Knack

Knack is a great game that is full of nostalgia and old school gameplay. However its mediocre story telling and main character's voice acting stop it from achieving perfection.

“Take away the expectations and graphical power, and you’re left with a simple, but often charming button masher.”

Republished on Wednesday 31st January 2018: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of February's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows.

Some say critics just don't appreciate Knack. Well, there's a reason.

Playing Knack is like watching a dull movie on a plane – it's tolerable if all you want is a way to pass the time, but it's not something you'd seek out for its own sake. I finished in about 11 hours and, challenges, co-op, and secrets aside, there's just not much here worth recommending. Sure, some individual elements show potential, particularly when the scale of the encounters changes as Knack ...

Falling to pieces.

Its eponymous hero is a super-powered entity built out of magic relics, and he’s out to deal with marauding goblins that have been stealing relics from human outposts.

Knack is not only a miserably boring action game, but it features one of the worst heroes ever made. Knack is easy to kill, stupid looking and part of an adventure that will never end. This PlayStation 4 game is too difficult for kids and too generic for adults. It's a disappointing failure on just about every level.

Knack has too little going on over its 12 hour length. The core concepts are strong - it’s fun to watch Knack grow bigger and smash things. The incredible imagination promised by the dawn of new hardware is on display in Knack. But the moments of payoff come too infrequently to make plodding through another three dozen frustrating enemies any less tedious.

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.