The best retro handheld game consoles offer a portable way to enjoy iconic games. These compact and often very affordable consoles allow us to indulge our nostalgia for retro graphics and relive engaging gameplay in remasters of classic titles while providing pocket-sized convenience that we can enjoy on the go.
The format has seen a boom in recent years, and there’s now a lot of choice, from premium options to budget handheld consoles that support tons of emulations. We’ve reviewed many of them on the site, and below I’ve rounded up our findings in one place to provide an overview of the best retro handheld consoles available today.
The best retro handheld game consoles
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Topping our list of the best retro handheld game consoles, the Evercade EXP (and the newer EXP-R) focus on retro collections, running officially licensed cartridges with compilations of classic games from multiple consoles. The collections are inexpensive and contain between six and eight titles, making them a great way to build up a sizable retro games collection.
Our reviewer loved the design of this handheld, finding it to be well built, comfortable and responsive, wrapped in a modern, portable package. It’s really versatile too since the EXP can be connected to a TV for playing at home, and the TATE mode turns it into a vertical system for classic shooters (although the buttons aren’t ideally placed for this orientation).
The console comes with 18 Capcom games pre-installed, including Final Fight, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and Strider; and a special bundle comes with the IREM Arcade 1 collection, a cart of classic ’80s arcade games, including R-Type, making it great value. The EXP-R has the same features and runs the same cartridges but packs a new chipset that runs cooler and also boasts a textured grip on the back for comfort. It’s available bundled with Tomb Raider.
Read more: Full Evercade EXP review
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For a sleek, premium retro handheld, we love this FPGA, which plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges. FPGA refers to that fact that it provides hardware-level emulation via the chip instead of relying on software to do it. Basically, it uses reverse engineered data to implement the behaviour of the original hardware, which can make it more accurate and efficient.
We found it to be the ideal way to play Nintendo’s portable back catalogue, providing latency-free play and great battery life. It has an ultra-sharp LCD display with different filters to recreate the look of different retro devices. It also has accurate sound, plus HDMI output so you can connect to an external display. It supports adapters for other systems like Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket too.
The design perfectly apes the Game Boy look but with a slightly more compact size, some extra buttons and a more premium feel. It has a satisfying weight to it, which inspires confidence in the build and helps justify the price, which is relatively expensive compared to other devices on this list.
Read more: full Analogue Pocket review
The Retroid brand makes a range of retro handheld game consoles. The Android-running Pocket 5 is super portable, has a great OLED display and comes in several fun colour options.
It’s just a tiny bit smaller than a Nintendo Switch Lite (Retroid also has the more genuinely pocketable Pocket Mini), and we found it to be comfortable to hold for long periods, significantly improving on the ergonomics of the Pocket 4 Pro with the addition of a decent grip.
There are no games preloaded, but it supports a wide range of titles via emulators, app stores and cloud gaming services, both retro and modern titles. In our testing, it was able to handle a wide range of games, from native Android games to N64 and PS1 emulation, and even Wii titles and Roblox. On the downside, it did get quite warm at times. and the speakers aren’t anything to shout about.
Designed by Grant Sinclair, the nephew of the ZX Spectrum inventor, the GamerCard is a Raspberry Pi-based gaming console barely larger than the size of an old floppy disk (remember those?). With a 4-inch square IPS screen, it’s just 6.5mm thick and weighs 100g.
That makes this easily the most genuinely pocket-size retro handheld console on this list. It’s definitely possible to carry this on you to use on the go without needing a bag. The two circular pad controls remind me of the iPod a little and give the device a sleek, minimalist feel with their eight tactile snap-dome buttons. The GamerCard somehow feels retro and modern at the same time.
With a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor and 128GB of internal storage, it’s a working mini PC that supports emulators like Recalbox, RetroPie and Lakka, PICO-8 titles and coding in MicroPython, C, C++, BASIC and more, encouraging game making as well as playing. It comes with a bundle of arcade games preinstalled so you can get playing right away.
The price of $170 / £125 makes the Anbernic below better deals in terms of money-to-spec, but then it doesn’t offer the premium feel and innovative design of the GamerCard.
Anbernic’s popular open-source handhelds running Linux-based emulators are great value for playing retro games from consoles like SNES, Genesis and more. There are lots of models and colour options even just within the RG351 series alone.
Both the RG351M and RG351P are strong options here. The former feels more premium, with an all-aluminium body and internal WiFi. The 351P requires a USB dongle for WiFi when you want to update the system and download game covers. It does feel cheaper too and performance can lag at times too, but it’s the best value retro handheld that we can recommend if you’re looking for a device that can play a wide variety of games, and we found it comfortable to use for long sessions.
The main buttons and the D-pad have a reassuring clickiness and the analogue sticks feel surprisingly premium. The operating system is also well-designed and polished, although the 3:2 screen, while good for Game Boy Advance isn’t so good for 4:3 systems. The 64GB SD card that comes included has a massive 2,500 retro games. Not all of them are exactly classics, mind, but it’s easy to load more games on to the card to transfer them over from a laptop. That makes this a great value retro handheld console at just under $50 / £60.
Also consider
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It’s not strictly a retro console, and it’s more expensive than the retro handhelds on this list, but the Nintendo Switch 2 has a nostalgic feel to it thanks to its fun design and the fact that this is Nintendo. It’s also great for retro remakes, ports and classic games.
A Nintendo Online subscription offers lots of retro games with new ones added each month. And there’s the bonus that you also get to play Donkey Kong Bananza and all the other best Switch 2 games. We found the new model to be well built, notably more powerful than its predecessor, and we loved the new magnetic Joy-Cons that now also function as mice.
Read more: see our full Nintendo Switch 2 review
Again, not strictly ‘retro,’ but the Valve Steam Deck is well worth considering if you want a mix of gaming, not just classics. It’s a powerful handheld PC capable of running retro emulators and PC ports with ease, making it a favorite for those who want a great all-round portable console.
It’s bigger and heavier than a Nintendo Switch (see above), but has higher-spec features with a custom AMD GPU and CPU. It supports 30 and 60 frames per second, and there’s also an OLED version. We found battery life could be liable to run down fast, sometimes requiring a tweaking of settings, and the fan can make quite some noise, but this is the nearest thing we have to a handheld gaming PC and still the best option if you want to take your PC game collection on the move with you.
