is the lone spot, and I mean the lone spot in Dimensions III which I will give it outright praise; the SNES original had a slightly different feel in its OST compared to the first two games, but it was still a pretty good score, with one of the miniboss themes in the game being one of my favorite tracks in the entire series. I personally preferred Super R-Type’s OST between the two SNES titles, but III’s OST is still well composed. Thankfully, the music remixes in Dimensions III are fairly awesome, providing a more intense, energetic set of remixes to these songs, making some good songs even better, and they even managed to make the mini boss theme I liked sound even better!
Unfortunately, the implementation of these songs in-game were not without issues; while they did remix the buildups to some of the Boss themes, they just don’t play properly in-game and jump cut to the main boss medley. This means the suspenseful buildup meant to time the stage BGM with the boss showing up or revealing its true self has been completely annihilated, impacting both the OG OST and the Remix version. There’s also the matter of the game’s sound effects, which didn’t get a nice glow up and instead all sound like the lamest stock sound effects imaginable you could find on the internet, with even the original Dimensions‘ 3D sound effects sounding more R-Type like than whatever the hell the Cyclone Force is meant to sound like in the 3D mode; it’s no good at all and sounds like a badly looping machine gun overpowering the other sound effects, instead of the quieter noise that it exhibited in the SNES original.
Speaking of no good, let’s talk about the visuals. While the music got a fantastic modern upgrade, I cannot say the same about the visuals; the game as a whole is in this weird aspect ratio that doesn’t seem to fully fill the Switch 2’s handheld screen no matter what I try to do. The 3D visuals scale aggressively OK in this manner, even in the Enhanced view option, but it makes the 2D mode look totally wrong due to it being nothing like a normal SNES screen aspect ratio; you can change the hud to look more like the SNES original, but unlike the first Dimensions you can’t change the screen size to be more pixel perfect. There’s no blur filter forced on here, but you do have a cruddy CRT filter that slap lines on the pixels and call it a day if you want to make the awkward looking 2D mode even worse.
But surely, even with how simple R-Type Dimensions‘ 3D mode looked, Dimensions III will look on par or even better than that, right? After all, it’s 2026 and a ton of 2.5D and other lower budget shmups have done incredible work with their visual art, making the best of their budget. Dimensions’ 3D felt and looked faithful to the original and not in an awkward manner, so how about III?
Well, I sure hope you like weird stop-motion and pretty ugly models, because that’s what the 3D mode in Dimensions III is in a nutshell, making it a pretty hideous disaster. You start the game off with a rather lifeless recreation of the first person force select screen, which is forced upon you even in the 2D mode, and the 3D mode just kept getting worse from that point on. Somehow the R-9 looks worse than it did in the original Dimensions, ditching the cute plastic model look of before and going for an ugly attempt at realism that just doesn’t fit at all. The first stage looks incredibly mediocre, with the cool rotating effect the SNES pulled off not being nearly as nice looking in 3D, and a lot of the enemy models look rather cheap. Again, even the original Dimensions at least made the 3D versions look rather faithful to the original designs.
Then you get to the boss, and you’ll quickly realize a lot of bosses and other hazards in Dimensions III does this weird, stop-motion like animation that makes them look uncanny, combined with the continued trend of the 3D mode looking rather ugly all around, as if it just barely got out the door without having any extra touches on lighting and other fancy effects. Playing Stage 3’s boss fight and flipping between the two modes, it became even more apparent just how badly these bosses animate in the 3D mode. Add in some incredibly ugly stage backgrounds and terrible lighting choices for a lot of the 3D stages, and it somehow makes even the super plastic-y final stage of R-Type 1 in Dimensions look like a masterpiece in comparison. All in all, this 3D mode really could have gone through some more passes and polish to make the models all look much better, rather than feeling like an early render of a 3D mode concept that never got the proper tuneups needed to at least somewhat look decent. You at least have that weird over the shoulder “Crazy” camera making a return, if you wanna make the game even uglier looking.
Surely we can just throw on the 2D mode, jump into the game and have some good Bydo action like on the SNES, even with a slightly awkward screen size and boss music jumpcuts, right?
Gameplay
No, no we cannot. Look, R-Type III on GBA was a notoriously bad port; the music was atrocious and a lot of design quirks in that port felt oh so wrong, but at least you could say the visuals looked fine enough for the handheld and could maybe fool yourself into thinking it was R-Type adjacent feeling enough. The better OST here should make this version curbstomp that port even if it would come nowhere close to the SNES original, and yet some of the design problems here feel similar to, and sometimes even worse than the GBA version.
Let’s start with the most immediate one that will raise a red alarm if you’ve ever played any R-Type in the history of the world; charging your main shot does not pierce through basic enemies. I cannot stress enough how this was such a jarring thing to notice within seconds of booting the game, which led me to restart on the 2D mode hoping I was just seeing things, and nope, your shot can’t pierce enemies here either. That’s right, all the enemies have messed up HP values, all of them. It doesn’t matter if you flip to the 2D mode, there’s so many inaccuracies on the HP.
This alone would be a major anchor against the game, but Dimensions III manages to get far worse from there. Bosses that die in fewer hits or more hits than the original. Enemies that were bulky before suddenly falling apart like paper, and basic grunt enemies not letting you pierce the charge shot through them. Even using the rapid fire on said grunts, it feels like it takes longer to get rid of them than doing the same on the SNES version. This just goes on and on throughout the entire game, and it completely destroys the difficulty balancing of this remake.
In the SNES version I can usually make it to Stage 3 pretty easily, with Stage 1 being the bumpy part, stage 2 being more of a breather, and Stage 3 being tough enough I get stopped but could push through it with more effort. R-Type III is a pretty meticulously designed game, with the slowdown even appearing to be done somewhat in mind with the level design. Here in Dimensions III, Stage 1 gets even harder due to the borked health values, Stage 2 gets tougher, but the boss becomes an insulting joke that can be downed in a few charge shots, and Stage 3 will projectile vomit all over you in 3D mode with the framerate. And I’m reminding you all this is the Switch 2 version we’re talking about here, not the original Switch version, which also has no excuse to have such a problem happen considering this is a shmup. Of course, the 2D mode has the slowdown removed too, which doesn’t help matters much either.
Then I made it to Stage 4 via Infinite Mode, a feature returning from R-Type Dimensions and EX. To quickly recap, Infinite Mode basically makes you god and gives you infinite lives and instant respawn, allowing you to casually go through the game. It’s most useful in local co-op since you can bring a friend with you who might not be skilled with the game at all, but even in a solo aspect the original Dimensions had some merit for infinite mode as it still tallied the amount of times you died in a run, so you could at least practice to cut that number down again and again if you so chose. In Dimensions III, Infinite Mode is pretty much just a cheat mode in Solo, with no count of the lives spent as far as I can tell, and no leaderboards for such either. At least it still might do you OK if you want to bring a friend along to suffer alongside you in this garbage remake.
Anyhow it was the only way I could get myself to see the later levels without feeling like I’m passing a kidney stone trying to play Stage 3 in 3D mode over and over again, (since playing in 2D mode just felt increasingly wrong with how much bugs and hitbox inaccuracies there were all over the place, and the lack of slowdown making some parts harder) so I made it to stage 4, the infamous “back and forth” factory level, switched to the normal game mode to try and beat it for real like I have in its remake incarnation in Final 2, and then realized some of the checkpoints were missing in a notoriously long and brutal stage, with continued messed up HP values. That was when I deleted the game off my Switch 2 without a second thought, since it just proved to me how rushed out the door this remake had to be.
Before I did however, I also noticed a lot of random annoyances and oddities that added up over time. Enemy bullets that failed to get blocked by my force and thus kill me, enemies that would suddenly pop into existence, enemies that spawned off course or most infuriatingly, hitboxes that made no sense whatsoever and would get me killed sometimes trying to do the same routines I would in the SNES version in the 2D mode. If you’ve played the SNES original this feels horrible, and if you never played an R-type ever this will still feel off in some way because of those busted health values; they seriously hurt a lot of the game’s enjoyment!
The lack of some extra cute touches the original Dimensions had, such as in-game achievements, multiple leaderboards for co-op/solo/infinite (instead of just the one that doesn’t even seem to record scores properly, at least I couldn’t get it to), the arcade machine borders, and other such touches like that make for Dimensions III feeling like an overall weaker value, despite it coming many years later. You do get some of the weird 3D visual effects from the original Dimensions like Retro 2.0, but those pale in comparison to all the other extra ways in which the original Dimensions felt like true replacements for the original Arcade games and then some, while also being a perfect newcomer entry point.
With Dimensions III it feels as if this is harder than the original for all the wrong reasons, and at times makes even the GBA version look somewhat sane. Newcomers to R-Type might surely try to train with the infinite mode, but without it counting your deaths per stage so you can work on practicing over time, what’s the point besides the game practically playing itself? And with so many inaccuracies for a set of stages never meant for such health values and checkpoints and enemy spawns to be utterly broken, it just makes the whole game feel like an absolute sloppy mess that makes zero sense while playing, and arguably will taint perception of R-Type III more than anything else.
Conclusion
I don’t know how many times I have to reiterate how horrible this remake is. I played the SNES cart I own back to back during the review process, wondering if maybe I was in a bad mood one day or was a bit too harsh or would feel equally about the original Dimensions, which I also revisited. With all that done, I can still be firm and say that no, Dimensions III is barely worth considering in the slightest, and is an insult to the R-Type franchise as a whole.
At best, it’s nice to see someone wanted R-Type III reissued again for the first time since the Wii, done in the same mold that did R-Type 1/2 so good it might as well replace the originals for many. Unfortunately, R-Type Dimensions III is pretty much what would happen if someone saw a video of a good game, went “I could do that, no problem!”, tried to recreate it by eye watching youtube videos, and then ended up in turmoil trying to get their project out the door. I cannot stress enough how much this feels like a rushed alpha build and nowhere close to final, from bugged sound effects, horrible “remade” visuals with wacko hitboxes, and a complete destruction of the game balance in a way that made the original version of R-Type Delta HD feel like a M2 masterpiece; at least that was largely caused by removing the original game’s slowdown, and not messing up HP values all over the place as well!
There’s no hope going back to the 2D look either, since all the wild inaccuracies apply there too, and it genuinely makes Dimensions III feel like this new team wanted to copy Tozai’s homework from years ago, only to try speedrunning said homework and giving us a remake that feels like it’s copied by eye than by actual attention to detail. When an XBLA era remake has better visuals than a 2026 remake, we’ve encountered a huge problem.
Then there’s the price, my god, the price, and what makes me wonder what the whole point of this release even was, since it sure doesn’t feel like out of desire to give R-Type III the loving remake it deserved. $35 and you get a short game, bugged to hell and back, riddled with inaccuracies and bugs, marred in such a way that not even the 2D mode was spared, and having less cute touches than Dimensions and Dimensions EX had years ago. When Dimensions EX, with two games, multiple cool touches, pretty solid remake visuals, in-game achievements and local/online leaderboards that actually work consistently is $15 MSRP, I cannot possibly fathom who on earth thought pricing the third game $35 digitally was a good idea.
Was this just rushed out the door to pump out physical copies for a dying Limited Print market, capitalizing on the desire from some to avoid Game Key Cards? Is this just a secret means for ININ to raise money to finally ship out their overdue, Strictly Limited Games that have been languishing in “never actually sent to manufacturing” for years and years now? I don’t know the answer to how this ended up so bad, but I do know that with the publisher’s prior history of making games that sometimes are shipped busted in some minor way and never getting fixed, I don’t think it’s good form to just wait for the promised patch to magically fix everything; R-Type Dimensions III should have never been sent out in its current state, period.
In its launch day incarnation, it feels like an Alpha build at best, and having spent a lot of time thinking about this remake and comparing it with many, many other R-Type Ports and reissues over the decades, I’m fairly confident in saying that this is by far the worst R-Type anything to have been released and sanctioned by Tozai/Irem since that GBA port of R-Type III from eons ago; and in some ways I kinda feel like that might have been slightly better, which is a travesty. Do not buy this remake, and do not expect to have them fix it in case they end up treating it like other games they promised to patch and never did. From how shoddy everything feels across the board here, I’m honestly struggling to see just how they could fix this to make it up to the quality of Dimensions EX without scrapping the whole thing and starting from zero.
Yes, R-Type Dimensions III truly is that dreadful, and I never want to think about this remake ever again after this review. I’m angry this will likely be what a lot of people think R-Type III was, and it didn’t deserve such a fate. It didn’t deserve to be shoved out the door at a scam-tier price, but here we are.
I give R-Type Dimensions III a 2 out of 10.