Completely unabashed rip-offs can sometimes work, just look at Lords of the Fallen, which took Dark Souls' core formula and iterated on it in some really neat ways. Or you could look at Raven's Cry, a game from Reality Pump Studios, who literally saw Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's pirates n' pillaging gameplay and thought "That's never gonna get old, we can do that!" Thus the result is a carbon copy of the base Black Flag experience, from mini-map placement in the corner of your screen, to the wait n' counter feel of combat, to even the ship-based battling that'll break up the rest of the monotony. It's assumed the only reason Ubisoft didn't file a copyright lawsuit against this thing, was down to it posing absolutely zero threat to their sales, being its reviews and sales were this year's equivalent to 2014's godawful Ride to Hell: Retribution.
