My last post talked about grinding my Tera character, a tiny bunny girl with a giant axe, up to level 65 during the Tera level-up event so I could get her a Pegasus.  That went pretty well!  It only took a few days and a few deaths, and I got to remember why I enjoyed the game so much – it’s a really pretty game and the combat system is so much more fun than tab-target MMOs.

It’s not the only game En Masse publishes, though.  They also publish an online MMO-esque brawler called Kritika Online, and they were running an event in Kritika where starting a new character and getting it to level 20 would get you a mount in Tera.

Specifically, a wolf.  A PINK wolf.  A PINK WOLF THAT LEAVES A TRAIL OF FLOWER PETALS.

Now, I am 100% macho as all get out, and you’ll just have to pardon me here while I open a beer bottle with my teeth, belch, and watch some football, but OMG OMG OMG PINK WOLF.

So I downloaded Kritika.

It’s… well, it’s a little like Tera in that the combat is all camera focused and there’s no target locking, but it’s a lot more frenetic and spammy.  You do a lot of mouse clicking and hitting buttons for your handful of skills, and if I am honest it could REALLY do with some controller support.  There are four base classes, and after you reach level 15 you get to do a quest to become one of several advanced classes.

I started a rogue, spent a few hours clicking buttons and beating up mooks, and then had the option to choose between “Catspaw”, “Assassin”, and “Wolf Guardian”.

Catspaw featured “The Killing Power of Cute”, so I went with that.

As you may have gathered from the class preview images, it’s a Korean game, and that means that there are a lot of half-naked women.

No, really.  Have a sample of the game’s quest givers, bankers, merchants, and so on:

There are also a few cute animals:

And, of course, the developers decided to put an NPC in the game just for me:

I, uh, I may have gotten a little off-track here.

Anyway.  The game.  The GAME.  In which you have things to do other than stare at the cute girl with glasses and massive… books.  That thing.  Well, while there are little quest hubs, the majority of the game involves going into very small instanced zones, each made up of little rooms full of enemies, killing all the enemies in each room to open the door to the next room, and repeating until you find a boss room, after which you warp back to town, hand in your quests, and then get sent back into the same instance because you need to kill a slightly different group of monsters or break some boxes that you didn’t break the first time or…

…well, let’s just say that they need to get a few uses out of every instance.  About three trips per seemed to be normal, at which point I was generally ready to tackle the next instance.

Oh, one word of advice if you decide to play this?  Play the instances on “Hard”, because it gives you a huge XP boost and isn’t really very hard at all.  Most of the NPCs in the low level instances seem pretty content to take occasional languid swipes at you and then get gathered up and juggled to death.

Eventually, I reached my goal, took a victory lap around the rest of the instance, and logged off to write this and to await the email with the code for my pink wolf.

I mean PINK WOLF.

So, with the understanding that all I did was make a character and kill stuff until I hit level 20, it seems like a pretty good little time-waster.  It’s unusual in the MMO space in that you could easily log in for 15 minutes, go through an entire instanced zone, kill the boss, get some loot and log off. If you are, like me, a VERY MANLY MAN WHO LIKES LOOKING AT HALF NAKED WOMEN AND IS NOT JUST PLAYING THIS FOR A PINK WOLF, it has lots of half naked women.  It also has hilarious item names:

I don’t know if it devolves into a horrific grind later in the game – I collected a lot of crafting-related drops, and there IS an “enchanting” system for gear enhancement, which is a huge red flag.  I also don’t know how it works as a co-op game.  I understand the PvP is broken as all get out and pretty much boils down to which player gets the first hit in so they can juggle the other player to death, but without personal experience I will relay that simply as hearsay.

It’s also free, with the standard caveat that players who pay lots of real money get to kick sand in the face of free players.  If you have En Masse Points (“EMP”) from playing Tera, you can even sorta kinda use them in Kritika.

For example, your first purchase in the cash shop gets you a bonus of a pack of healing potions and xp boost items.  Since I wanted to hit level 20 faster, I decided to spent some of my EMP.

Specifically, I decided on:

And this was 125 “Kred”, which are exchanged from EMP at a 1:1 ratio… well, sort of.

There was no option to buy 125 Kred, and no way to pay for my Pink Cat Hood with EMP, so my new headgear really cost 200 EMP and I now have 75 Kred languishing in Kritika with nothing to spend them on.  This is, of course, WHY these companies use their little points etc.

Still, it was worth the fakebucks to look like this:

And now I really want them to put this hat in Tera, so I can buy one over there as well.

Sooooo… let’s sum this whole post up.  I did go into Kritika with specific non-Kritika-related goals in mind, but I still had a good time.  I’d say give it a try.