Knack 2 finished! Final analysis

I wrote a little while ago about how since Knack was free anyway with Sony's "Stay at home" program or whatever it is called that there really isn't much reason to NOT play it. Play it I did, all the way through, in a mere 4 days. This is a rarity for me because normally one of two things happens to me with all games.

• I get bored with it because it can't hold my interest
• It becomes too difficult, I walk away and then when I return I remember nothing about the game, which makes it even more difficult and I invariably end up deleting it

With Knack, the game held my interest all the way through and I completed the game. To be fair I was playing the game on the Easy setting and I did this intentionally because really difficult games do not appeal to me at all.

Let's get into the pros and cons of this game shall we?

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PROS

Simple Controls

While the moves you have available to you continue to grow throughout the game, a vast majority of them are optional. The only exception being these one particular types of enemies that are introduced very late in the game that require a certain combo in order to eliminate their shields.

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This is just two buttons you have to remember and not some crazy, Dark Souls like combination that requires timing down to the nanosecond in order to pull it off. You honestly could finish the entire game on the easy setting without ever using anything other than your regular and hard attacks outside of this. Well you would still need to dodge every now and again but that is pretty easy as well.

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They mix it up with puzzles

This is one thing that I always appreciated about a lot of games: You get a break in the action to figure out what is for the most part quite easy puzzles. This breaks up the monotony and gives the game some variety.

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Most of these puzzles simply involved activating a switch or two and then changing from your big to small form in order to get through them. This is elementary-school grade shit here guys. It certainly isn't some big brain stuff but I enjoyed it anyway and I think most people would as well.

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Some good ol-fashioned platforming

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Again, none of this is terribly difficult but there are some instances where you need to time your jumps pretty accurately or fall to your death. Don't worry, dying is not that big of a deal mostly because especially during puzzles and the platforming sections, you respawn right where you left off but in a safe place at the start of each section.

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Great voice acting

Nothing ruins a game in my world quite like terrible voice actors. The cinematic sequences that have become the staple of all games these days can easily be ruined if they hire bad voice actors and I think that the development team spent some real time getting good actors for this title. I have no complaints about any character in the 30 hours or so of gameplay.

Other points of note

• extremely fast load times
• easy to understand skill tree
• you get to utilize enemy vehicles if you want to

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This doesn't mean that everything is good though, and all games have their bad side, so let's talk about that too.

Cons

Virtually no replay value

There are no side quests, the game is completely linear, and once you complete it on one setting going back and completing it on a more difficult setting merely makes you take more damage and your enemies take more or they add more of them. Other than that there is nothing different about a 2nd playthrough and therefore very little reason to do so

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You are given access to a world map and the ability to keep all your powerups on the 2nd playthrough but like I mentioned before, the story simply resets itself and nothing else is different. I suppose you could wander around and try to find all the collectibles but I am not completionist nor do I particularly want to get YT involved in order to try to make that happen. Therefore, once you finish the game, you are finished with the game. Hey! At least it was free!

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Basically the same story as every other game

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Bad guy wants to take over the world, unlikely heroes emerge that are scoffed at by their community, initial bad guy gets conquered and new bad guy emerges then it turns out that the REAL bad guy was one of the good guys all along. Meh.... we've seen this many many times before.

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Skill upgrades are kind of useless

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I like the idea behind skill trees and this game has a bunch of powerups and other than the general "50% more punch damage" ones I didn't use any of them for the most part because well, they overly complicate the game and don't really give you that much of an advantage.

Before anyone accuses me of not experiencing their use because I finished the game on Easy please know that I went back and played the game on Normal and Hard expecting these skills to be necessary: They are not. Actually, if anything the higher difficulty setting simply mean that you need to be more careful with your dodges and run around a bit more while your health regenerates... and that is about it.

Of all the upgrades that I bought, I think I might have used 2 of them and even then I didn't do so with any sort of regularity.

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No Metroidvania aspect... and they could have

Remember how in the Lego games you would encounter something along the way that you couldn't access and not much information was given to you why that was the case but then later on you would gain the ability to access said areas? Well that was a big part of the reason why those games had replay or backtrack value. Knack had such a great opportunity to do this as well but for some reason they didn't utilize it and that is a real shame.

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Other points of note

• No control over the camera, ever
• At times it is difficult to determine where an edge is and you fall to your death over and over and over again
• Borderline excessive use of quicktime events... if they are still called that (I think you know what I mean)

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Overall Opinion!

Had I paid for this game, I might be a little disappointed if I had paid more than say, $15 for it. This has a lot to do with the fact that I am quite frugal in my gaming purchases and this obviously isn't a factor since they are giving it away. Would you believe that this was actually a "pack-in" game in Japan and Sony had high hopes for turning this into a franchise character? Obviously the game didn't do nearly as well as they had hoped and they kind of scrapped that idea.

I feel as though this game will probably appeal to casual gamers like myself because the game is never really that difficult, even on the more difficult settings - it is merely more time consuming because of the additional HP given to enemies. For hardcore gamers out there, this game would probably be considered laughably bad. My opinion is tainted because I got it for free and I'm also an older gamer so it kind of brought me back to simpler times.

My over all score would be ** 7 / 10 **