Cronos: The New Dawn - Bloober Team Almost Did It!

It's important to know a little about the reviewer before you read their review.

I rarely play Survival-Horror games and have only played a handful games like - Dead Space, Silent Hill.

I typically enjoy Action-Adventure, exploration oriented games. I played Cronos: The New Dawn for about 18 hours on my PlayStation 5 and here is my review.

Characters

The game has a very few characters but each one of them is very important. Each character you meet tell you a story and it's up to you who you want to believe.

The protagonist is a well crafted character with a lot to uncover about their past and the game takes you through a roller coaster ride to realize their story.

There are couple of other characters in the game but we won't be talking about them in this review. In short, every character is well played by their actors and every dialogue in the game hold importance so you need to keep your ears up all the time.

Gameplay

The core of the gameplay is centered around resource management, clearing enemy areas, fixing broken things and finding missing pieces to solve puzzlea to unblock your path and move forward. In order to do so, game provides you with different kind of weapons and items which includes a Healing injection, fire bombs, Handgun, Shotgun and a couple more guns.

The game core is all about resource management and it feels tough in the beginning but the resources management gets easier as you upgrade your weapons and your suit but even then you can't really use ammos luxuriously. You can upgrade your inventory slots by upgrading your suit by finding cores, a rare object in the game that you need to dig deep to find as many as possible for a smooth ride - I'll leave a tip for you - Try and find as many cats as you can.

You can also upgrade your weapons and for that yo need to find as many game currencies as possible.

If you can manage your resources well, I'm certain that you will end up having a good experience through the game.

Combat

Now let's talk about the combat - The game offers a point and shoot combat through 3rd person view and each gun holds their own character. You can feel the weight of the guns through every shots. What felt really good was the charged shots - charged shots did more damage but took double the time but charged shots are important for resource management as you use less ammos.

You also have two area damage weapons in form of mine bomb and flame thrower capsule which can be used to stun and taken down multiple enemies at a time.

Ammos are hard to come by and you must use them as efficiently as possible. If you want to take one tip out of this is to try and group enemies togehter and blow them off when they are near a gas can.

Graphics & Sound

Okay lets talk about graphics, sounds and performances now. The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 and did not show any problems on my platrough on PS5, the game looked excellent graphically and was consistent throughout.

As for sound the game was best expereienced in 3D audio headphones but I chickend out as I was to afraid to play with headphones on.

The tension built through the sound was very well crafted and with sounds of enemies lurking around made you take each step very carefully.

With most of the key points covered, let's dive into strength and weakness of the game.

Story

To say that story of the game is complex would be an understatement. The game combines the concept of Time Travel, Alien Species, memory preservation to say the least. The story circles around a Traveler who is sent to the earth to save humanity where the Traveler encounters Orphans( a dead species who comes to life to feed on you) and has to get past them to find and collect essence of humans that are worth preserving and in turn save humanity.

By the time you end the game you are left puzzled with what just happened and it will take you a few minutes to fully digest the story of the game. Alright, that's enough about the story, let's talk about the Characters , shall we!

Strengths

Looking into Strengths, the game truly shines in producing a survival Horror experience through the fear factor of running out of ammos and being too slow in taking out enemies as the enemies merge with dead enemies and get even more stronger.

The game offers an excellent story for you to ponder upon when you finish the game and lastly the enmy areas are very well designed to make sure you bring your A game.

Performance and Visuals

As for weakness, the game comes up with a few cheap tricks to produce jump scare moments which I wasn't fond of. Moments like something suddenly appearing on the screen with weird noices only to go off the screen immediately.

Another weakness of the game was at around 70 percent mark where it started to feel repetitive. It was very evident as even the Devs joked about it through the in game character and dialouge. If the game was 3-4 hours shorter I think it would have hit the right spot

Conclusion

Alright, some final words before I wrap up the review - Overall I though the game was an excellent survival horror experience with a solid but a very complex storyline. The game shined through it's enemy design and enemy area design but I was let down by the repetitive nature of the game and game could have easily avoided it.

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SpwanYaard