If you are serious about project, start from empty template, unless you know unreal well enough to know what is going on in template and are able to modify it without problems.
In your case start playing with sidescroller template see how it works then recreate what you need from it in your own game. Those templates are getting old fast, they were created for 4.2.0 or so.
Since initial release epic devs added many great tools )and bp programming ways) that were not present year ago.