Back to the old school!
The scrolling beat-em-up doesn't get much love these days, as developers struggle to find new ways to keep them fresh for modern audiences, but in their heyday they were incredibly popular. Capcom were undoubtedly the masters of the genre, and were also responsible for injecting some much needed depth into an otherwise simplistic type of game when they released the excellent licensed Dungeons and Dragons games, Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. These titles added RPG-lite elements, a decent fantasy storyline, and magic spells and equipment to be used in battle, and proved to be a great success in the smokey arcades of the 1990's. The next big title that would follow a similar path was the sublime Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn by the talented folks at Treasure - with a Japanese anime visual style and far more levelling up options and alternative routes through stages - this game remains the pinnacle of this hybrid genre. Then things went quiet... until now.
