7 Best Genesis Beat 'Em Ups

Rare made this crossover with Billy and Jimmy Lee from Double Dragon, though Technos only licensed the characters and had nothing else to do with it. The Dark Queen has joined forces with Shadow Boss, and their plan involves a colossal rat-ship that explodes out of the moon. It is the first Battletoads game where all three Toads are playable. Fighting comes first this time, and the platforming and vehicle gimmicks take a back seat. When you lose a life, you now respawn in place.

Do not mistake any of that for mercy. After the first two stages the margin for error gets small, and few players beat it without cheating. Level four turns into a space shooter borrowed from Asteroids, of all things. The Genesis version sounds better than the Super Nintendo one and feels closer to the NES original.

This was the first Turtles game on a Sega console, out in August 1992. A young Konami team led by Hiromi Sumida built it as a remix, with levels taken from The Arcade Game and Turtles in Time plus a few new sections. Shredder uses the Hyperstone, a dangerous stone from Dimension X, to shrink Manhattan down to collectible size. There are less than half as many levels as Turtles in Time, but each one is longer.

It is the only console game where Tatsu from the live action movies shows up as a boss. Smarter enemies make it a bit more challenging than the Super Nintendo Turtles in Time. The new songs for the Shredder's Hideout stages hold their own against the best SNES tracks. The voice clips are another story: extremely low quality, like Shredder phoned them in. It often gets overshadowed by Turtles in Time, but it is just as good a game overall.

Altered Beast was directed by Makoto Uchida, his first time leading a project. Zeus raises a fallen warrior from the dead and sends him through the underworld to rescue his daughter Athena from the evil lord Neff. White wolves drop power orbs, and the second one tears your shirt apart, and the third turns you into a beast. Each stage has its own beast, like a wolf that throws fireballs or a dragon that flies. It was the pack-in game when the Genesis launched in North America in 1989.

It is honestly one of Sega's weaker games, and its visuals are why Sega picked it to show off the console. The difficulty is incredibly high. It was designed as an arcade credit feeder, and at home you only get limited continues. Neff is polite, though, and refuses to fight you if you have not transformed yet.

Sega Technical Institute made Comix Zone from an idea by programmer Peter Morawiec, who first showed it off in a 1992 demo video called Joe Pencil Trapped In The Comix Zone. Sketch Turner is a cartoonist and part time rock musician who gets pulled into his own comic by Mortus, his villain, who keeps drawing new hazards in. You fight from panel to panel on a single plane. Sketch can tear off part of the page and throw it as a paper airplane at the cost of some health. His pet rat Roadkill pulls switches and finds hidden items.

It is one of the best looking games on the system, and Howard Drossin's soundtrack is one of the most beloved of the late Genesis games. It is also very hard. Late in development, Sega's testing department asked for a higher difficulty, and Morawiec later regretted listening. It came out in July 1995, too late to sell well, and has since built a cult following.

Lead designer Makoto Uchida was fond of action movies, particularly the Conan films, and Golden Axe shows it. Ax Battler is the all-round barbarian and Tyris Flare is a fantastic magic user. The dwarf Gilius Thunderhead is the strongest of the group, but his magic is the weakest. Little gnomes run through every level, and smacking them knocks loose magic pots. The more pots you hold, the bigger the spell, and every spell hits every enemy on the screen.

Finishing a combo plays a particularly brutal animation for the time, and defeated enemies stay on the screen forever, unlike almost every other beat 'em up. The Genesis version adds Death Adder's mentor, Death Bringer, as the true final boss. Its success started a whole series, beginning with Golden Axe II in 1991. The Genesis version came to the Nintendo Classics service in October 2021.

The working title was DSWAT, which tells you a lot. Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding are ex-cops who team up with Adam Hunter and give up their badges to take down Mr. X and his Syndicate. The police are either bought out or too scared to help, except for one loyal guy with a rocket launcher, who is your special attack. Axel is basically Cody from Final Fight with a cool headband. It set up the series' two-player co-op and Yuzo Koshiro's acclaimed techno soundtrack.

It topped the UK Mega Drive charts when it came out and went on to be one of Sega's best-selling games. Next to its sequel it looks like a middling first effort. Players still put it second here, ahead of everything except the game that improved on it.

Streets of Rage 2 was made by an ad hoc team of several companies, including Ancient. Ayano Koshiro was the lead graphic designer, while her brother Yuzo Koshiro composed the music, with three contributions from Motohiro Kawashima. He wrote it on outdated NEC PC-8801 hardware using his own audio programming language. Mr. X has captured Adam, so Axel and Blaze bring in Max Thunder, a pro wrestler, and Eddie "Skate" Hunter, Adam's little brother on roller skates. Every character gets a Blitz Attack and special moves that cost a little health.

Yes, the heroes send a kid in roller skates to fight a crime empire, and he holds up fine. It is quite possibly one of the finest beat 'em ups on Sega's console, and it has ended up on lists of the greatest games of all time. Players recommend it more than any other Genesis beat 'em up.