A name like 100 in 1 Game Collection is bound to trigger anyone who was alive during the Wii era of gaming, the golden age of “crappy underwhelming shovelware”. This isn’t even my first rodeo with a Maximum Entertainment-published collection of minigames with a generic title, as I did review 34 Sports Games: World Edition last year. It was bad. Truly bad. So let’s just say that my expectations for another compilation with another painfully generic name from the same publisher were already kinda low. To my surprise, 100 in 1 Game Collection ended up being a lot better than expected. But don’t think this is a hidden gem or the next party game staple. It’s just not bad. Mediocre, sure, but not outright bad.

I liked the Pac-Man minigame… because it was just Pac-Man…

100 in 1 Game Collection does exactly what its generic title may suggest, but with a slight twist. Sure, there are one hundred minigames to “enjoy” in this package, but you need to unlock them, one by one. In a way, an actually respectable decision. I might not be a fan of all of the games in this package (in fact, I rarely enjoyed them), but having to unlock them one by one made me experiment with them, at least once, and also create a slight sensation of wondering what would I unlock next. All of it was tied together by a bizarre story mode that felt absolutely out of place, even though I somewhat respected the decision for such inclusion, as it made 100 in 1 Game Collection feel less like a cheap cash grab.

Never have I seen a game telling me to tamper my expectations.

That doesn’t mean I enjoyed the story-centric focus. It felt absolutely pointless and off-putting. You play as a mute sprite-based NPC looking for the game he was supposed to come from. You’re guided by a space shooter protagonist with a sassy attitude, who introduces you to other characters from this collection. She also provides commentary on the games you’re playing, and this is where the off-putting nature kicks in – she basically slams all games in this collection. She’s the first one to admit the majority of the titles in this package is generic, a clone of a more famous game, and that you should tamper your expectations a bit. I’m not going to lie, I may have chuckled once or twice, but it felt like the developers themselves weren’t exactly the biggest fans of their creation at the end of the day.

The most basic shooter I have ever seen, but it’s functional, I guess.

As for the minigames themselves… well, they’re generic. You will have fun with a handful of them because they are just blatant clones of more famous arcade titles from back in the day. I had fun with the Bomberman clone because it was just Bomberman; the same can be said about the Pac-Man clone. There was even a Flappy Bird clone. All titles in this collection look like all those old Flash titles, as well as fake mobile games you see all the time in social media ads. Not hideous, but not a single one of them were visually appealing.

I guess I have to admit that the controls are decent. Given how they are mostly based on classic arcade titles, there’s not a lot you can do to ruin them. The games are simple to pick up and play, and are responsive. Most of them just use one, maybe two buttons. That doesn’t mean the gameplay is engaging, however, but in no moment did I feel infuriated with the gameplay. Bored with some generic and poorly-designed games, sure, but complaining about the controls or responsiveness, nope. It’s just painfully average and functional to an “I don’t even know what else to say about them” degree.

This is a minigame that would have been considered lame even for Mario Party standards.

When a collection has a literal hundred games, you’re bound to find one or two you end up playing for quite a while. Even if 100 in 1 Game Collection is one of the least creative gaming compilations I have ever seen, with the in-game characters themselves stating you shouldn’t expect much from it, it’s not the worst thing in the world. There’s just not a lot of creativity in this package. Most games are clones of classics from thirty years ago, with a less exciting presentation. I guess that, if you can find it for cheap one day, you might get a kick out of some of its content, but this is a bonafide example of “quantity over quality”, not the other way around.

100 in 1 Game Collection is available now on PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of 100 in 1 Game Collection was provided by the publisher.