Mighty Knight 2

A side-scrolling brawler with a progression layer that is doing more work than usual. Waves of enemies arrive, you cut through them, and the resources that drop buy upgrades, skills and additional heroes for your squad — so the fights feed a build, and the build is what carries you through fights that are not survivable with starting stats. That structure means the between-fight decisions matter as much as the fighting. Spending everything on your own damage works for a while and then stops, because the later waves arrive in numbers that one character cannot hold; the heroes that join you are the answer, and deciding when to invest in them instead of yourself is the actual game. Skills have cooldowns long enough that using them at the right moment is a choice rather than a rotation. The combat itself is fast and readable, with enough weight in the hits to be satisfying, and it plays cleanly on a keyboard. Runs through the campaign take a while and the difficulty curve is honest — a wall usually means the build needs rethinking rather than that you need to fight better, which is the right kind of wall for this genre.