It's a brave move, one that has paid off with aplomb, as Cronos: The New Dawn is a story that only Bloober Team could tell.
You, as the Traveler, are sent into this wasteland to locate anomalies, allowing you to travel back to the beginning of the Change to 'extract' certain important figures.
You proceed through largely linear levels, dispatching monsters while keeping an eye on your very limited resources. Now and then, you'll do a simple puzzle that's perhaps a bit too simple to even really call a puzzle.
Cronos's one major gameplay innovation is merging, a mechanic by which the game's monsters – Orphans – can absorb one another's corpses to gain their abilities, becoming significantly more powerful.
Later on, armed with fully upgraded guns and more readily available ammo, it becomes far less of an issue. The fact the game's most interesting mechanic is so easily overcome is a shame, even if it hasn't massively soured my view of Cronos as a whole.
Besides, if you're playing on Hard Mode, this is certainly less of an issue.
Thankfully, while Cronos's gameplay didn't particularly capture me, I could not feel more differently about the game's story and world, both of which are fantastically presented.
In a world in which you are almost entirely alone, grappling with demons both internal and external, Cronos's approach to worldbuilding works wonders. Often, I found myself going out of my way to explore, not to find resources and upgrades, but simply to experience more of New Dawn and its inhabitants' slow marches towards their deaths.
The game routinely engages with themes of individualism versus collectivism, or freedom versus authoritarianism. In many ways, it can at times feel like playing witness to the plight of the 1980s Polish worker.
Unsurprisingly, Bloober's take on the era is wry and unflinching. I would argue that some of their critiques of the nation's Communist era have a touch of eye-rolling unsubtlety but, ultimately, its their history to recall. Either way, I had a blast exploring it all.
Sadly, as I reached the very final area, a bugged door prevented me from reaching the game's ending. Too close to the embargo to remedy, this review comes with the caveat of having finished perhaps 99 per cent of the game, though that missing one per cent is significant.
Not to hop on the recent anti-Unreal Engine 5 bandwagon, but Cronos is another below-par UE5 title.
Despite spending my first hours playing Cronos on the lowest possible settings, I was lucky if I crawled above 30fps. I averaged around 25fps and at one point dropped as low as 17 whole frames per second.
Thankfully, a patch appears to have resolved this for the most part, allowing me to run the game on higher settings at a higher framerate, but it is far from stable. I was still bouncing between 40-60fps every few seconds, so while it was a huge improvement, and didn't ruin my playthrough as my earlier experience threatened to, it's far from perfect.
View Green Video on the source websiteIf you're a PC player whose build is similarly struggling with recent UE5 titles, I would highly recommend either opting for a console version of Cronos or simply waiting until the PC performance is sorted out.
While it may draw heavy inspiration for its gameplay from its forebearers – the likes of Mass Effect and Resident Evil – in its tone and presentation, it pushes survival horror forward in entirely new ways.
If Silent Hill 2 was the adrenaline shot that brought Bloober Team roaring into life, Cronos: The New Dawn is the solid, ironclad follow-up that shows that this studio is far from a one-hit wonder, but a bona fide horror powerhouse, and I'm very excited to see what they come out with next.
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