Beat this years ago but I'm gonna review knack now because fuck it.

There are worse games! This game is objectively pretty bad because it's content is minimal and repetitious, and it's story and characters aren't interesting. But this game has like... "childhood animated movie that wasn't very good but you love it anyway" energy. Like hoodwinked, doogal, alvin & the chimpmunks, monsters vs aliens, etc. It's cool for kids. It isn't annoying though! And it's pretty harmless.

Uhh, but this game's combat doesn't evolve and its overall pretty badly designed. Graphics are cool and the music is nice! But who cares, this game will forever live in infamy for being a terrible ps4 launch title, and being a huge meme for it's glaring mediocrity.

KNACK THE FUTURE BABEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYT

Knack is a bit of a weird game to me. On paper it’s something that genuinely feels like it attempts to accomplish nothing noteworthy in the slightest, with so many ideas present here being staggeringly mediocre and seemingly trying to culminate in the most average game ever, acting as a pseudo-tech demo that manages to not even accomplish that much to any effective degree. What truly gets me about Knack is how all of these ideas that were already as insignificant as they were, are consistently botched and made to feel bad across the board, transforming mediocrity into something that feels actively bad to play.

The content within this game feels skeletal, largely lacking in any memorable setpieces in favour of guiding the player through repetitive corridors of enemies, with the progression between each level feeling inconsequential and stagnant, and functionality rarely shifting beyond occasional types of Knack that make some small attempt at shaking things up. Unfortunately, even the most gimmicky parts of the game still feel near functionally identical and mostly boil down to different ways of taking damage over time, rather than anything that would potentially invite a playstyle that differs in any major way. Knack is also a 3D brawler/platformer that strives to dumb down both sides of its gameplay loop to painfully simple levels. Platforming is almost a non-entity, with most platforming that you’re doing being more akin to traversing battle arenas with an element a slight verticality as opposed to full fledged platforming challenges, but the combat is so basic that these slightly varied arenas aren’t enough to meaningfully change much. Knack’s moveset being as basic as it is makes it so encounters cannot have much variety to them due to how limited the player’s capabilities are, leading to a lot of visually distinct, but mechanically samey enemies that are sent at you.

Playing Knack feels like white noise that abruptly throws a high-pitched, ear-piercing noise at you from time to time, with its monotony only being broken up by cheap shots that you often can’t even see because big Knack takes up a third of the screen. Almost everything killing you in one hit doesn’t play nicely into how sluggish you’ll often feel, with a lot of situations that feel impossible to react to without dying a lot to memorise the exact route you need to take to avoid getting hit, which is an element of friction that I’d find compelling if the systems in play weren’t quite so braindead. The fact that something as simple as an actual combo meter is relegated to an unlockable as opposed to just being there is a testament to how shoehorned in the collectibles feel in general as well. For the most part, all that these will unlock for you are features that feel like they should have been part of your base kit from the beginning instead of a reward for finding secrets, especially since you’ll likely not get more than a couple of full gadget sets to begin with since the collectibles you get from hidden areas are randomised. The more you think about Knack, the worse it gets. A tech demo that was meant to showcase the power of the PS4, yet only takes any advantage of this with Knack himself, as every other character model looks somewhat uncanny and ugly, and cutscenes making me think of a Clash of Clans ad more than an actual game, being one of many bad elements to be found in a game that barely feels like it’s trying to do anything most of the time. Worse than I expected it to be, don’t play Knack.