Luftrausers cloned in second Vlambeer copycat incident

The talented and hardworking team at Vlambeer has once more fallen afoul of quick-and-dirty copycats, this time shamelessly stealing the lovely Luftrausers.

PocketGamer flagged a new iOS release called Skyfar which, with all the good will in the world, looks near-inarguably like a clone of Vlambeer's Luftrausers, which has a very distinctive style.

Speaking to Joystiq, Vlambeer's Rami Ismail said the tiny indie dev hopes it can challenge the copycat legally.

"We obviously endured a bit of a scare when news arrived of Luftrausers being cloned and released ahead of our own release schedule by another developer. This time, however, it's not 'just' the idea of the game that has been cloned, but also the visual style. This gives us much more room to fight the whole thing, and we fully intend to," he said.

Ismail said the clone's developer had gotten in touch with a very poorly spelled missive "explaining" just how the game wasn't a clone after all, but Vlambeer isn't impressed.

"We simply can't deal with the stress of another cloned game, so we've gotten in touch with Apple and Google to see if there is a way for for the issue to be resolved without us getting involved in yet another clone war," Ismail said.

"Ultimately, we refuse to accept this as a part of our industry. We believe that showing our games to our fans early is a better way of developing Vlambeer games than keeping secrets and just dropping the final result on people when it's done."

Ismail also said that the reason Luftrausers isn't coming to iOS is that mobile devices don't allow the precision controls Vlambeer has developed for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Vita, so it's probably not even going to be very good.

For those who came in late, Vlambeer - which made the best game ever as well as Super Crate Box - is the developer of Ridicuous Fishing. The game debuted as a flash release, and before it could make it to iOS, it was cloned as Ninja Fishing. Unable to get the blatantly copied "tribute" taken down, Vlambeer almost disbanded in despair, before eventually rallying with incredible courage to release its far superior version, which quite deservedly, has sold well and attracted high praise.