Knack 2 review — it rocks

Knack 2 works. Simply, elegantly, its many disparate parts—components that fit together so poorly in the original PlayStation 4 launch game—fuse together to form a warm, flowing game that’s as nonsensical and charming as its titular character. In a moment when publishers and developers working with resources on the scale of Sony and the SIE Japan Studio bury their games in meaningless collectible items, unnecessary multiplayer components, and endless grinding (of character upgrades, of repetitive open-world missions, and so on), Knack 2’s clarity is sweet relief from the gaming landscape of 2017.

Over its dozen or so hours, you’ll run through ruins, cities, mountains dotted with windmills and invisible towers, factories, and islands punching robots and monsters while solving light puzzles, jumping over traps and pits, all while changing the size of your weird red and gold golem hero as you go. As simple as any fantasy game about jumping over stuff made in the past 30 years, Knack 2’s familiarity belies it solid grasp of the fundamentals. It just works, and even more so when someone’s playing it with you.