Kritika Global returns to Steam without P2E but with cash shop awfulness

July 25, 2022 5:00 PM

Before we get to that headline, this story needs a bit of a refresher course: Kritika Online was an anime-styled action MMO that first arrived to the west in 2017 from publisher En Masse, which shut it down in April 2019. The MMO later come back in November 2019 as Kritika:REBOOT thanks to self-publishing from developer ALLM, but that only lasted another two years before ALLM shut it down in February 2022. Last month, it brought it back again, this time as Kritika Global, an NFT-laden pay-to-earn edition of the same game.

That version of the game has now shambled its way on to Steam. How can it come back to that storefront when Valve has been banning crypto and NFT-filled titles? Because this version of Kritika Global has excised the need for a connection to a crypto wallet completely. The Steam version’s launch was further celebrated with a small event that hands out goodie bundles for logging in and hitting level 70, on top of cash shop bundle sales.

Speaking of that cash shop, user reviews are calling to attention that Kritika Global still features some of its gross cash shop monetization despite play-to-earn being extricated from the game: That means players still only have one character slot and need to shell out $50 for an extra slot and additional inventory slots have to be bought. In addition, some reviews are noting that this version runs worse than previous editions of the game.

Mercifully, it appears that players on Steam aren’t behind this fourth return of the game, as the title has hit an all-time peak of 61 players at the time of this writing – a damning figure particularly when stacked against REBOOT’s all-time high of over 3,700.