The best action games like Mega Man 2 are Mega Man X, Mega Man 11 and Shovel Knight. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Mega Man 2 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The reinvention — same structure, with a dash and a wall-cling that change everything.
The modern entry, and the closest in feel to the NES run.
NES design sensibilities with modern fairness, and the best homage there is.
Made to be this era again, and unusually tough.
Mega Man X as a roguelite, and the co-op works.
An indie built on Mega Man Zero's speed and combo system.
Same console, same one-hit brutality, same memorisation.
The other great NES action-platformer, and much more deliberate.
NES action platforming at its most cinematic and most unfair.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Mega Man 2 that are not action games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Mega Man 2 — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Mega Man X. The reinvention — same structure, with a dash and a wall-cling that change everything.
No. Mega Man 2 released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Mega Man 2 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.