Is Imitation the Sincerest Form of Flattery in Gaming?

At what point is taking the mechanics of another game, while removing others from the original title, a detriment or a positive? This was my thought while I played the preview of The Sinking City 2, which has seemingly completely changed direction from the original The Sinking City and instead took more than a page from the gameplay notebook of later Resident Evil games. 

Initially, my thought process aimed more towards the negative, but let's be honest, The Sinking City had a fair few problems from a player's perspective. For instance, the combat wasn’t exactly engaging: instead, it was sluggish, with melee being a pain and shooting being slow. The new version is much faster thanks to the blatant inspiration from Resident Evil 2 (2019), and the reliance on melee has been toned down. From a gameplay perspective, this has made playing The Sinking City 2 10 times better.

This is one of the biggest strengths of taking inspiration from, or copying, a more successful title, even if there is a risk of alienating the original player base by removing some mechanics. For instance, the original HELLDIVERS was a top-down twin-stick shooter with a relatively minimal scope. In comparison, Arrowhead Game Studios massively shook up the formula with a new third-person perspective, plus the galactic map for HELLDIVERS 2, seemingly taking inspiration from games like Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon and the multiplayer focus of Left 4 Dead. 

That choice alone turned out to be a massive win, with HELLDIVERS 2 standing as one of the best-selling titles in modern gaming. So, with that in mind, you could argue that The Sinking City 2, taking the mechanics and design of a much more successful series, could be a good idea. The issue is that, in doing so to the degree that this game has, you risk losing some of the magic that the original title had in spades.

For instance, in the original game, investigations were a central part of the experience. You had to visit libraries or other sources of information to find out where you needed to go, refer to the map to find the next location, or get details on characters. However, all that has been pushed to the back in the sequel, at least in the sections I played, with the investigations relegated to finding clues to certain puzzles and the odd bit of background lore. The world is also much smaller, with a focus on semi-open worlds that you explore to gather materials, much like the later Resident Evil titles. On top of that, you also have safe rooms and a limited, Tetris-like inventory that you can use storage crates to manage. 

Of course, The Sinking City 2 isn’t the only game to completely revamp its design to better match more popular titles. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy developer Naughty Dog made some massive changes for the follow-up, Jak II: Renegade, thanks to the popularity of Grand Theft Auto III. The game moved from a platformer to a run-and-gun shooter with driving mechanics. This, at least in my experience, felt less egregious because the game still felt like a Jak title, even if it was ever so slightly edgier. The use of the world, characters and more helped it to feel more connected. 

However, The Sinking City 2 feels like a completely different game from the original, to the degree that I wouldn’t have thought it was connected if not for the title. It reminds me of the major change we saw with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which took the side scroller into the mechanical realms of the original God of War (2005). Once again, if the box didn’t come with the name “Castlevania”, you could easily think it was a completely different series. 

The problem is that many of the above games can rely on their unique aesthetic to help connect the different titles. Meanwhile, The Sinking City 2 doesn’t feature much of what we saw in the earlier game; even the base enemies have mostly become zombie-like, at least. In the original, you could wander through the town and see the odd fish people interacting with normal humans, hinting back to the original Cthulhu story. The Sinking City 2, meanwhile, takes place after a massive flood, so there’s not much other than ruined buildings. There are some interesting design choices, but the levels I played made it feel like something was missing. 

However, let me know what you think, and are there any titles that you think changed their mechanics or formula to copy another popular series? On top of that, do you think that it worked out well, or if it ended up ruining the series for you?