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Sony has been saying for a while that it wants PlayStation 4 to take us back in time to a more innocent kind of gaming, but I didn't realise they meant it so literally until I played Knack, an old-fashioned platform brawler where you run around double-jumping and mashing buttons to punch goblins and robots until they flicker out of view.Almost completely linear and framed by a third-person camera over which you have no control, Knack is a series of fights that box you into small arenas until you kill all your enemies, at which point a forcefield is removed so you can continue. These fights are broken up by basic platform sections where you dodge through traps. There are ice and lava levels, along with forests where you punch owls and spiders, and in the end I was surprised the developers didn't just go the whole hog and throw in a mine cart ride.
All of this is set up by a simple story about goblins attacking humans. Built out of prehistoric relics by an inventor everyone just calls the Doctor, Knack joins forces with the security robots of a billionaire industrialist called Viktor to repel the goblin threat. Accompanied by the Doctor's young assistant Lucas and his uncle Rydar, they all end up in a race to secure an ancient power. The result is a bit more advanced than what happens in the Mushroom Kingdom, but not by much.
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