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Knack is exactly the sort of game you’d expect from Mark Cerny. His experience designing, producing and consulting on some of the company’s greatest hits – including the Ratchet, Crash and Uncharted series – to his work on PS4 itself shows in every frame.
Described by the man himself as “halfway between Pixar movie and character action game”, it’s built to show off the PS4’s power. Visually, it has a strong, kid-friendly look that’s also very well lit, adding to the appeal of the game as much as any of the characters themselves. In terms of its core gameplay, it’s not anything drastically new: platfom action, interspersed with item-collecting and messing around with different elemental and material objects to grow Knack from three-feet tall to a forty-foot tank-destroyer.
But it’s certain other elements of Knack, and how they feed into the new system’s architecture, that are also of interest. Specific items can be found in the world that give you buffs, but if your friends are also playing the game you can trade items with them. It’s the fastest way to acquire the best gear, according to Cerny, and it represents the first instance of PS4’s vaunted share mantra.
Also of note is Cerny’s statement that Knack will support play while you download, and that gamers with connections of 8Mb/second or above will be able to play the game start to finish after about two hours of starting the download.
So if it’s not exactly the most exciting game in the world, it is a technically interesting one. No real surprise, coming from the man who’s one of the foremost responsible for attempting to put PlayStation back on top.
