Borrowing elements from other games and paying homage to titles from the past is pretty common. However, a The Last Of Us clone that popped up on the Nintendo eShop last week, and is somehow still there, takes that a little too far. The Last Hope – Dead Zone Survival is clearly a little more than just inspired by Naughty Dog's critically acclaimed PlayStation exclusive, and its appearance on Switch has been generating a lot of attention.
You need look no further than the artwork for The Last Hope to see VG Games has simply tried to make a very poor, very unofficial Nintendo Switch version of The Last Of Us. So much so that if the girl in the image were to turn around, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ellie's face. The Last Hope's creators have stopped short of using the names Joel and Ellie, simply referring to their Ellie equivalent as “the girl”.
“Journey to the library to safe an innocent girl from reckless zombies,” the eShop description reads, and no, that's not a typo, it really does read safe instead of save. The description also hammers home how great its story is. I mean, if it rips the exact same tale as the one told in The Last Of Us Part 1, then that part is technically true. However, at £0.99, I get the feeling The Last Hope doesn't offer the same experience to its players that The Last Of Us does.
Again, the most surprising part of all this is that The Last Hope is still available to buy. Not only has it been up on the eShop for a few days at this point, but it has been getting a lot of attention on social media. I would say none of that attention has been good since pretty much all of it has been poking fun at the Naughty Dog clone, but any attention is good attention for a game like this. The more people buy the game out of curiosity before it is inevitably taken down, the better for its developers.
While it's somewhat surprising The Last Hope managed to make it onto the eShop at all, this certainly isn't an isolated incident. Left 4 Dead fans briefly thought their prayers had been answered last year when the series appeared to receive a mobile spinoff out of nowhere. However, a quick look at footage of the game revealed it to be a knockoff that didn't even have any zombies.
The Last Hope is not The Last Of Us, and unfortunately, it's probably going to be a while before we get anything new from the series. Its multiplayer game appears to be in a little bit of trouble, Naughty Dog won't say anything about Part 3, and season two of its adaptation is probably still two years away at least.