goood.games
Knack2013

Knack

2013 Sony Computer Entertainment56Mediocre

Playtime

ModerateTypically 12 hours

Playable on

Included with

  • PlayStation Plus
    Extra

Available on

Game modes

Details

Launch
November 15, 2013

Overview

Knack Official Launch Trailer

From Mark Cerny, one of the greatest minds in video games today, Knack is a fun-filled adventure of colossal proportions that invites players to wield fantastic powers and discover a unique and vibrant world.

Screenshots

Screenshot for Knack
Screenshot for Knack
Screenshot for Knack
Screenshot for Knack
Screenshot for Knack

Reception

There's some great design here, but it's joined by some poor choices and visuals. While children may have a blast, the difficulty and controls are a bit strange, as if they weren't designed with them in mind but everything else was. It's just utterly average and repetitive, despite there being an underlying potential for something superb.

Towards the end, at least, there are a couple of levels where the checkpoint balancing isn't quite so bad, and this also coincides with some better level design. By this stage you may also have unlocked a couple of gadgets that allow you to do things like slow down time or increase your damage multiplier. The rest of the game may be shallow, bland and...

The biggest issue with Knack is that it delivers on a completely different experience than you would expect: a tricky yet rewarding old-school game brought kicking and screaming into a brand new generation was always going to confuse people. But it's a lot of fun, and despite frustration through poor checkpointing, Knack is far from a bad game. In fact,...

Knack does have that one good idea — the character gets bigger, the character gets smaller — which is enhanced by the idea of making him big with other materials like wood and ice. But it's never really explored. You're constantly being forced to shed all of your collected relics to activate an elevator, or something, or receive a large cache of relics...

With the difficulty dropped down to easy, Knack might find a place among younger gamers/new PS4 owners, but it's a tough recommendation otherwise.