Top 5 fighting games for mobile

I’m always a little disappointed at fights in real life. It’s mainly because the combatants don’t dance around gracefully like aerial ballet dancers, gracefully performing outrageously athletic moves, such as in films or games.

Instead, real life fights are ugly, painful, and have a distinct lack of fireballs, which is incredibly disappointing.

So don’t bother picking on someone your own size - here are five mobile games that’ll quench your thirst for bloody violence (and fireballs) without the risk of actually getting hurt.

Blasting out of mobile portals at the tail-end of last year, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3’s adaptable control schemes and blistering pace caught us by surprise, despite some positive-looking screenshots revealed prior to release.

Everything you remember about the arcade original, including the fatalities and FMV-style characters, are present and correct, with only the full character roster failing to make the transition unscathed.

While the final boss fight may be ridiculously hard, there’s no denying that UMKIII packs one heck of a powerful punch on mobiles.

It may lack the ground-breaking 3D graphics of the original release, but Tekken Mobile is a great example of how to properly translate an intricate fighting game to mobiles, managing to adapt the control scheme perfectly to the keypad.

Like UMKIII there have been edits made to the character roster, but that doesn’t take the gloss off the smooth, tactical combat and the excellent two-player Bluetooth mode.

Both the previous games mentioned in this article have noticeably had content cut from their original - characters, locations, and the like. It’s what you’d expect, given the size and memory constraints of their new home.

Nobody told Capcom that, though, as it managed to squeeze an almost pixel-perfect translation of one of the key titles in the genre’s history, Super Street Fighter II, into handsets.

With a control method tastefully adapted to keypads, and absolutely no corners cut in the process, Super Street Fighter II may not be the most approachable or attractive of games but it’s still as deep and engaging as ever.

Good fighting games aren’t all about men with tiger heads or fireballs (disappointingly), as Super K.O Boxing 2 amply demonstrates.

Taking the form of a Super Punch-Out! style cartoon boxer, SKOB 2’s control scheme may be a lot simpler than the above titles, but it somehow manages to retain the same level of depth to the combat.

Fast and brutal like a real fight, but infinitely less painful and far more enjoyable, Super K.O. Boxing 2 is worth stepping into the ring for.

No self-respecting list of fighting games could possible ignore the man who can slam a revolving door, so it’s a good thing (for all our sakes) that the light-hearted game based on Chuck Norris's god-like antics is good enough to make it to the top five on mobile.

Flying the flag for side-scrolling fighting games, Chuck Norris: Bring on the Pain’s self-aware ridicule of the fictional and outrageously OTT antics of the all-American action hero is a refreshing change of pace from all the deadly-serious fireballs, and ends up being an addictive and rewarding brawler in its own right thanks to some tight controls and well-paced gameplay.