Have you played Knack?

[binary solo]

So I've now played a few hours of Knack. I just finished the "stealth" bit in bad guy's mansion.

So the good: Core gameplay is fine. Reasonably varied. Unforgiving but not unfairly. Every time I died it was because I misjudged not because the game took a cheap shot. I'm playing on normal difficulty and I like that normal is still a challenge. And hard SHOULD be for expert players, and everyone else should die a lot on hard, that goes for all games, not just Knack.

The bad: Story. Bleh what trite nonsense. I can play through the story and I suppose it's a story for kids, but it's rubbish.

Everything else: Graphics, reasonable. Environment, too linear, it could have been like Jak and Daxter 1 at least a little bit, but everything is pretty well follow your nose, but it's not in the bad column. At least it means I will finish the game fairly quickly and not run around aimlessly. So because the story is rubbish having he linearity force to progress through the game is actually a good thing. Knack, why give him individuality if he's not going to be the main speaking part?

The game is fun but it's potential has been wasted. Because I can see a lot of unrealised potential in the game I can't give it a score higher than 7/10, we'll see if it gets that high in the end. But because the core gameplay is pretty good, I don't believe it deserves below a 6/10. My baseline comparisons are Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank and it doesn't come close to those. If VGC sales of 1.33 Million are fairly accurate I think that's about the level of sales it deserves.