I love a good side-scrolling arcade brawler. I grew up playing this genre extensively, both on arcade machines and home consoles. It’s hard to pick a true favorite as there are so many standout examples of this genre, particularly if you look back twenty or thirty years. Double Dragon, Final Fight, Knights of the Round, Dungeons and Dragons: The Tower of Doom, Turtles in Time…and so many more are worthy of a revisit even now.
These games blend fun flashy graphics with multiple playable characters and intense attack combos that formed the design backbone for more modern action games. If you’ve ever enjoyed a God of War or a Dark Souls, you’d probably get a kick out of this older arcade genre as well.
I like these games enough that I’ll even have a great time with a mediocre installment. I recently played and reviewed TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Although it’s a weird mashup of 2017 arcade content and stapled-on 2024 additions, I still had enough fun with it that I played through it twice in short order, and I’m thinking of giving it another go later this afternoon.
Over the last decade or so, the brawler genre has seen a minor resurgence. This has produced some larger-budget efforts like Shredder’s Revenge, Streets of Rage IV, and the new…
