There’s a lot of these retro collections about at the moment, I’ve reviewed several this year. Red Art Studios are the next team to bring more retro games to modern machines with Joe & Mac Retro Collection.

“Fight huge dinosaurs and crafty cavemen while looking for the tribe’s kidnapped damsels in this retro collection featuring the three Joe & Mac SNES games!”

Back in the day, I only ever played the first game on the SNES, I quite liked it. The other two games passed me by, so this little collection is a great way for me to play catch up. What you get is the Joe and Mac trilogy… with some quite awkward titling. You get the original Joe & Mac, the sequel Congo’s Caper, and Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics… that is the third game, but is titled as the second. And that’s if you just stick to the PAL relases, the Japanese titles are quite different.

Anyway, along with the three games you get a little bit of historical documentation. You can do virtual unboxing of all three games, each with full HD scans of the manuals, virtual cartridges. You can even open the PAL, NTSC, and Japanese boxes. There’s a music player that features all the tunes from all three games. And there’s a gallery with scketches and artwork. Of course, this being a retro collection means you get all the usuall screen/display settings. CRT filter, aspect ratios, etc.

One thing I found a bit disappointing was what, although you get to do the virtual unboxing with the PAL, NTSC, and Japanese versions of all three games, you don’t get to play them. You only get the (I think) NTSC versions. Also, you only get the SNES ports of the games. No original arcade Joe & Mac here. No Mega Drive. No Game Boy. So as a collection, it is a little light.

As for playing the games themselves. There’s a boss rush mode for all three, and the standard just playing through the story like back in the day. As with any retro collection these days, you get save states and a rewind feature for those times when your relasie that your teenage reactions left you thirty years ago.

All three games here are still fun. I was more than happy to sit here in 2026 and play through all the titles from the early-mid 90s. But, I think the collection is a bit thin in terms of content. As I say, you get the three SNES versions and that’s it. The virtual unboxing is only interesting for the handful of minutes it’ll take you to get through it. The music player is great for when you want some 16-bit caveman tunes, but how often will that come up?

Joe & Mac Retro Collection is a decent retro colletion, not a great one, it’s okay. Out now for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.