Marvel, Ninja Gaiden, and More: Dotemu Beat ‘Em Up Games Releasing in 2025

When it comes to side-scrolling beat ’em ups, few studios produce brawlers as enormously entertaining as French developer and publisher Dotemu. Whether it’s reviving classic properties in the genre, like Streets of Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or developing their own original titles, Dotemu has an extensive track record of fan-favorite games. At Summer Game Fest 2025, the company showcased three distinctly different games, each involving side-scrolling combat in their own way, but within varying narrative genres and scopes.

The first of these slated for release is Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, developed by The Game Kitchen and made in association with Koei Tecmo for a July 31 launch. Harkening to the classic 2D Ninja Gaiden trilogy on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the game retains the franchise’s precise combat and difficulty, while providing systems like unlockables and upgrades to keep the project accessible to wider audiences looking to embrace their inner ninja. Of course, for those looking for a challenge, Ragebound also possesses game modes with a heightened difficulty guaranteed to make even the most experienced Ninja Gaiden players dig deep to survive and overcome the hordes of mystical enemies.

“From the beginning, we aimed to keep the difficulty on the higher side (as fans would expect), but focused on rewarding quick reflexes and responsive gameplay rather than level memorization. This way, the challenges are meant to feel intense but always fair,” explains The Game Kitchen producer and game director David Jaumandreu. “For hardcore players, we developed a fully-fledged Hard Mode, featuring more aggressive enemy behavior, new boss patterns, and modified level layouts. It’s a mode built to really test players’ skills and push the action to the next level.”

Rather than playing as the franchise’s recurring protagonist Ryu Hayabusa, Ragebound has players control two different ninjas – Ryu’s protege Kenji Mozu and Black Spider Clan warrior Kumori. Each character has their distinct movesets that are more noticeable as players can access more advanced attacks while they are also able to fuse into a composite warrior drawing from both of their abilities. While The Game Kitchen looked to the 2D Ninja Gaiden titles for Ragebound’s gameplay foundation, they also were inspired by the fast-paced and stylish combat prominent in the more recent 3D Ninja Gaiden games as they developed Kenji and Kumori’s playstyles.

“Our goal was to use Ryu’s abilities from Ninja Gaiden III as a foundation, ensuring that all the classic techniques fans loved from the 2D series were faithfully brought into Ragebound. From there, we started crafting a new set of abilities tailored to our original characters and the game’s own vision,” Jaumandreu observes. “Kenji, as Ryu’s disciple, masters the art of the blade with precise yet powerful slashes and can make use of talismans. Kumori, on the other hand, specializes in rapid, aggressive bursts of deadly kunai and is trained to use a variety of lethal ninja weapons.”

Just as Dotemu had revitalized the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game franchise with its 2022 beat ’em up Shredder’s Revenge, the company is doing the same for the classic Marvel brawlers that dominated the arcades in the early ‘90s. Slated for release later in 2025 is MARVEL Cosmic Invasion, maintaining the same timeless gameplay from Shredder’s Revenge but to a colorful rendition of the Marvel Universe. Evoking arcade games like Captain America and the Avengers and 1992’s X-Men, the game draws its inspiration directly from the comics while giving each playable character in its roster their own distinct vibe.

“Our goal with designing each superhero was to make sure they express themselves as closely as they would in the comics,” game director Frederic Gemus says. “We designed them with high level archetypes and combined these different play styles in ways that characters can share a common language while making sure that they were unique.”

As a significant increase from the scope of Shredder’s Revenge, MARVEL Cosmic Invasion boasts 15 playable characters, nine of whom having already been publicly announced. Whether it’s Wolverine getting up close and personal with his adamantium claws or Venom swinging in like a wrecking ball with his symbiote tentacles, each character dispatches waves of enemies in ways that feel true to the source material. In addition to their solo attacks, the characters can also team-up for devastating moves that often clear the screen of enemies, while unique to the pairing, something Dotemu was careful to bring to life.

“Having a cast of 15 superheroes working in tandem means hundreds of different possible combinations, so in order to make things more accessible for the player, we kept a similar logic between each team ups, where the inputs would result in similar types of assists when using the Cosmic Swap,” Gemus says. “Afterwards, it is just a matter of making sure that each superhero’s assist is finely tuned to be awesome-looking and useful in the middle of a brawl!”

In addition to its upcoming licensed games, Dotemu is also working on its own original IP with the fantasy roguelite beat ‘em up Absolum, also due for release in 2025. Players choose from a variety of fantasy genre archetypes and embark on an epic journey, complete with branching paths, as they battle through waves of monsters in classic side-scrolling combat. These elements, along with the arcade-style gameplay strongly add a dimension of replayability to experience the full breadth of the game and its impressive depth.

“We knew from the start that we wanted the game to be an adventure. So we designed the gameplay experience around that feeling,” explains Absolum’s head of game design Jordi Asensio. “How do we make the players explore all the paths and not just one, how do we keep them from optimizing their routes right away? So we created a rich and interesting world filled with new things you want to see and quests you want to complete.”

That depth and heightened element of player choice extends to the characters they choose and how they are customized over the course of the game, something drawn from its Dungeons & Dragons influences. And while the base combat remains consistent, feeling how each of these hero characters control really gives fun new ways to approach the game, especially as the number and difficulty of the enemies increase. For Absolum, this is all part of making the game feel unique to each player as they battle formidable villains in their epic quest.

“One of our inspirations is Dungeon & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. So we kind of started with picking classic D&D classes like the warrior, the rogue, the wizard etc. And started to align them with classic fighting game archetypes,” Asensio elaborates. “We came up with unique characters that despite being based on archetypes, can step a little out with all the upgrades you can find during a run. This way it’s up to the players to find their preferred customization.”

Published by Dotemu, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound will be released for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC on July 31. Absolum and MARVEL Cosmic Invasion will be released for consoles and PC later in 2025.