Top 30 Biggest Video Game Copycat FAILS

Despite what the title may imply, no, this is not exactly a copy of Star Wars. What Star Warfare is blatantly trying to copy is the artstyle of the Borderlands games. Between the pseudo cel-shading of the world to the texture work and even the UI, everything about this game looks like a knockoff Borderlands. You even fight Skag-like creatures that are instead called Hati. And those arent Psychos you are fighting - those are Mobs! Really, why not just go play Borderlands instead?

Nintendos Splatoon games have managed to secure itself a pretty meaty slice of the FPS market, which makes it a big target for those trying to steal players via hackneyed copycats. Take Sepia Go for example, a Chinese knockoff game that straight up steals assets from the Splatoon games! Yes, those are the same squid kids and ink weapons youve seen before. The only difference is that everything in the controls and gunplay feels downright abysmal. Somehow, Sepia Go managed to stay on the market for three whole years before it was finally shut down in 2019.

Strangely enough, there havent been as many copycats spawning from The Last of Us as one might have expected. However, one developer named VG Games tried in 2023 with The Last Hope. In addition to having an eerily similar art style as Naughty Dogs game, The Last Hope had a character that was pretty much just Ellie with a different name: Eva. The similarities were way too close for it to remain on the Nintendo eShop, though. The game was only available for a month before Sony had it taken down. And before you ask, no, there was absolutely nothing redeeming about the game let alone original.

It isnt uncommon for a kids IP to try and copy more successful titles. In the case of LEGO, a Minecraft clone made sense for the brand to chase, and we did almost get one of those between Mojang and LEGO before the deal fell apart. Years later, we got LEGO and Warner Bross own Minecraft clone with LEGO Worlds. Alas, this was not the gem they were hoping for. LEGO Worlds was mundane in gameplay, and the worlds were super restricted and small for a game that wanted you to craft and build things. It isnt horrible, but for what its trying to be, it does not hold a candle to the more successful OG.

You might remember seeing a clip go viral that featured several Nintendo characters that were given horrendous voice acting. That was Pocket All-Star Smash Bros, and it was a Chinese knockoff game built entirely off of stolen Nintendo assets. Every sound effect, cinematic, song, character, billboard, and what have you was ripped from one Nintendo game or another. And if you saw anything that wasnt Nintendo-related, it was an asset coming from a Capcom, SEGA, or Konami game. Pocket All-Star Smash Bros. was removed sometime in 2017 due to financial reasons according to the games developer, Biyan Chen.

More borderline plagiarism invaded the Nintendo eShop in 2025. Only this time, it wasnt borderline plagiarism - it was straight up plagiarism. While the 2025 smash hit R.E.P.O. was stealing Lethal Companys thunder with more engaging gameplay on the PC market, publisher BoggySoft decided to release a repackaged version of R.E.P.O. for some easy money. R.E.P.O. Horror took assets from the original and delivered a lazy cashgrab version that only supported one player. It wasnt long before the game was removed from the Nintendo eShop. Whats worse is that there are still tons of scam games like this on Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, and even PlayStation Store.

Regardless of its age, OutRun remains one of SEGAs most iconic arcade games from its early years. Why it does nobody knows, and as expected, someone has already tried to ride the games coattails. Long before its merger with Enix in 2003, SquareSoft had attempted to make its own OutRun with Rad Racer. Though it wasnt as technically sound as SEGAs own, Rad Racer saw moderately positive reviews and even managed to sell nearly two million copies on NES. A much-improved sequel was made in 1990, but ultimately, OutRun has long managed to be the de facto arcade racer next to other iconic SEGA racers like Daytona USA.

Marvel and DC have long been trying to step on each others necks to dominate the video game market. Marvel has been thrashing their competitor for a long time, but whenever push has come to shove, DC has often shown to be vastly weaker. DC Dual Force is one of the more humiliating examples of that as it tried to compete with the monumentally successful card game Marvel Snap. Whereas Marvel Snap kept itself simple and easy to play, DC Dual Force tried way too hard to differentiate itself and ultimately made something overly complicated with unnecessary mechanics and games lasting way too long. DC Dual Force didnt even last six months before it was shuttered and delisted. Meanwhile, Marvel Snap is laughing all the way to the bank.

Following the success of Overwatch, ProbablyMonsters and Firewalk Studios decided to shoot for the stars and make their own hero shooter. Would have been a bold move had it launched in 2016, 2017, or even 2018. But fast forward to 2024, a whole eight years and hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain later, and no one was impressed. Concord was a steaming pile of mediocrity with its bland character designs, unremarkable environments, slow movement, and weird focus on story during marketing. It was a game no one wanted, and Sony pulled the game from sale less than two weeks after launch.

It was called the God of War at Home during its short-lived run, and it has since become one of the earliest troubling signs of digital store slop, or e-slop. Developed by Dolaka Ltd., War Gods: Zeus of Child was a desperate attempt in tricking Xbox players into thinking they were buying a four-dollar God of War game. The game even used its own cheap carbon copy of Kratos! Obviously, the game was swiftly taken down after the internet put it on blast, though a couple days later, Dolaka tried to put out another knockoff game: Dinasaur Falling Survival was a misspelled cashgrab attempt targeted towards Fall Guys. Classy.

In 1985, Sega released a killer arcade title called Space Harrier. It was widely touted within the industry for its incredible graphics and fun jet-propulsion-based gameplay, and it was subsequently ported over to dozens of home consoles. By all accounts, it was a monumental success. And in came The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner to leech off it. This one came from Square and was released for the NES. The game was a technical marvel, being one of the first to utilize stereoscopic 3D and a forward-based scrolling effect that allowed players to move in any direction. Technical marvel aside, it was an obvious ripoff of Segas game and its innovative technology.

Someone should have told Namco Bandai that they were about ten years too late to get aboard the party bus. In 1999, Hudson Soft and Nintendo released the brilliant Mario Party. The multiplayer gameplay was highly praised, and it became the go-to sleepover game. The series is still going strong today, with Super Mario Party being released in 2018. In 2010, Namco Bandai ripped the formula right off for Pac-Man Party. They werent even inventive enough to give it its own title! Making it worse is Namco Bandais obvious inferiority to Nintendo, resulting in an inferior game no matter which way you slice it.

In 2006, Cliff Bleszinski and Epic Games gave us Gears of War, which proved to be one of the next-gen Halo killers. It proudly sat alongside Halo and Call of Duty as the go-to multiplayer games of the generation, with particular attention going to its graphics and cover-based shooting mechanics. Nearly five years later, Team Tachyon released Quantum Theory. Just a single glance at its artwork is enough to give away its obvious inspiration. Like Gears, the characters are muscular and wear large, bulky pieces of armor. The guns and camera angles are virtually identical, as is the games cover-based shooting mechanics. Theyre so similar were surprised Epic didnt slap them with a lawsuit.

This is probably not the ripoff you were expecting. Flappy Bird was the worlds biggest mobile game in January of 2014, becoming the most-downloaded free app on the App Store. However, the Flappy Bird wasnt long for this world, and he was put down by his creator on February 10, 2014. Naturally, a ton of clones and ripoffs sprouted up in its wake to fill the gap and satiate the addictions of players everywhere. The Legend of Zeldo: Lonks Awakening was one of these games, as it was essentially just Flappy Bird with a Zelda themed coat of paint.

This game is just a mess on all accounts. Nintendo released Super Mario Maker in 2015, an interesting side scroller that let players create their own Mario courses. A couple years later, we got the glorious BoxMaker. BoxMakerall but admits that it ripped off Super Mario Maker in its grammatical abomination of a Steam description. Its not just the concept that the developers ripped off - the music, the sound effects, the color scheme, the gameplay mechanics - everything is ripped straight from Mario.

Blizzard isnt one to take things lying down. Not long after Hearthstone was released in closed beta, a Chinese developer swooped in and ripped off the concept. Even the logo was strikingly similar. Legend of Crouching Dragon: Generals of the Three Kingdoms was released the following fall season on mobile devices, and Blizzard was not happy. They launched a copyright violation lawsuit, resulting in Legend of Crouching Dragon being taken off the App Store and its servers being temporarily suspended. In 2014, Blizzard won the lawsuit, and developer Unico Interactive was reportedly asked to hand over $1.6 million in compensation.

Fighting games are tricky to pull off, as titles like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Super Smash Bros. pretty much nailed the formula. It seems hard to make an original fighting game these days, and as such, new ones are often compared to the classics. But Kung Fu Panda is essentially a one-to-one remake of Super Smash Bros. The gameplay and look are identical, complete with increasing percentage points as a damage counter, a drop-in from above after elimination, crowd noises, orchestral music, and even that colorful explosion graphic that accompanies a knockout. If Po was in Super Smash, you literally couldnt tell the difference.

And here we have another blatant Chinese ripoff. Like Kung Fu Panda, Final Combat is a one-to-one ripoff of Team Fortress 2, only without the quality. The character classes are exactly the same, although they lack the charm and sense of humor of the original cast. The game also copies numerous elements from Team Fortress, including gameplay mechanics and the colorful, cartoony art style. It could make for a decent, albeit blatant, ripoff if it werent for the horrible controls, persistent bugs, and rampant framerate issues. Its just a bad game all around.

The toys-to-life genre exploded when the Skylanders franchise was released in 2011. While some games, like Lego Dimensions, have managed to set themselves apart, Disney Infinity practically replicated the formula. Level up your favorite Disney character, buy Power Discs for more weapons and improved stats, and beat up the bad guys. You could even design your own levels, a feature which would evolve in 2.0 and 3.0. However, there just wasnt enough content, and buying a new version every year quickly became expensive. By the time the series had reached its true potential, players had left. Eventually, Disney called it quits, and promptly shut down developer Avalanche Software and its publishing division.

The GameCube didnt have much, but it did have Metroid Prime, AKA perhaps the greatest first person shooter of all time. Metroid Prime influenced untold amounts of developers and video games, and its certainly not rare to see elements of it in various other first person shooter and adventure games. But Another Bound Neo is a straight ripoff. It looks exactly the same, and the screen layout alone could fool anyone not deeply familiar with Metroid Prime. Put screenshots next to each other, and Another Bound Neo might just pass the taste test. Or sight test, in this case.

Copycat games have been an issue long before mobile gaming was plagued with them. As the oldest entry on this list, The Great Giana Sisters was a shameless clone of Super Mario Bros. Just look at this! It's as if the art style was directly lifted from Super Mario Bros., and the developers made tiny tweaks to look slightly different! While it's believed that Nintendo filed a lawsuit against the developers, that rumor has since been proven false. However, Nintendo did take part in swaying sales away from Giana Sisters.

Its hard to imagine anyone trying to replicate the look and feel of the Uncharted series. Considering the games size and scope, itd be hard to pull off. And yet, someone still tried to copy it. What resulted was Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta, a game that tried so hard to look exactly like Uncharted, the main character looks like he could be Nathan Drakes cousin. The most notable flaw here is in the incredibly awkward animations, everyone looks stiff as a board! The reviews on Metacritic arent lying

The Simpsons have had some pretty good copycat games over the years, with a few games successfully setting themselves apart from the games that inspired them. However, not every title was a real shiner. Enter The Simpsons: Skateboarding, a Tony Hawks Pro Skater clone that forgot to include everything that made the games fun. Why cant I pull off this trick? Why am I not able to grind on that railing? Why is it so frustrating to control?? The game was buggy, the physics were broken, and it failed to replicate the fluidity Pro Skater was known for.

Mario Party has been known for its simple, yet replayable gameplay. You hit a Dice Block, navigate your way to a Star, and play a bunch of minigames. Few have tried to replicate this formula, and very few have succeeded. Sonic Shuffle did not succeed. The game was essentially Mario Party with a Sonic skin, but its gameplay was just too confusing. You draw a random card from your hand to move, but you can also steal an opponents card? What? And ohhhhhh, the load times! You spend more time waiting on the game to load than playing it! This game was just another case of Sonic trying to be like Mario.

These days, its not rare to see a game billed as a spiritual successor end up being a poor imitation. Fur Fun was a Steam game that desperately tried jumping on the Yooka-Laylee hype train in early 2017. Like other abusive Steam developers, Fur Fun was littered with stolen assets, using gold ingots from Minecraft and ripping music straight out of Banjo-Kazooie. Oh, and did we mention a YouTuber published this? Yep! DalasReview not only published the game, but he also provided some of the worst narration weve ever heard. On top of that, he went out of his way to file DMCA takedowns and hide any negative criticism. Fur shame!

Mojang Studioss Minecraft is the game of our generation, and with over 200 million copies sold, it is the highest-selling video game of all time. There were bound to be a few ripoffs. Perhaps the worst of all was DigitalDNAs CastleMiner. This too is a block-building sandbox game centered around mining for materials and building structures. It was just one of many Minecraft ripoffs released through Xbox Live Indie Games, and while it was arguably the worst, it was also the most successful, selling over one million units. It just goes to show that sometimes shamelessly ripping off something else does pay off.

Once again we have a shameless Chinese knockoff in the form of Mole Kart. Released for iOS in 2012, Mole Kart is exactly what it sounds like. Comparisons to Mario Kart were obvious and instantly made by critics and fans alike, with nearly every review in the App Store mentioning its obvious inspiration by name. In fact, entire courses were ported over, including Moo Moo Meadows and Mushroom Gorge, and the items, blocks, and sound effects were nearly identical. It didnt take long for Nintendo to take notice, and the game was quickly taken off the App Store. However, it was later re-released under the title Mole Kart I, and a sequel was released the following September.

There are SO MANY games trying to copy the success of Super Smash Bros. What most of them fail to realize is that you need a strong character roster, good level design, and a balanced game. Punch-Time Explosion had a pretty decent character roster, like Dexter, Billy & Mandy, Nigel Uno, Samurai Jack, and the Powerpuff Girls. However, some of these characters were too overpowered, and most of them played too much like their Smash Bros counterparts. The game even had its own version of Subspace Emissary from Brawl! Punch-Time Explosion had the potential to be a great Cartoon Network branded game, but it turned out to be yet another Smash Bros clone.

MOBAs are all the rage these days, but the market has become so saturated that theres almost no room for a new game. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. Interactive and developer Turbine realized this a little too late. Infinite Crisis has you playing as your favorite DC character trying to destroy the enemy teams base. It was a decent game, but the problem is that we already have League of Legends, Dota 2, and Smite. With all three having established communities, youd have a hard time trying to get players to switch over. The game soon found itself in a crisis of its own, and servers were shut down less than five months after release.

If you want to understand the definition of shameless, this game perfectly encapsulates the meaning. The War Z was one of many games that tried riding the coattails of Day Z during the peak of its success. In fact, War Z went so far to replicate the game that it looked like an exact copy! Problems quickly escalated when the developers were caught lying about features within their game, and they would incorporate microtransactions later down the road. Add in homophobic slurs from the executive producer and censoring criticism, and War Z would go down as one of the worst games ever made.