The only PS4 launch title worthy of being played in a tub.
Straight from the wondrous mind of Mark Cerny comes Knack, an action platformer with lots of voxels and a mildly odd look to the human characters.
Firstly, the boxart. The boxart definitely leaves a good impression. A nice PS4 logo at the top with the always welcome "Only on PlayStation" is one of the first things to see, followed by the boxart itself, which has the rather wonderful Knack logo, as well as a large, fully-powered Knack looking rather menacing towards the top, and at the bottom, two of the human characters and small Knack surrounded by goblins. The boxart does seem to capture the spirit of the game (or at least what I've seen and not played of it), and looks a lot better than a lot of other boxarts, to be honest.
The back of the box has a take on Sony's "Greatness Awaits" PS4 line with "Adventure Awaits", essentially the same catchphrase as half of the more kid-oriented media tends to use, as they show Knack fighting against Goblins in mechs and talk about 2-player cooperative play, which is something to be quite unexpected from a PS4 game, but a fantastic addition nonetheless! The real shocker here is a 37 GB minimum install to the HDD, which is a hefty load onto the 500 GB default hard drive for the PS4, and makes me wonder if 1080p is REALLY the way to go.
Opening the case is one of the biggest heart breakers of Knack. No instruction manual almost brings a tear to my eye. Sure, instruction manuals have been going the way of the dinosaur, but lack of an instruction manual as of late for all video games has been something incredibly saddening for me: as instruction manuals were definitely a huge part of opening up a video game case or box for the first time. However, as opposed to a tradition paper manual, instead you're treated to the inside of the cover of the box, which shows a Dualshock 4 and has the game's rather easy controls listed, so the loss, while still there, isn't quite as crushing.
Finally, the main part of Knack itself: the disc. The disc is rather simple, having an E 10+ ESRB rating, other miscellaneous logos, the Knack logo, and a blue and white background with Knack's parts strewn about. In all, it's a rather basic Blu-Ray disc, aside from one thing: the disc edges. With the Wii U launch last year, the world was greeted to the wonders of video game discs with rounded edges instead of the flat or sharp edges that are on most discs. However, the Playstation 4, or at least Knack, doesn't follow suit, instead leaving us in the backwards age of semi-pointed edges on our discs, which is probably one of the, if not the biggest let down of Knack.
In all, despite the grand visionary that Knack comes from, it still has it's shortcomings. A nice package overall, but that, of course, isn't enough to help Knack in the long term.
3/5
...And for those still reading all the way, as you can tell, this isn't a TRUE Knack review, but just me doing a little something in preparation for the Playstation 4 launch. I hope those that read all the way enjoyed my "review", and I will be sure to have actual, substantial coverage of Knack starting on the Playstation 4's launch date of November 15th.
0 comments:
Post a Comment