Moments when you think "I really hope this is a troll..."

[DoPo]

Er, was the author that wrong though? He mentioned gameplay, use of cover, size of targeting reticules and so on, which is nothing to do with the universe the game is set in.

Some parts, yeah, flat out wrong, but taking elements from something else that has borrowed from you isn't new. The Tyranids in 40k look alot like the Zerg because the Zerg are copied off the nids. But the nids that came out after the Zerg seem to look alot more like the Zerg than the ones that were around before hand.

Some parts flat out wrong, others just irrelevant or what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about wrong. Case in point: targeting rectangles. I cannot think of a lesser thing you can call a ripoff, unless somebody complains about the use of a colour. Not the colour of a uniform or a ship, mind you, just claiming the use of a colour green, for example, was stolen by the second game.

Then in the paragraph the author mentions cover, he explicitly says that the two games are different in that respect. So, this means that while claiming that Space Marine is a ripoff of Gears of War, he blatantly brings up use of cover and then clearly states that Space Marine doesn't use it as much, while at the same time this is a core element of Gears. How or why this is relevant to his argument is beyond me.

60% the very next paragraph is meaningless. He says that the enemies in the two games look nothing alike and that "Ork" sounds like "Orc". I'd like to know why exactly did he even bother typing it out.

If we remove everything that disregards the fact that W40K came out decades before Gears of War, we are left with the following things:
- Similar blood splatters - seriously? You have a game in which the blood splatters are prominent. Can anyone explain how to make them different?
- The guns shoot in a similar way - they are guns. In probably 85% of the games that feature guns, they shoot the same way. Especially amongst games in a similar genre.
- You can use your chainsaw weapon to slice enemies - OK, I'm willing to accept that being taken from Gears of War. One could say that chain swords are iconic to W40K and slicing is literally what they do, but I can see that THQ could have taken the "execution" from Gears of War. No shame in that.
- apparently they have both a melee system - this I'll give to him - yes, maybe the melee systems are similar. I don't know. I don't want to know.

I can write the same kind of article calling Quake 2 a ripoff of Half-Life and it would be more correct than what that guy says. Let's see, they both have crosshairs, the characters can have lots of weapons, and the weapons are quite similar - rocket launcher, machine gun, a pistol, a laser thingie that is an instakill.

Now, borrowing elements - yes, games do that all the effin' time. So yes, a game that is targeting the same market niche and is the same genre borrowed (or however you want to call it) stuff, that's not basis to call them a ripoff, especially since Gears of War has elements similar to what WH40k had, starting with thirty years before that.