Marvel MaXimum Collection review

Love Marvel and side-scrolling beat ’em ups? The Marvel MaXimum Collection is for you, bundling together a number of titles from yesteryear that you may or may not already be familiar with depending on your age. Though there’s also a scrolling shooter included, and a 2D platformer for good measure. The trouble is, none of them are what you’d describe as “good”, at least in the modern light of day.

Overall, there are six games included in Marvel MaXimum Collection. For side-scrolling beat ’em up fans there’s X-Men: The Arcade Game, Captain America and The Avengers, Spider-Man/Venom: MaXimum Carnage, and Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety. Then, rounding the package off and adding a bit of variety are action-platformer Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge, and scrolling shooter Silver Surfer.

When it comes to most of the games there are alternate versions included, too. Choose to play Captain America and The Avengers, for example, and you can opt for the arcade version or multiple of the home console ports. Only X-Men: The Arcade Game and Silver Surfer have singular versions available, and the reason for that is simple: they didn’t receive ports to other formats all those years ago, so none can be included here.

X-Men: The Arcade Game is perhaps the best game here, being a side-scrolling beat ’em up that’s still relatively fun to play and enjoyable to look at. It’s incredibly cheap at times, though, so you’ll probably be thankful that you can adjust numerous settings to make it more newcomer-friendly. You can give yourself as many credits as you’d like, too. Some fun can also be had with the multiple versions of Spider-Man/Venom: MaXimum Carnage and Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety, though some gameplay elements may cause a fair degree of frustration.

Captain America and The Avengers is by far the worst side-scrolling beat ’em up included, no matter which version you play, and quite possibly the worst game in the package overall. There really is nothing redeeming about it. That doesn’t mean that Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge and Silver Surfer are anything more than interesting curios, though. There’s a reason why these games aren’t more widely remembered, with Silver Surfer only really having notoriety for its difficulty. Optional cheats mean you can now neuter it if you want.

The games included in Marvel MaXimum Collection aren’t likely to impress any newcomers, then, and those who fondly remember them might even have their memories shattered when paying them another visit. But thanks to its reasonable price point and smattering of extra features, retro fans might want to pick it up. As already mentioned, all games here have either settings you can tweak or optional cheats to enable, which is nice. You can make use of save states, too, and rewind to correct any mistakes you make.

Accessible via the main menu, there’s also a music player, allowing you to immerse yourself in each game’s soundtrack, as well as an archive full of box art, manual and advert scans to pore over. It might not be the most generous of offerings, but it’s appreciated. It’s just a shame that you can’t remap the controls for any of the games included, as they’re not always that intuitive.

If you’re a Marvel fan or really into retro games, you’ll no doubt appreciate that Marvel MaXimum Collection serves up some games that are hard to track down or otherwise impossible to play on modern formats. It’s just a shame that most of the titles included aren’t all that enjoyable to spend time with. Your mileage with the collection might vary, then, but it’s hard to deny that Limited Run Games has put in some effort to preserve these curios.