Of course the two titles everyone has their eyes on are those first-party exclusives that start with “K”. Since I just wrote an article about Knack creator Mark Cerny, we’ll start there.

I was actually pretty shocked that the first reviews to go up were largely negative. Eurogamer gave the game a 4/10 and so did Gamespot. The game started off this morning with a Metacritic score of 30… which is usually reserved for pretty lousy games. Thankfully as more scores are going up, that Metacritic score is up to 60 as of 10am EST. 

Still, that’s a pretty mixed bag of reviews. While most reviews I’ve read praise the game for the nice particle effects, common complaints are that you don’t have enough health and die very easily, and that the voice acting and dialogue is a bit on the cheesy side. 

Fairing better is Killzone: Shadow Fall. So far there has not been a single negative review and its Metacritic score is at a solid 71. The game is being praised for having stunning visuals and a rock solid framerate. Some complaints I’ve seen so far in reviews is the lack of jetpacks and mechs in multiplayer (that were in Killzone 3) and also that the campaign starts off very strong, but the last 1/3 of the game really takes a dive. 

So there you have it. I’m sure as the day goes on and more reviews go up we’ll see these scores fluctuate a bit more. You can find the Knack reviews here and the Killzone reviews here. We certainly encourage you guys to share your impressions of these games once you’ve played them. I hope to have some impressions of my own up sometime next week.