Magazine ads included features which did not exist or were not as impressive in the final game which contributed to a negative reception.

[4] The game is played from a first-person perspective, where the player sits inside the cockpit of a flying vehicle and fires missiles at "Regillian" enemies.

Dimension X was advertised over nine months before being available, the ads featuring what appeared to be a texture-mapped ground plane using a technique promoted as "altered perspective scrolling".

In a new product overview in ANALOG Computing, Lee H. Pappas wrote: "The only outstanding feature of the game is the scroll-in-any-direction moire pattern landscape".

[2] In the review in the same issue, Robert T. Martin found the game didn't live up to the developer's standards:Synapse, however, has fallen short with Dimension X.