Game Reviews

Kritika: Chaos Unleashed

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Kritika: Chaos Unleashed

"You have unlocked: Kolten's Mighty Pants!" Kritika: Chaos Unleashed's narrator proudly informs me.

"Excellent", I reply, immediately heading to the inventory section. The mountain city of Ronte won't know what hit it. My omnipotent underwear will smite the goblins in a fiery wave of retribution.

"Cower before the might of my bloodthirsty knickers," I whoop happily, blasting though a wave of enemies with renewed vigour.

Kritika: Chaos Unleashed is one of those RPGs where you can't quite work out whether its tongue is wedged in its cheek, or it really is that ridiculous. And that makes it oddly charming.

Go berserk

You have the choice of two diametrically opposed characters at the start, a powerhouse beserker, or a feline acrobat called "Kitty".

These are your weapons against the forces of Alkee, a tyrannical leader who is raising a private army to exert his iron will over the land of Kirenos.

The main story is sort of hard to follow from there. It leapfrogs from level to level with little explanation. Your platoon commander wants you to go out on patrol, for example. Now some city somewhere is under attack, so you should go patrol there too.

Still, the game makes up for its weak narrative with well-designed gameplay. Combat is fast-paced with simple mechanics. You string together combos with a basic attack button, and can add to them with powerful skill moves like "wind spin" and "thunder dash".

Rack up a high enough combo score and you unlock a special signature move that can easily take out a low-level boss or large group of enemies in one fell swoop.

Slash, hack, repeat

It's fighting of the hack-and-slash variety, which is immensely cathartic. Sort of like popping bubble wrap, if bubble wrap were to emit brightly coloured arcs of light every time you popped a vesicle.

This is most obvious in the second game mode, Monster Wave. Here you carve your way through endless scores of baddies, racking up insane combo scores and earning gold for every felled foe.

This gold then feeds into the main campaign, allowing you to upgrade skills and weapons - very useful stuff.

When you're not fighting you can head to the workshop to craft and enhance weapons, thus boosting your powers in combat. You can also upgrade your skills as you progress and wage rival matches against other players online.

There are a few things that spoil this frenzied RPG though. Most glaringly is the fact you need to have an internet connection to play Kritika.

This is fine if you're indoors with Wi-Fi, but in the mornings on a train (the time when you’re most likely to want to take out a cleaver and carve your way through the hordes) you'll be unable to play.

Worse than that is Kritika's shameless panhandling at every available moment. A stamina bar depletes every time you complete a stage, eventually locking you out the game unless you top it up with Karat Gems (Kirenos's local currency) or wait for it to fill again.

Then, if you pay 400 Karats you become a VIP and can thus "auto-battle". This means that when you play online against friends who haven't paid, you will almost always win because a super-smart computer is playing for you.

It's not all bad though. The graphics are gorgeous and the gameplay is compelling. Plus, if you play long enough, you do get a very nice pair of pants.

Kritika: Chaos Unleashed

Gratifying, addictive and brutally fun, Kritika: Chaos unleashed should be prescribed by doctors as therapy. Honestly, with all its in-app purchases it costs about the same anyway
Score
Alysia Judge
Alysia Judge
After spending months persuading her parents that it's a valuable career path, Alysia is still not bored with writing about games. That's a good thing really, since skills like spaceship navigation and zombie slaying are pretty much non-transferable.