I bought 3 games for my PS4 thanks to Amazon’s buy-2-get-1-free sale: Knack, Killzone: Shadow Fall, and Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. I haven’t even opened AssCreed, but have tried both Killzone and Knack, and like Knack quite a bit. I’m not normally a platformer kinda guy, but Knack is very well done, mostly fun, and very whimsical. The graphics look good, but not in a photo-realistic way. Instead, it looks like a finely animated cartoon that we can participate in. The video below shows a short snippet of my gameplay, including me making a stupid mistake at the end and getting killed.
While the game is fun, it isn’t easy, even on easy mode. Some of the combat gets quite easy, but some of the enemies can take you down in one hit. A few of the puzzles take a few minutes to figure out, but they haven’t been too hard as far as I’ve played.
The biggest problem with the game is the checkpoint save system. Games and developers that use bad checkpoint systems like this one don’t respect their players. Yes, there are mini checkpoints during the gameplay, so if you die, you don’t go back too far (Killzone: Shadow Fall also has these), but they don’t stick if you need to quit the game. If you quit, the game restarts you at the chapter checkpoint, so I lost quite a bit of progress when I so nastily discovered this. Infuriating! Killzone saves the current checkpoint so you can quit and come back and not lose anything, so it is much better than Knack in this case.
So do I recommend Knack? Yesterday when I lost so much progress due to the pathetic checkpoint system, I would have said “NO,” but after calming down a little and playing some more, yes, it is a worthy game and is fun to play. I’ve yet to try the co-op mode, but I look forward to that.
And, of course, it’s killing me that the PS4 came out at nearly the same time as the new Star Trek Online season (The Sphere), which has a really fun battle zone for ground combat, as well as the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion (Helm’s Deep). Oh how will I get time to play all these things?