The best fighting games like Super Smash Bros are Rivals of Aether, Brawlhalla and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2. Below are 9, 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 Super Smash Bros 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 competitive answer: platform fighter built for tournament play.
Free, cross-platform, and the easiest way into the genre.
The closest mainstream alternative with a real roster.
Platform fighter built around 2v2 team play.
Sony's attempt — different KO system, worth it for the roster.
Dreamcast arena fighter, the other great four-player brawler of that era.
Local multiplayer chaos distilled to arrows and one hit each.
If it was the party chaos you wanted rather than the fighting.
If Smash was your on-ramp and you now want the genre proper.
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 Super Smash Bros — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Rivals of Aether. The competitive answer: platform fighter built for tournament play.
No. Super Smash Bros released on the Nintendo 64, 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 Super Smash Bros 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.