The best fighting games like Double Dragon are Streets of Rage 2, Final Fight and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge. Below are 12, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to fighting costs you.
Filtering to fighting means you want a contest with a clear answer — you got it right or you did not. It is the right filter when what you liked was reading an opponent.
What you get: A skill ceiling you can actually see yourself climbing, and the shortest feedback loop in games.
What made Double Dragon worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the fighting part of that answer, and only the fighting part.
The genre's high point, and by some distance.
Capcom's answer, and the other template everyone copies.
The modern four-player brawler, and a joy.
The recent entry, roguelite-flavoured and surprisingly good.
Branching routes and a genuinely deep combat system.
Four players, fantasy, and very easy to get people into.
Fantasy brawling with a magic meter and creatures to ride.
From the same lineage — Kunio-kun — with RPG progression.
The deepest brawler ever made, and the best-looking.
Same console, same era, considerably crueller.
One against many, taken seriously and made lethal.
Saturn brawling with lanes, endings and a huge cast.
A first few hours that can be discouraging alone. Fighting games are far better with someone at your level than against the internet.
The full list is on games like Double Dragon — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Streets of Rage 2. The genre's high point, and by some distance.
No. Double Dragon 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.
Much less than they were. Modern control schemes, rollback netcode and real single-player modes have changed the on-ramp completely in the last few years.
One opponent against one, or one against many. They share ancestry and almost nothing else — the picks below say which each one is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Double Dragon list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is fighting — 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 fighting guide for where to start in the genre generally.