"Good artists copy, great artists steal." It's a line that essentially means that explicitly mimicking something is easy enough to do ? making a clone of a game is simple enough. But it's another thing to take the ideas of one game and use them in another to create something that is original all in itself. Time Locker [Free] explicitly steals the gimmick of Superhot, the first-person shooter where time only moves when the player moves. It even uses a very similar low-poly graphics style. But instead, it turns the game into a shoot 'em up with some hints of Crossy Road [Free] to feel like a unique iteration on previous ideas, one that uses existing concepts liberally, but to form its own thing that stands on its own merits.
But those merits have to be defined first. Because part of the issue is that Superhot has been cloned several times since its original 2013 game jam edition. And several clones of Superhot have shown up on the App Store. But the difficulty is not necessarily in replicating an idea, it's in creating it in the first place. Figuring out the concept of Superhot and implementing it into a fully-formed package took a lot of time! And sure, it's possible for unscrupulous developers to replicate it. Unity and other engines have made that super-easy. But what about a developer like Time Locker's Sotaro Otsuka who pretty clearly decided to adapt this time-freeze system for his own game" Well, that's pretty much the basis of video games. Superhot is...