Hack-and-slash titles are chaotic. They see hordes of demons despatched with OTT flourishes and excessive force, and oversized behemoth bosses executed with extreme prejudice. They’re super-stylised slash-fests of sword-swipes, bullet-ricochets, triple-flips, and combo-kills. They’re also some of the best games available for console and PC alike.

Though to the outsider a hack-and-slash, or ‘H&S’, game looks like a button-mashing flurry of hope and explosions, they’re actually games that require great skill and can take an age to conquer. A true fan knows that H&S gaming is about the satisfaction earned from revisiting a title over and over, each time ramping up the difficulty in a never-ending struggle to squeeze every combo, armour set, and secret out of the title possible in an effort to truly master it.

There’s no doubt that another appealing aspect of the genre is its compatibility with other game types, with open-world RPG, dungeon-crawler, Metroidvania, and action-adventure developers all finding the H&S format a welcome addition to their traditional gameplay and narrative frameworks.

To help spread the good word of the hack-and-slash gaming genre, we’ve rounded up some of our favourite titles. Any one of our selection will have you slicing your way through enemy masses like a hot knife in no time.