The best fighting games like Golden Axe are Streets of Rage 4, Streets of Rage 2 and Dragon's Crown. Below are 8, 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 Golden Axe 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 best modern beat-em-up, and it honours the Sega originals directly.
The Genesis high point of the genre.
Fantasy brawling with RPG depth and gorgeous art.
Four-player fantasy brawling built for a sofa.
The arcade sequel, and far better than the console follow-ups.
An indie brawler made by people who studied the classics closely.
The most fun four-player brawler in years.
Saturn brawler with branching paths 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.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Golden Axe that are not fighting games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Golden Axe — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Streets of Rage 4. The best modern beat-em-up, and it honours the Sega originals directly.
No. Golden Axe released on the Sega Genesis, 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 Golden Axe 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.