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Suspiciously Similar is a new feature where Astrosaurus looks at an iPhone game that is shamelessly inspired by an already existing game. Sometimes they're blatant, sometimes they're not, either way we get a huge kick out of seeing these land in the App Store.
Welcome to the first Suspiciously Similar! It feels like everyday I'll see a game come out in the App Store that is audaciously close to an already existing franchise. Whether it be the art, the name or how the game plays. I've even seen on more than one occasion developers lift art assets straight out of existing games and use it as their own. Sometimes they try to be sneaky, other times they couldn't care less. I've seen dozens of these in the Land of Apps and figured I might as well share with you some of the better examples as I come across them. Have an example? Drop me a line!
[Call to Arms vs. World of Warcraft]
Call To Arms or "Call to Arms - Real MMO" as their iTunes page reads is an online MMO. Unfortunately I had some difficulty getting to that whole "online" thing the game is focused around. Every time I tried to connect to the server it gave me a vague error and told me to try again. I quickly shrugged off not being able to play with "thousands of players from all over the world" and pressed forward. While I can't speak about how the the game actually plays but I can speak of their artwork. It's trying to be World of Warcraft. Badly. They're pretty shameless in their attempt to somehow lure would be WoW fans into picking up their title with similar art.
Let's start with their title screen, specifically the Call to Arms logo both of the characters are trying to swat:
While it's not identical you can't help but notice the similarities, my favorite of which is the little frozen icicles they copied from the Wrath of the Lich King logo. Kids are hip to wintery shit these days, right? By the way, why does the humans legs transform and become part of the ground? It's no wonder he's a little ornery.
Call to Arms did something pretty drastic and divided their game up into two factions, the Humans and the Orcs. Novel, eh? Check out their Human crest along side with WoW's alliance crest:
Yup. You've the got wings, the crossed weapons, a shield and even a lion head as the focal point. What they DIDN'T do, however, is stick with gold... instead they went with silver.
Oh yeah, and where on earth did they get the idea for that sweet icon of theirs?
Oh Call to Arms, you silly goose! You didn't even try on this one. Ah well, it's not the artwork but the quality of the game that's important right? Right???
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