R-Type is a venerated franchise that has been around since the late 80s. Known for its gruelling difficulty and unique enemy designs, the shmup franchise from Irem has made its way into millions of homes and frustrated millions of players throughout the years. What you may not know however is that years ago on the PSP, Irem released a tactical strategy game based in the R-Type Universe called R-Type Tactics (creative, right?). That release garnered limited acclaim at the time but managed to spawn a Japan-exclusive sequel, R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate. Now developer Granzella Inc. with the help of acclaimed publisher NIS America have brought new life into the R-Type Tactics series with the release of R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos!
R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is a remaster of the original PSP game for modern consoles. It also includes R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate and a new Cosmos epilogue that takes place after Tactics II. It’s the entirety of the R-Type Tactics franchise in a single release and that’s a lot of strategy! All of the R-Type Tactics games have the same basic layout. You’re either fighting as the humans to repel the Bydo Empire from our solar system and crush them into oblivion or you’re playing the Bydo on the opposite end of the battlefield, slaughtering those pesky humans! This is the only R-Type series you can play the Bydo in and it’s a neat concept. Chances are you’re going to start out with the humans though, so we’ll focus on that.
Within R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos, you’ll be selecting missions in order to progress through a single player story mode, first learning to use your ships and commands, and then immediately jumping into battle against the enemy. This is a vintage style hex-based strategy game with movement distances mapped out and fog of war. Each stage gives you a limited number of ships to work with and a set of goals to complete. Mostly your goal is to wipe out all enemies on the map, though you’ll occasionally have to search for and reclaim bases or gather up lost equipment as well. Selecting a ship allows you to view it’s abilities, range, and attack options. You then move and attack. Seems pretty simple, right?
Well, that’s where the R-Type frustration magic starts. First off, there’s no tutorial mode for the game. In fact, the assumption is that you know everything already and if you don’t, it’s on you to read the manual to find out the very specific information you need or figure things out by trial and error. R-Type weapons tend to be extremely linear and even though this is a hex based map, you can’t actually rotate your ships, which forces you to fire your most powerful weapons only in a horizontal straight line. To do that, you’ll have to wait 3-4 turns for them to charge those weapons and unfortunately for you, getting in range is challenging and any hit you take from enemy forces resets your charge, delaying you.
That wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t also have a round timer counting down the turns as you try to come in hot and take out a few enemy ships. You’ve also got a limited number of ships so sacrificing them won’t necessarily help you. Instead you’ll have to creep against the clock to slowly make your way through enemy territory as your turns tick down, your fuel runs out, and your resupply and repair ships lag behind. To make up the difference you’ll have to use the Force options that connect to the ship in traditional R-Type games. In R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos however, they’re independent powerful ships that can ram enemies, doing much more damage than missiles. Why? Who knows. But they work in a pinch!
Once you get the hang of the controls, you’ll start making you way through various levels and expanding your fleet. Once again, that R-Type difficulty rears its ugly head though because in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos, there are almost no resources to gather and you can only build as many ships as you have resources for. And even then, you can’t build them unless you have someone to pilot them, so it’s going to be a long wait to get up your strength. Choose the wrong ships to build and you’re just hosed too. You’ll be too weak to take on enemy ships and you’ll die by attrition.
That’s not great because every single stage is a good hour long in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos. One of the biggest problems with the original game is that it is incredibly slow-paced even by strategy standards; its almost glacial. Movement and selection in the menu system are ponderous, ships don’t move instantly, and the computer moves very slowly as well. Each attack and movement also has a very dated cinema sequence to further slow things down (which you can thankfully turn off). Sure, it’s not much to look at then, but at least it’s 20% faster to play and still painfully slow. That doesn’t change at all in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos from the original game. You’re going to be spending a lot of hours on this one and even strategy fans are going to groan when their hour-long battle ends in a crushing defeat and they realize they’ve built the wrong ships.
Let’s move on to the visuals and sound here before we go any further though. While this is a cleaned up HD version of R-Type Tactics and its accompanying titles, they’re honestly not much to look at. The GUI screen is cluttered and busy with a ton of options and functions. The gameplay itself is fine but rather dark. You can barely see your ships unless you zoom in and if you do, you can’t see the field of play. Even so, there’s not much going on on the main tactical screen, which would be fine in a faster paced game, but some rendered backgrounds and glowing hexagons just don’t cut it. The cinemas are cool, but they also look like they were made in the Saturn era and cleaned up, making the whole game look ancient. That significantly lessens the impact of the gameplay. Audio doesn’t help either because you get the same tracks over and over again here. There were some attempts to make things interesting with a spoken narrative that explains each mission whether you fail or not and the narration is fine, but the text that goes along with it is barely legible and the same track on repeat for every battle makes you twitch inside. Honestly, even as an older game, this doesn’t hold up and that’s before you realize that it’s almost impossible to tell ships that have moved from ships that haven’t due to changes in the visuals from the original game.
Now we get to the fun part. If nothing else has driven you away from R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos, you’re either a hardcore R-Type fan or a masochist. But remember how we said that each battle is an hour or so? Well…there are 30 battles in the first game on the human side and more on the Bydo side. That’s important because unlike every other collection that’s been released in recent memory, in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos you have to beat the game to unlock the next one! That’s right, R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate and the new Cosmos content are entirely inaccessible until you complete the first game! That makes sense, right? And if case you wanted to say, speed things up by making movement instant or skipping combat animations or basically using any other quality of life modifications such as difficulty, you can’t. There are no QoL changes for modern players included with R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos. The developers basically said “here’s the game, play it or don’t, you’re lucky we brought it out at all” and then just shoved it on storefronts. No difficulty sliders for this incredibly hard game, no way to access 2/3 of the game until you wind your way through 30-50 hours of the first game which you’ve probably already played if you’re interested in this one. No way to crank the speed up to make things go faster. It’s a pure slog that will frustrate all but the most tenacious of players.
Sure, there are a bunch of extras such as a complete library of all the critters you fight and some gallery photos and cinemas you can rewatch. There’s even some sort of gift code option in the menu system that likely does something but is entirely unexplained and doesn’t work. But the big problem here is that you can throw all the extras in your like but it doesn’t make R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos any more accessible and the entire design of the game is disrespectful to the time of modern gamers. Gaming is supposed to be fun and it honestly feels like R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos goes out of its way to make the entire experience the least enjoyable it can be.
R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos provides dedicated fans of R-Type with a full release of the original PSP game in HD along with the second game available in English for the first time. It also tacks on additional new content to wrap up the story more fully. However, incredibly bad pacing problems, a lack of accessibility options, a complete lack of tutorials for a complex game, and dated visuals manage to lower the appeal of that package substantially. This is a game that had potential and simply doesn’t live up to it. Tactics aficionados with substantial free time and a love of R-Type might enjoy it but for the average player, this is going to be such a time sink that they’ll likely never even manage to unlock the rest of the game which honestly should have been accessible immediately. In short, unless you’re really, really into R-Type, R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is one to avoid unless it’s on a deep discount sale.
This review is based on a digital copy of R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 55” 1080p TV and portably on the Playstation Portal where it played equally well. R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is also available for Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PS4, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.