10 Shameless Video Game Rip-Offs (That Were Actually Great)

7. Killer Instinct

The success of Mortal Kombat saw a slew of inferior fighting games attempt to cash-in on it throughout the second half of the 1990s, with perhaps the best of the lot being Killer Instinct.

Rare's brawler attempted to offer a more accessible iteration of Mortal Kombat by toning the violence down and making combos easier, even if the story - focused on a fighting tournament - and gameplay - centered around brutal finishing moves - were largely the same.

Some of the game's roster feel like imitations of Mortal Kombat kombatants, and the general gloomy aesthetic and in-game music sound suspiciously similar, and yet, Killer Instinct gets away with it because it's so damn fun to play.

And more to the point, its personality is a little different - this is after all a game where you can play as Riptor, a human-velociraptor hybrid.

While it ultimately wasn't the Mortal Kombat Killer that Rare positioned it as, Killer Instinct's appealing aesthetics and thrilling combo-driven gameplay made it a genre classic in its own right.