Rampage Knights

I came into Rampage Knights expecting a throwaway retro brawler and walked out two hours later having lost track of time with the Assassin class, double-jumping over goblin hordes and vanishing mid-combo. That reaction is pretty common. This is a side-scrolling beat-em-up layered over randomised dungeon crawling with permadeath, and the combination works better than it has any right to for a two-person indie from Rake in Grass. The six classes are where most of your replay value lives. The Barbarian soaks hits and swings an oversized sword but can never equip armour, the Warlock survives on demon familiars it cultivates by killing enemies, the Pirate fires cannon balls on a cooldown where other classes roll, and the Assassin moves 20 percent faster than everyone else, double-jumps, and can instant-kill downed enemies with a charged assassination. The Battlemage swaps the dodge roll for a suite of four spells, and the plain Adventurer is the starting-point fallback for new players. Each one genuinely changes how you approach the same randomly generated rooms, and item synergies, buffs, and debuffs layer on top to keep individual runs feeling distinct. Combat itself is fast and physical. You throw enemies into spike pits, pick up barrels to hurl at crowds, and use jump attacks to break shielded enemies open before they absorb your whole combo. Friendly fire is always on in co-op, which adds a chaotic edge. The co-op death system deserves specific credit: when one player dies they come back as a ghost that can still deal chip damage and cause knockback while their partner racks up kills to trigger a revival. That mechanic alone fixes the sitting-on-your-hands problem that kills momentum in most two-player brawlers. The criticisms are real but manageable. Room pacing is uneven. You will occasionally push through three empty corridors in a row, then hit a room that throws endless enemy waves at you with no apparent structure. The difficulty spike between solo and co-op is steep enough that if you try hard mode with a partner you will almost trivialise large chunks of the run. And while runs last roughly an hour, the procedural generation is not deep enough to hide repetition completely after a dozen attempts. The music stutters if you launch from Big Picture mode, a small but irritating technical note. The player reception since launch has stayed solidly positive, which reflects the honest quality-to-price ratio here. It sits at an 80 on Metacritic and carries a Very Positive Steam aggregate across several thousand reviews. Critics correctly landed on comparisons to Golden Axe and The Binding of Isaac, and those hold up. If you grew up with arcade brawlers and have a co-op partner you trust not to swan-dive into every pit, this delivers.

Fred · Scout Team

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