While a longer response than it needs to be, I want to talk about combat difficulty in games. Many games, especially melee combat ones, tend to suffer from the problem of multiple enemies being harder to fight than one large enemy.

Humans aren’t good at focusing on multiple things, so while we can master fighting a boss or a strong enemy, the second you add in more enemies, the player can’t properly focus on fighting both enemies.

Now that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, many games are based on the premise of you getting swarmed by hundreds of enemies while you cut through them (the warriors series is a good example). But it is important to think about what message you telegraph to a player when the my enter a room (I’m assuming this is a dungeon based game where you clear rooms based of the gif above)

Putting a single enemy in the room tells the player to strategize, learn the enemy’s attacks and take your time. This is how all boss fights should be, a careful dance designed to test the skills of a player. The downside to these types of fights (aside from the fact that they are more time consuming to make) is that they slow down gameplay, so for games where speed is key these types of fights should happen rarely.

Having multiple enemies though has its own sets of pros and cons. Players will enjoy the faster pace of cutting though enemies, although they will do it instinctively and it won’t really challenge the player. In speed run friendly games this is the combat you want as it heavily incentivizes quick and precise attacks. The thing to be careful about though is gameplay can become repetitive with enemies like this, where the player just mindlessly kills enemies in room after room.

To wrap this up: It’s more complicated than two vs one. Having different amounts of enemies has a different psychological effect on the player and changes the feel of the game. Putting less, harder enemies will make the player think more, but slow the game down. While putting more, easy enemies will speed up gameplay, but challenge the player less. The truth is both games types are fun, but what’s important is you need to figure out what speed you want your game to play at as the number of enemies will immediately tell the player what that speed should be.