Thank you Clear River Games for sending us this game to review!

Every time I play a new R-Type game, I'm quickly reminded how wickedly difficult they are. R-Type Delta was released for the original PlayStation as the first 3D-rendered R-Type game, and is the fourth game released in the series. When I first played the game, I figured a home-release would be easier than those released to arcades first, right? Well, I was wrong - this game is just as tough as the others. Like many games from older eras, you get the most out of them by replaying it over and over, mastering each section as you slowly get farther. Eventually, through trial and error and lots of persistence, you will hopefully come out on top.

Like other R-Type games, there is some kind of story where you have a reason to blow up the Bydo menace once again. And like in those games, I don't really know what the story is. Even if it was explained it wouldn't matter, as you just blow up what's in front of you without questioning it. The store page promises environmental storytelling, and I suppose that's true, but whatever. The shooting action, and avoiding death as much as possible, is the driving force behind the gameplay and the main draw.

R-Type Delta is a horizontal shoot 'em up. In each level, you move from left to right while blasting whatever gets in your way. While a majority of enemies do approach from the right, enough of them come from every direction that you really have to be careful and stay on your toes. On top of just the enemies, of course they fill the screen with bullets to avoid, keeping you on the edge of your seat at all times. With instant deaths from a single hit, there are no shortage of ways to die.

You have more than just the enemies to worry about, but also the environmental hazards of the levels themselves. Walls, debris, and even large falling rocks all play a part in trying to kill you. All of these, along with enemies, work together to force players to manage many things at once to avoid death.

And the difficulty comes on pretty quickly. While the first level isn't too terrible, as soon as the second level hits there are the first of many difficulty mountains to overcome. Many games have difficulty spikes, but that would be dramatically underselling it here. I burned through hundreds of lives making it through the second level the first time in Practice mode, and I am yet to make it through in a real playthrough without cheating despite many, many tries.

The funny thing is, there are three difficulty levels: Kids, Human, and Bydo. While Kids mode generally has less bullets on the screen than Human, I found the difficulty gap between Human and Kids to be much smaller than I might have otherwise expected, so I played most of the game on Human difficulty. Regardless, even on Kids mode, it's still quite hard.

If you decide to be like me and cheat to get through the game, realize that Steam Achievements will no longer trigger. It's not clear to me if that is forever or just during that playthrough, but I haven't triggered any more since then, so I can't be sure. I found the cheats on Steam Guides, as well as GameFaqs. The cheats for the original game still work exactly the same on this newer version.

I have to admit that one reason this review took me so long is because it's just so difficult that I was stuck until I discovered the cheat codes recently. I feel like I'm getting closer, but I'm not quite there yet on the second level, which hardly accounts for the rest after that. The part that tripped me up the most is where you have to get through a tiny passageway with an insane number of spawning enemies coming at you from all directions. There are key powerups given to you at certain places, and even getting them is itself risky, but you can't get through it without them. You also may have to switch what side your Force powerup is on in order to make it through. It's just brutal.

Speaking of powerups, there are several, and managing them is key to victory. The basic powerup of any R-Type game is the Force, which is a ball that can attach to the front or the rear of your ship. The Force can be powered up by collecting red, blue, or yellow orbs that change the active attack to the one corresponding to the color. Red tends to be direct straight-ahead damage, blue attachs are spread out or homing, while yellow tends to be wide area attacks or hug the walls. Red is the most powerful in most situations, and yellow the weakest, with a few notable exceptions.

I should probably point out that there are three ships available at the start of the game, and how they handle Force powerups is different between them. The original ship from R-Type is the R9, and it has the simplest powerups with simple Force behavior. It's generally considered the weakest of the three.

The RX is called the tentacle type, and is pretty powerful. Once you collect a Force, you can either attach it to your ship, or have it detached and roaming about shooting on its own seeking enemies. Both modes are very useful, especially with the red power, as it has a nice forward-shooting wide beam. Yellow has tentacles that are situationally helpful, but often not very good. Blue is decent but not amazing, as always. Overall I enjoyed using this ship.

The R13 is not as easy to use as the R9, but it's arguably the most powerful. This one is called the lasso type. For this Force type, when it's attached each color shoots something as with the others, though slightly different. Red is a straight laser beam. Blue has angled homing shots. Yellow has a rotating turret that shoots a laser in a semicircle pattern, with a delay between shots. It's strange, and not that powerful, but situationally very useful. What makes R13 so unique is not just these, but also when you detach the Force, the force itself will do significant damage while impacting the enemy, but also the lasso string itself can do light damage as well. A truly unique ship!

There are other powerups other than the Force itself, though those are certainly the most important for many reasons. The bits provide a bit (har har) of protection, and with the red powerup, can shoot as well. If you have one it's above you, and with two there is one above and below. They can damage enemies and absorb shots they impact. The other upgrade is the missiles. Each ship's missiles are slightly different, but they essentially just shoot another shot towards the bottom of the screen or towards enemies. More damage always helps, but it's the most forgettable of all of the upgrades.

I found that most of the time, I would use the button that does repeat fire to clear the area of baddies as I moved my ship around. But there is another fire button as well, which fires a single shot, or if held, charges your cannon. After charging up, you can release the wave cannon to not only do significantly more damage than the repeated shots in the same timeframe would likely do, but also clear out a bit of the area around or in front of you. Each ship has a slightly different charged shot, so it's worth trying that out in many situations.

The last major weapon is the Delta mode. At the bottom of the screen, there is a Dose gauge. When it's filled to 100, you can activate Delta mode for a short time until the gauge runs out. Each ship has a different Delta attack, with some activating a swirling defensive laser (R9) or activating some kind of screen-clearing blast. These are very powerful, and since shooting other enemies is how you recharge them, need to be used with care. I should probably get in the habit of using these more often, honestly.

Using these many pieces of your arsenal is critical to doing well. Since the Force can block impacts or shots in many cases, as well as help you shoot in whichever direction it's attached, managing whether it's attached to your front or rear is critical in surviving many levels or defeating bosses more quickly. R-Type Delta's levels are all pre-planned and never random, so memorization is a critical part of overcoming the many difficult obstacles the game offers.

Being originally a PlayStation game, I was surprised to see that the developers chose to make this remake as faithful to the original PS1 art style as possible. While the graphics are a higher resolution compared to the original, the quirky pop-in of 3D on the PlayStation is faithfully reproduced here rather than corrected like I would have expected on a modern remake. While I kind of wish they offered a cleaned-up option like some of the other R-Type ports, I have to admit that this choice certainly has some charm.

For those unaware, as one of the first 3D home consoles, the PlayStation was lacking a Z-buffer which is how most other consoles and PCs noted the depth of a pixel. That's why on even classic consoles like the Nintendo 64, polygons were smooth and predictable in motion, but on the original PlayStation (PS1), they would sometimes pop or warp. The developers of R-Type Delta: HD Boosted must have spent considerable time getting this 3D effect to simulate those simpler times just right, since modern hardware doesn't act like this anymore. Whatever the case, they did an excellent job.

The art style itself, despite being low-polygon, does look nice for what it is, though certainly dated. Even the higher resolution offered here is still pretty low resolution. Nevertheless, the art conveys pretty well the enemies, including the mechanistic robots during earlier levels, or the more organic opponents later on. The fetus-shaped things flying around late in the game are pretty disturbing, and some of the bulbous bloody stuff looks pretty strange, also.

The music is also pretty good for what it is, as it's appropriately tense or spooky. I really like how when your ship goes into the water that there is a muting effect that sounds just like if you put your head underwater. They did a great job there. Shots, blasts, and lasers also sound appropriate, as does your ship exploding - which I heard a lot.

Morally, it's not too far out of what you might expect. There is a lot of spaceship and shooting violence. Most of the enemies are mechanical, but later on they become strange and organic, with the aforementioned floating fetuses being quite disturbing. There is some blood late game as the enemies become more fleshy. There are no language concerns that I noted.

Technically it runs quite well on any PC really, and runs great on Steam Deck. Strangely, it doesn't run on desktop Linux (despite SteamOS being Linux) unless you supply the command-line argument 'SteamDeck=1' in the launch options. One strange quirk is that you can't exit the game without a keyboard, as you need to press the Escape key to quit. On the Steam Deck, I was able to use the integrated Steam interface to quit the game, but I couldn't from within it. I suppose you could program a macro to one of the gamepad buttons in Steam to act as Escape, but still that's a surprising oversight.

R-Type Delta: HD Boosted is a very faithful love-letter to the PlayStation classic R-Type Delta. The price is about right at $24.99 considering you're likely to get a lot of time out of this game unless you're a master or played the original a whole lot. Whatever the case, it's a lot of fun if you enjoy a challenge and don't mind trying and trying again. If you get frustrated easily, I recommend you look elsewhere. If you like classic shoot 'em ups, R-Type Delta: HD Boosted is a really good entry in a well-loved classic franchise and certainly worth your time.