Up Hero

Up Hero drops a single fighter into a field that keeps filling with monsters, then takes the attack button away. The swinging happens on its own whenever something comes close enough, which leaves you one job: deciding where the hero should be standing.

That job is larger than it sounds. Standing in the middle means being surrounded from two sides at once, and standing at the edge means the crowd arrives as a wall rather than a stream. Good positions are the ones a horde has to walk into single file.

Levelling happens during the fight rather than between fights. Each level offers a new skill or a bigger version of an old one, and the offers arrive while monsters are still moving, so the choice is made under pressure instead of in a quiet menu. The locations change too, each with its own monsters and a boss at the end of it.

The weapons are not only swords: firearms and magic are there as well, and all three can be mixed in a single run. Skills stack into combinations rather than replacing one another, which means two runs that started identically can end up playing very differently. Runs are short, and a bad one still teaches you which combination was never going to hold.