Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection

Genre: Compilation

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is a Compilation containing seven games, released previously on the Nintendo Entertainment System (referred to here as “8-Bit”), Game Boy (referred to here as “Portable”), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (referred to here as “16-Bit”), and Sega Genesis (referred to simply as “Genesis”. I guess the folks behind this release felt Sega would be less litigious in protection over their trademarks). This collection was released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, with this Compilation getting pulled from digital storefronts… er… just a few days before this review will be published in 2026. However, if you really want it, you can still find this game’s physical release for sale in some places, such as PlayAsia. Should you want it, though? Let’s see…

Here is what I thought of each of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Score
Jurassic Park 8-Bit	Top-Down Action-RPG	1	C-
tl;dr This tedious game with unclear goals has you wandering around collecting eggs to unlock buildings to collect more eggs while shooting or evading dinosaurs. While I wouldn’t say this is outright horrible, it’s far from anything I would consider fun.
Jurassic Park Portable	Top-Down Action-RPG	1	D-
tl;dr Take the NES game, give it worse controls, a more constricted field of view, occasional framerate drops, and Game Boy’s signature pea soup green four-color palette, and you get Jurassic Park Portable, a port that takes a poor game and makes it even worse.
Jurassic Park 16-Bit	Top-Down Action-RPG / First-Person Shooter	1	D+
tl;dr This version of Jurassic Park takes the basic premise of the NES game, reworks the level design to make the world a literal maze, and makes indoor sections into Doom-style First-Person Shooter areas with terrible controls and absolutely atrocious framerates and input delay. The result is an absolutely terrible game whose only saving grace is that it at least attempts to differentiate itself from the NES and Game Boy versions.
Jurassic Park Genesis	Action-Platformer	1	D+
tl;dr This game had the brilliant idea of letting you choose between playing Dr. Grant from the movie or a Raptor who is for some reason hunting him down when there are plenty of other things to kill and eat. Then it ruined that good idea by making the game control absolutely horrible, with terrible level design, leaps of faith, and some absolutely hhorrible jumping mechanics. If you have fond memories of playing this game on Sega Genesis as a kid, your memories are wrong.
Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues 16-Bit	Action-Platformer	1-2 Co-Op (Local)	D+
tl;dr This is a mediocre Action-Platformer presenting itself as a hypothetical sequel to Jurassic Park (before we received an actual sequel in The Lost World) with silly cartoony cutscenes, a horribly limiting field of view, and speedy enemies seemingly designed to exploit that limited field of view. To make matters worse, most enemies are bullet sponges. Ugh.
Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues Portable	Action-Platformer	1	C
tl;dr This is actually… not horrible? It’s a fairly average Action-Platformer that requires you to scour each level for every keycard before it’ll let you exit, but the controls are good, the level design is decent, and while the field of view is limiting and forces you to make leaps of faith, the game’s overall slow pace generally keeps enemies from jumping out and surprising you before you can react. This isn’t an especially great Action-Platformer, but it’s the first game in this collection that hasn’t bored me or made me actively crave turning the game off.
Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition	Action-Platformer	1	C-
tl;dr The title makes this sound like an alternate version of a prior game, but this is a sequel to Sega’s first Jurassic Park game on the Genesis (complete with both Dr. Grant and the Velociraptor as selectable characters with their own campaign), and a marked improvement. However, “improvement” doesn’t mean “good” – The controls are much-improved over the first Genesis Jurassic Park game, but hit detection is off, the level design leaves a lot to be desired, and it’s often unclear where you’re meant to be going. Plus, there are some infuriating design decisions like the pterodactyl in the aviary that keeps returning you to the start of the level. Overall, while it’s a better game than it’s predecessor, it’s still not a very good game.

In short… oof, this is not a very good group of games. The best of the lot is surprisingly the Game Boy version of Jurassic Park 2, which is a completely different game from the Super Nintendo version. However, it succeeds merely at being an adequate and capable game, not an excellent one.

It should be noted that even if we limit our scope to only Jurassic Park games released before CD-based platforms, this collection still lacks the MS-DOS and Amiga versions of the NES/Game Boy/SNES game. Probably no great loss there. It also lacks the Sega-developed Game Gear and Sega Master System releases, which were completely different from the Sega Genesis game and reputedly quite good. You’ll also find none of the games based on the Jurassic Park film/book’s sequel, The Lost World, which received versions on Game Boy, Sega Genesis, Game Gear, and Game.com… do I need to mention Game.com ports? I don’t really hear anyone screaming for Game.com ports. All of the decent arcade games are missing here too. In other words, this is in no way a comprehensive collection of Jurassic Park games, even if we limit our view to games of the era of the games in this collection.

Players have various display options, as well as save states and a rewind feature for all games, which will be particularly useful as most of these games are pretty difficult. There’s also a music players for all of the included games, which is nice, though I don’t think the soundtrack in any of these games is exceptional.

Then, there’s the question of value. At $30, this collection works out to a bit over $4 per game. While I do think this is a pretty fair price for retro games, it’s hard to see this as a value given how poor these games actually are. Even less so now that the digital release is unavailable and you’re limited to buying the more-expensive physical release.

Overall, Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is a decent bundle of some pretty bad games, with the best game in the lot being merely “okay”. This is a game I can only recommend to huge fans of the Jurassic Park franchise, those who had nostalgia for these games from when they were younger and need to be shown the error of their ways, or collectors. If you’re looking for good Action-RPG and Action-Platformer titles, you have tons of better options. If you’re looking for a better Jurassic Park game, both Jurassic World Evolution: Complete Edition and LEGO Jurassic World will give you a much, much better time. By comparison, this collection of fossils is best left buried in the past.

tl;dr – Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is a Compilation of seven games from the NES, Game Boy, SNES, and Sega Genesis. Sadly, almost all of these games have aged extremely poorly and are simply not very good games, and the best game of the bunch is a slow Game Boy game I would describe as merely “okay”. Unless you’re a major Jurassic Park fan who has exhausted the much better games based on the franchise currently available, a collector, or someone wearing the rose-tinted shades of nostalgia, I think you’ll agree with me that these games should have remained extinct.

Grade: D+

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