Knock Harder: Useless

Knock Harder: Useless is a game title with a punkish joke in it, and that already tells you it is trying to sell attitude as much as play. By our assessment, there is not enough public substance here to pretend it is anything more specific than a game that likely trades on fast, rude energy and a self-aware name. The upside is that this kind of thing can be immediate and easy to read at a glance; the downside is that the title alone does not tell you the mode, the scope, or how much depth it has. In practice, a game like this lives or dies on whether the moment-to-moment loop is sharp, because the name is doing a lot of the work before the player even starts. It sits closer to small indie curiosities than to a big, clearly legible genre piece, and that makes it hard to judge more deeply without playing it. The ceiling is simply the amount of actual design hidden behind the joke, and that is not visible from the name alone.