MARVEL MaXimum Collection Review

Limited Run Games has built a reputation on curating retro game anthologies with real care, and MARVEL MaXimum Collection is its attempt to do for 1990s Marvel licensed games what its Castlevania and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collections did for their respective franchises. The lineup includes arcade cabinets, SNES and Genesis titles, and NES classics spanning the era's Marvel gaming boom, and for the games it gets right, this is a genuinely welcome piece of preservation. The problem is that the games it gets right sit alongside a rocky launch and a handful of inclusions that even devoted fans admit are simply bad.

X-Men: The Arcade Game is the reason to buy this

There's near-universal agreement on what the collection's crown jewel is. X-Men: The Arcade Game, officially licensed and supporting up to six simultaneous players, is described repeatedly as the standout title, with reviewers who grew up feeding quarters into the cabinet calling its inclusion here alone worth the price of admission. One longtime fan specifically notes this now completes an unofficial trilogy of beloved 90s arcade cabinets available on Steam, alongside Turtles in Time, joking that only a Simpsons arcade re-release remains to round out "the big three." Beyond the marquee title, Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage draws consistent praise as a smooth, responsive beat-'em-up that holds up well, and Silver Surfer for NES, while acknowledged as genuinely difficult, is called manageable and enjoyable with practice by players willing to engage with its punishing 8-bit design.

Modern conveniences help make the harder titles approachable rather than frustrating. Rewind and save-state features built into the pause menu let players push through sections that would have demanded real skill or a pocket full of quarters back in the arcade era, and reviewers specifically credit this with letting them finally finish games they never could as kids. Presentation quality is also a genuine strength: the collection runs at 60fps with 2K resolution support, ships with a curated set of bonus soundtracks, artwork, and manuals, and includes newly commissioned box art that multiple reviewers single out as vibrant and well made in its own right.

A buggy launch and an inconsistent lineup

The collection's problems start with its multiplayer implementation. Online co-op is available on exactly one game, X-Men: The Arcade Game, and at launch its netcode was badly broken — reviewers report six-player lobbies freezing entirely, players getting disconnected mid-session, and severe input lag even in successful connections. Several reviewers note the developer has since patched a number of these issues, and at least one review was explicitly updated to acknowledge the improvement, but the consensus among players who bought in primarily for co-op is that the launch state fell well short of the experience advertised. Captain America and the Avengers, a natural candidate for local or online co-op given its four-player arcade origins, ships with no multiplayer support at all in this collection, a gap multiple reviewers call out as a missed opportunity.

The broader lineup selection also draws real criticism. Alongside the standouts, the collection includes console titles several reviewers describe as rushed or simply bad by any era's standards — Spider-Man and the X-Men for NES in particular draws blunt condemnation, and Separation Anxiety, the sequel to Maximum Carnage, is repeatedly called a disappointing, half-finished-feeling follow-up that restricts basic mechanics like web-swinging in ways the original didn't. Notable absences sting too: multiple longtime fans specifically wanted the Sega Genesis X-Men and X-Men 2: Clone Wars titles included and were disappointed to find them missing, alongside other era-appropriate titles like Spider-Man vs. Kingpin and Wolverine: Adamantium Rage.

Value depends heavily on what you're after

Pricing sentiment in the review base splits almost exactly along the same lines as the game-by-game quality assessment. Players who bought in for X-Men: The Arcade Game specifically, treating everything else as a bonus, consistently describe the collection as good value even during its rockiest launch days, with more than one reviewer framing the arcade highlight alone as worth the cost given how many quarters the original cabinet would have eaten over an equivalent amount of playtime. Players who expected a more consistently strong lineup across all six-plus included titles are less forgiving, with one detailed breakdown rating the collection as having exactly one legitimately great game, a couple of decent ones, and the rest as filler not worth revisiting, suggesting a fairer price closer to ten dollars for that portion of the audience. Both readings are consistent with the review base as a whole: this isn't a collection where every included game earns its place, and buyers should walk in with realistic expectations about which specific titles they're actually paying for.

It's also worth noting this release follows the same template as Limited Run's previous Castlevania and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anthology collections, which several reviewers reference directly as a point of comparison. Fans of those earlier collections who came in expecting a similarly tight, consistently strong lineup are the ones most likely to be disappointed by MARVEL MaXimum Collection's larger proportion of weaker console ports, even as the arcade-era highlights hold up just as well as anything in Limited Run's back catalogue.

Final Verdict

MARVEL MaXimum Collection succeeds where it matters most for its core audience: a genuinely excellent, officially licensed re-release of X-Men: The Arcade Game, backed by a handful of other well-regarded 1990s Marvel titles and thoughtful modern conveniences like rewind and save states. But it's held back by a collection that leans harder on filler than its stronger Limited Run predecessors, an online implementation that badly needed post-launch patches to become usable, and a lineup that skips several titles its own audience specifically wanted included. Worth owning for the arcade highlights alone, but this is a collection to buy on sale rather than at full price unless X-Men Arcade in particular is what you're after.