10 Best Beat 'Em Up Video Games Of All TIme

The old school beat em' up's heyday ran from the late eighties to the nineties, urged on by big macho movies of the period like Streets Of Fire and anything starring Steven Seagal, Arnie or Sly.

While there have been scattered revivals in recent years – Viewtiful Joe, Castle Crashers and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game - these often featured diminutive or geeky heroes, over the beefed up, cut off t-shirt clad heroes of yesteryear.

It wasn’t all brainless fun, though, with a bunch of key developers at the time –Technos Japan, Sega and Capcom to name a fistful – putting serious thought into what they were creating, each adding little mod cons and innovations to their games, which in turn would get picked up by the next developer and so on and so forth.

This meant that with each brawler that hit shelves, gamers had something new to enjoy, be it the addition of a double-tap run up on your foes, or the ability to waltz up to a baddie and grab him.

Not many genres out there progressed in this manner at such rapid speed - a cause for celebration, if ever there was one.

This sophomoric effort from developer Omega Force pretty much kicked off the whole Dynasty Warriors franchise, showing that even at the turn of the nougties the brawler genre still had some life in it.

The game was just what fight fans had been waiting for when released, offering players the chance to hack, slash and pirouette across eight maps, getting all bloody in battles that include hordes of foes.

Out of all the twenty-eight playable characters to choose from, a number have become household names and the majority of us that played this game still have nightmares about that fateful time we dared lay a hand on Liu Bei – never in history has a character gone from stoic to apeshit at such speed.

At nearly twenty-years old, Dynasty Warriors 2 is rightly held up to be one of the true PS2 classics.