The Nintendo eShop gets pretty weird if you delve deeply enough. Filter for prices that are just higher than free and under ten dollars, and you’ll find yourself in very dodgy territory. Among perfectly serviceable indies and older classics on sale, you’ll find a real glut of terrible games. Most of these are bug-ridden, badly-designed versions of popular genres that already exist: truck simulators, boxing games, hunting simulators, racing games, and more are par for the course.
Stranger still is the number of straight-up clones. Within a few minutes of scrolling, I found a Dead Space knock-off called Deep Space, and a game called Gangster Life: Criminal Untold that appears to be ripping off Grand Theft Auto. I could probably have listed more if I wanted to dig into every trailer, but these games are unpleasant to experience, even from a distance. The one that’s started making rounds on social media is called The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival, which appears on the Nintendo eShop page with marketing dangerously similar to The Last of Us. The Last Hope claims to have “storytelling and narrative”, “captivating plot”, “immersive graphics”, “engaging gameplay mechanics”, “challenging missions”, and “meaningful choices”.
I can guarantee you that The Last Hope has none of those things. The game says it features a combination of time travel and a zombie apocalypse, which is communicated to you in static loading screens before the game starts. Apparently, your job is to use a time machine to travel into the future, gather information on what caused the outbreak, and report back so you can prevent it. So far, so good – that’s probably not grounds for a lawsuit from Sony. You, Brian Lee, wake up in a hospital, clumsily bludgeon some zombies with a bat, and go outside. You run around a blocky, PS2-looking world full of ambling zombies. If they see you running around in plain sight, don’t worry about it! You run faster than them and they barely try to attack you.
After taking some food from a zombie-infested supermarket without issue, you pick a lock on a police car, steal everything inside, and hear a girl crying for help over the police radio, to which you say, “Alright.” Though she doesn’t say where she is, you make your way to a nearby library to liberate her. After juking a few zombies and walking over to her, you find out her name is Eve and she, strangely, looks just like Ellie with fewer polygons. You might be tempted to just run out of the library and avoid all the zombies who, again, don’t seem that interested in you, except this version of Ellie cowers in one spot when she sees infected, and they will bash at her with their fists until she dies, which makes you lose the game.
According to the game’s description, you will make your way to a pharmacy, police station, and eventually metro tunnels. You’re trying to get on a ship to escape the city while protecting Ellie – sorry, Eve. It has crafting mechanics, of a sort. You can crouch, but not actually use stealth. There’s dialogue, but it reads awkwardly. Calling this game a clone is like calling the gruel I cook for myself Michelin-star fare. It’s certainly a game, by the dictionary definition, but it’s a terrible one, and it’s even stranger that it’s so explicitly stealing aspects from a hugely popular game, piecing it together into a Frankenstein, and selling it for just over a dollar.
It turns out that a lot of the games on the Nintendo Store are made by the same publisher and a handful of other companies that create similarly terrible games. VG Games, who made The Last Hope, have also made games mimicking Plants Vs Zombies, Need for Speed, Mad Max and Subway Surfer. They have none of the good qualities of those games, but I have to say, having a title like Zombie Garden vs Plants Defence – Battle Craft and Survival Simulator Game for a Plants Vs Zombie clone is pretty ballsy.
Another company, Midnight Works, has published a blatant rip-off of Deadliest Catch called Deadliest Catch, complete with a description stolen from Steam and rewritten with a thesaurus. They’ve also done games like Drift Horizon Racing, the aforementioned Dead Space clone, and Z World Zombie Death War. Most of these games are published within weeks and even days of each other, and none of the most egregious rip-offs are listed on their website.
If I read any more of these titles, I will surely lose what’s left of my senses. I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure some of these games are similar enough to their ‘inspirations’ that they could get the pants sued off them, especially Deadliest Catch – that one’s an outright scam. What worries me most is that this seems to be where the industry is headed, especially with the rise of AI-powered development. Video games are good because of the thought and skill put into them, but when we give people the ability to create the shittiest possible versions of games we love with minimal skill and time, digital storefronts will inevitably be flooded with garbage when those responsible for curating them don’t give even the slightest shit.
Nintendo doesn’t seem to care about what goes into the eShopi if it’s allowing products like this through its filters. I want to be able to find good games when I open the Deals section, not have to sift through trash. Knowing that there are scams slipped in between every cheap indie or discounted cult hit makes me worry that there are less aware people spending money on terrible games by accident, simply because their titles are written to sound kind of like games the average gamer has probably heard of and not yet played. Maybe instead of going after hackers and taking all of the money they’ll ever have for the rest of their life, Nintendo can try dealing with the scammers working through its platform with apparently no oversight.