Chaos Theory: The top five crowd-control combat games

There's just no guarantee that filling the screen with bodies will yield any appeal. PS2 title Ikusagami (released as the hard-to-find Demon Chaos in the UK) managed to fit around 65,000 enemies onto your telly, but carving through such masses feels detached and inconsequential. And so we hit on a secret trait of good crowd-control games: a certain depth. It's easy to understand why many players find such games numbing rather than thrilling. Their intricacies can take their sweet time to emerge, and require an amount of trusting investment. While Earth Defence Force 2017 is, on the surface, an intense but crude duck-shoot, you still feel like you have to play well to punch through the onslaught. Seasoned Dynasty Warriors players don't button-bash, but call on combos to best cut through the chaos, and any enemy generals within threatening range. Serious Sam plies you with piles of baddies, sure, but each one offers a slightly different vector of danger, and so you've got to keep on top of the mosh pit in order to be graceful; that needs a surprising amount of personal RAM, and drills you into the zone as effectively as any conceited cinematic adventure could hope for

Plus, there's a peculiar aesthetic, um, pleasure to be had from many crowd-control titles. You know how people laud Super Mario Galaxy because it's unpretentious, and is happy to be 'just a game'? The same applies here. The Serious Sam series has no delusions of grandeur; it knows that it isn't trying to tell a rich, memorable story, and so it goes nuts, with gorgonzola-strength action cheese, doolally self-referencing and an endearing sense of abandon. If you've got a single goofball bone in your body, you'll find the game all the richer and more memorable for it, too. Did anyone play Earth Defence Force 2017 and not adopt the "EDF! EDF! EDF!" battle cry as a daft, cheery catchphrase? And the Dynasty Warriors games are 'renowned' for their hammy, repetitive soundbites of voice acting, but that can only add to the comic-book charm, not to mention offer a wad of superbly childish double-entendres ("I have come for your head!"). The characters are shoddy, but it's perfectly in line with the game's sense of realism. You know how it's perfectly acceptable to guffaw at Arnie's tackiest lines from Predator or Commando, or whatever? It's that, yeah.

Finally, as a cherry-flavoured post-script, some of my most eclectic and open-minded of gaming friends are crowd-control enthusiasts of some persuasion or other. Last year, some girl spent half an hour on the phone to me, explaining in horrendous detail which of the Dynasty Warriors 5 characters she'd most like to marry, and I promise she's not mental. Which, somehow, only goes to show how right I am. So, while I'm on a roll, here are the top five crowd-control games, in descending order of my preference. You're welcome to disagree, of course, but then you'd no longer be welcome at my house. There are plenty of games that were considered - Spartan: Total Warrior, Kingdom Under Fire etc. - that didn't quite achieve the required purity (well, monomaniacal focus) to qualify. Here you go:

The Top Five Games