'Cronos: The New Dawn' delivers a mysterious story worth uncovering, solid survival gameplay, and combat that’s brutally challenging (no difficulty options; hard mode is the default). Excellent visuals, music, and atmosphere, with smooth performance to back it all up. Tough, but rewarding game (for having an easier and more story-focused experience, you may use a game trainer). I rate it an 8 out of 10, and, technically, it's likely Bloober Team's best game.
The best way I can describe this game is "dry". What does this mean?
Think of Dead Space, but reduce the game to just the plasma cutter, reduce the enemy complexity to the basic necromorph and make that 90% of the enemies you encounter, and make levels 2 and 3 representative of the entire game (until the final chapter, anyway).
That's Cronos. What you see is what you get, and there are absolutely no real attempts to make the game stand out. Your weaponry is basically just a pistol and a shotgun, and variants of said weapons, an SMG with a variant, and one super explosive gun which is cool but you'll get like 4 shots of the thing for the whole game. You'll see the same basic enemy type over and over game with the odd special type, which are weirdly densified to a few areas where you encounter a whole bunch of specials at once, and then it's back to the basic enemies. And almost the entirety of the game is trudging through the same basic worn out, gore filled hallways. The level design doesn't actually get good until the game's final chapter. And the scare factor is just a general, flat "creepiness" with no real scares or eerie moments. The odd jump scare, but that's it.
None of this is really a bad thing. The game is rock solid all throughout, with great graphics, solid performance, good enough gunplay, and an interesting enough story, but what you do at the beginning of the game is pretty much what you do for 80% of the game, and then it suddenly starts to get good...and then it ends.
There are significant cons though:
-The game is too damn dark. Even if you increase brightness settings, it just makes the game become foggy and grey like the devs absolutely insist you play the game in sheer darkness and punish you if you try to increase the brightness.
-The game actively punishes you for exploring with most side paths leading to an ambush of some sort. This is bizarre given this game leans very heavily towards survival horror where resource management is a must. You're better off NOT exploring.
-Speaking of the survival horror, for a game pushing resource management it sure likes to throw a lot of enemies at you. You'll mostly encounter a few at a time, but then you'll suddenly run into dozens with nothing more than a handful of pistol bullets and one shotgun shot. Later on this actually gets fun, but it's a bit of a shock early on when it takes a full clip to bring an enemy down and you're entirely dependent on explosive barrels just to deal with a group of enemies let alone dozens plus a brute type enemy. It's challenging, but it feels less legit challenging and more like the kind of unfair challenge you'd see in a game's hardest mode, not the first 30 minutes of the game's default difficulty.
-The game takes WAY too long for enhancements to kick in. As mentioned above, when you get to the final chapter in the game and suddenly you're getting a lot of money and resources to level up, the game becomes a lot more fun while being no less challenging. But for the previous 15 hours, it's a real slog with very incremental gains in power. You get more cores in probably the final hour than you do the whole game. This should have been better balanced.
-No real replay value besides unlocking the game's true ending in a second playthrough. Your guns don't get more interesting or anything when you power them up and the game doesn't really get more interesting.
You do get to save cats though. I know some people will like that.
TL;DR; if you like survivor horrors, you will like this one too. If you don't like survivor horrors, mod the game for "easy mode" and try it for the story and setting: it's worth it :).
I'll start by stating: I don't like survivor horror games. The usual gameplay assumptions in this genre are, subjectively, not fun.
So why I bought this title, you may ask? I really liked the setting and story vibes presented in trailers.
Was it worth it? Yes, with a caveat that I'll explain later.
Why should you play this game then?
If you are a survivor horror player, this should feel like home to you:
- I'm no expert obviously, but to me this game played in many ways like Dead Space Remake (for better or worse). It was tough but fair. Shooting felt very satisfying. And there were moments of genuine anxiety created not by simple jump scares, but by your expectations about what may happen in a moment.
- Upgrades felt a bit lacking at the beginning but with time you'll notice how much they matter.
- Enemy variety is a bit lacking and not all bosses are memorable, but for the most parts they are fine.
- Developers really nailed resource drops, if you take the time to explore. Don't get me wrong: in a traditional survivor horror fashion, you will be counting every bullet and every scrap you'll find. But the game drops just enough of everything for you to be able to progress, if you're smart about your inventory content and how you approach combat.
- Oh, and the inventory itself will be your worst enemy because it's so small.
One big caveat here: there is no difficulty setting. I played Dead Space on easy (and I'm not ashamed of it!). I played it like that because of slow movement and no dodge. Combat frustrated me because of that and I have no patience for this kind of gameplay. If the combat is in real time, I prefer a more action-oriented style, that's why I don't like the genre. Here I had the same experience. I managed to get to about 2/3 of the story, but I just couldn't force myself to repeat a fight with one particularly annoying boss. The only reason I managed to finish this game is because I found a "story mode" mod, that made changes to inventory, game economics and resource drops. The combat was still hard and annoying, but at least now I had the depth of stuff to kill the boss before it killed me because of a small misstep.
Purists will no doubt be disgust with what I did, but I really wanted to finish the story and that was the only way I could :).
And on that note: the story and setting - the real reason you should play this title:
- I'm from Kraków, where the game is set, so I can recognize a lot of details about the environment. There were quite a few artistic liberties taken, of course, but a lot feels genuine (those old trams!).
- I'm not old enough to remember communist Poland directly, but I recognized a lot from stories and old movies. Developers made a great effort to recreate 1980s Poland in details, small and big, and in my opinion they succeeded. Underneath all that post apocalyptic rot you can really see a lot of from that place and time.
- The story didn't start very strong for me, but 2 - 3 hours in it suddenly hooked me. I wanted to know what has happen, to the world and to characters from the past. The game drip-feeds the story at first, but with time you will find enough clues to start working on theories. The ending can be predicted, but for me it happened very near the end. And even after the credits, there are still questions to be answered. Not a sequel bate, but definitely a sequel possibility.
- Voice acting, while not a lot of it, is good. One missed opportunity is the lack of Polish. It would really nail the vibe from the time and place.
- And to cap it off: the music makes a great work. You won't hear it all the time. But when it starts, it amplifies everything. Tracks were chosen masterfully.
On a technical note I didn't have many issues. I remember one crash near the end (acceptable enough in 20 or so hours I played). There were some minor stutters but only after loading a save or reaching a new location. Otherwise the game run ok without RT (around 80 fps in 4k on a 4080S, highest preset, and DLSS of course). And with frame generation you can even play with RT on, but I preferred to turn it off.
I wanted to love this game but the combat is just not enjoyable at all! They throw lots of enemies at you and you literally have a single digit number of bullets on you most times. And only one can of fire as an emergency. And you have to save at checkpoints. And there is no dodge mechanic. Missing one bullet usually means you are screwed. And if two enemies merge, they create something with even more health and damage.
Would have loved to explore more of this but it's not a fun challenge.
This is simply NOT a scratch on Dead Space gameplay-wise.
I would like to preface this review by stating that I am a huge critic of Bloober and of their games. I have played everything that they have developed from Observer to this title, and it is impossible to speak of this game in isolation as Bloober has undergone a sort of metamorphosis in and of itself.
Basically, I have always considered Bloober to be Eurojank. What is Eurojank? Well, it's Eastern European games having a grand vision, but a sloppy and buggy execution. While all their previous titles: Blair Witch, Observer, The Medium, Layers of Fear were "good enough", they were always buggy and poorly poorly optimized. Those games were acceptable to me because they were not presented as a AAA masterpiece. They fit the budget and fun was had, but were still rather somewhat annoying at times with the performance issues.
Then we fast-forward to my utter contempt for Bloober....Silent Hill 2 remake. I feel as though it were not actually much better or worse than their previous attempts (optimization included), but received far far far too much praise because of the IP and nostalgia. I feel if it (SH2) were judged upon its own merits, it wouldn't stand out at all, but would be just another middling AA title.
Now, we come to Cronos. There is no IP to back it, nor are there any nostalgia glasses clouding anyone's eyes. Bloober has taken their experience working with Konami, it seems, along with UE5, and also the newfound fame, and are doing their best to transition to a competent AAA Dev team.
This game has ambiance for sure. The combat is brutal, the resources scarce, and the struggle to survive is ever present. Now, there are technical hiccups....I mean...It's Bloober after all. Hardware Lumen (RT) absolutely tanks fps even on the 5090, and there is still the shader compilation traversal stutter ever present in UE games. The price is absolutely ridiculous too for a new IP.
However, all things considered, Good Job, Bloober Team!!! You have made it!
