The painful thing about being a fan of licensed games is knowing that they will rarely, if ever, be re-released in the future, due to copyright issues and expired licenses. With the advent of digital storefronts, it’s actually common to see licensed games being delisted after a few years, making them hard to access – you gotta buy a hard copy of Deadpool if you want to play that underrated gem on your PS4 or PS5, for instance. When Limited Run Games announced the Marvel MaXimum Collection, I rejoiced. A bunch of Marvel classics from three decades ago once again available for a wider audience. I’d finally be able to replay some classics from the 90s… and also experience a bunch of mediocre filler.

Oh man. This game is just too good.

The belle of the ball in this collection is the possibility of playing Konami’s X-Men arcade game once again. To this day, this game is still considered to be one of the best beat ’em ups ever created, and yeah, this statement still holds up. It’s still a fantastic game with amazing visuals (especially since they follow the art style featured in the Pryde of the X-Men cartoon, a favorite of mine), incredible music and digitized dialogue, and actual online co-op for up to six people, rollback netcode included. There is no shame in admitting that you want to buy this collection for this game alone: it is worth the entire price of admission. The emulation is pristine, controls are fluid, and customizable difficulty settings make it widely accessible to Marvel fans of any playing experience.

I don’t care if this sounds controversial: I liked playing the Silver Surfer game.

But this collection isn’t solely comprised of the X-Men arcade game. Marvel MaXimum Collection is plastered with other titles from the early 90s, and I’ll be honest with you: not all of them hold up. All of those games are interesting novelties, and I love the fact they have been digitally preserved for modern consoles once again, but out of the other twelve titles included in this package, I’d say that… three of them are also quite decent. The rest ranges from mediocre to downright bad. 

I had way more fun with Maximum Carnage than expected. The SNES port, that is.

My other three main recommendations are the Super Nintendo port of Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, the Data East arcade game Captain America and The Avengers, and, to my absolute shock, the NES title Silver Surfer. Yep, that game that is infamously known on the internet due to one of the Angry Video Game Nerd’s earlier episodes. This tough-as-nails shooter is better experienced on this collection due to the inclusion of rewind features and cheat codes, which let you further enjoy the game’s impressive visuals and amazing soundtrack, which features some of the best compositions ever put into a NES cartridge.

I’m a sucker for the Pryde of the X-Men art style.

Maximum Carnage is an all-around good beat ’em up with excellent visuals for its time, and a decent soundtrack. It’s not groundbreaking by any means, but it certainly was a fun experience. Meanwhile, Captain America and The Avengers is yet another higher-budgeted arcade game with voice acting (in terrible Engrish, but that’s part of the charm), large sprites, but an unreasonable level of difficulty. That being said, it’s a game that feels more interesting to play NOW than back in the day, since we live in an era when people know and care about the Avengers. Back in the 90s, Marvel was 1000% all about X-Men and Spider-Man; no one in their right mind cared about Hawkeye or the Vision. Playing this game in a post-MCU world, however, is somewhat fun, in a “Di Caprio pointing at the screen” kind of way.

She might look like Tinker Bell, but that’s the Wasp.

The rest of the library included in this collection is… passable. The thing about most of them is that they’re either LJN-era licensed shovelware, or underwhelming ports of the good games I’ve mentioned above. For instance, there are more versions of Captain America and The Avengers in this package, but only the arcade original is somewhat good. The NES one, for instance, barely works. There are four ports of Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge, with the better port (the SNES one) being, like, a 6 out a 10, and the worst one (the Game Boy port) being barely playable at all. They’re all novelties at best. Worth a few minutes just for the sake of getting to know them a bit better, but that’s it. Go back to X-Men afterwards.

Not all games in this collection are bangers. You gotta understand, most of them were LJN titles.

There’s no shame in admitting you want to buy the Marvel MaXimum Collection purely and solely due to its magnificent port of the X-Men arcade game. It’s worth the price of admission alone. Think of the rest of the package as a bonus. You might be impressed with some of the games in this package, such as Maximum Carnage on the SNES, but the biggest chunk of this library is here as pieces of nostalgic novelty at best. There’s nothing wrong about it. Limited Run Games did give them a few quality of life improvements, so they’re the best versions they’ve ever been. But just don’t expect a Cowabunga Collection-esque package. We’re still talking about licensed video games from the 90s, some of them having been published by the reviled LJN, so know what to expect.

Marvel MaXimum Collection is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A Copy of Marvel MaXimum Collection was provided by the publisher.