Disapprove: Cronos: The New Dawn

Given Bloober Team’s previous track record and initial showings of Cronos: The New Dawn, I was considering ignoring it entirely as it looked extremely mediocre at best. Yet, at release, the game started getting a lot of positive reviews from everywhere. It can’t be that so many people are praising a poor game, right? Wrong, apparently. Cronos turned out to be not just mediocre in ways that I predicted, but it also somehow managed to do poorly things, that Bloober Team usually does really well.

Cronos: The New Dawn claims to be a “survival horror” game, though for the initial 3 to 4 hours of my playtime I was fully willing to accept that it was yet another example of marketing gaslighting people into thinking linear third person shooters can be considered “survival horror”. However, as the game goes on, it does become a survival action, of sorts, with even some sections that indeed work as they would in a survival horror game. Which, unfortunately for Cronos, puts it into direct comparison with representatives of several genres, at all of which it is quite average at best.

As mentioned, the game functions as something that could be considered a survival action – think Resident Evil 4, – so it’s an action focused action adventure with horror theme for the story and setting and a mix of fully linear sections with some interconnected locations you get to explore and unlock more of. The team has previously attempted a similar approach in the quite adequate Silent Hill 2 remake last year, though this time around the “more linear” sections are extremely linear. Not that it’s a bad thing if the combat and locations are good, but sadly both are quite poor. The combat is far from the worst I’ve ever played – it functions and there are some nuances to it, like the ability to charge shots or the fact that enemies try to merge with other enemies to get stronger, which can be prevented. But it is exceedingly dull most of the time, except when it’s very poorly thought out and frustrating instead. There’s no real “difficulty” in the latter moments, nor does the game do what The Evil Within did – it doesn’t kill you for “playing wrong”, it’s just so messy that sometimes you get unlucky and start to slowly lose a battle of attrition. Boss fights are especially poorly designed, which is odd, since that was the only genuine combat highlight in Silent Hill 2 remake.

The biggest surprise, though, is in the visuals. I often said about Bloober Team’s games – they don’t know how to design a fun game, but their tech art and level art team are top notch. Their environments always looked interesting, transitions creatively used the Unreal Engine tech, they did a lot of genuinely impressive visual trickery all the time. But Cronos: The New Dawn is easily the ugliest Unreal Engine 5 game I’ve seen. Everything looks dull and boring and very reminiscent of the Unreal Engine 3 era at the end of 2000s, where games often looked hideous and you couldn’t tell one location from another. I feel like they were banking on the whole “alternate reality 1980s Poland after apocalyptic event” atmosphere being weird and unfamiliar to a lot of more English-speaking audience and maybe it is (it’s certainly not weird to me). But I do feel like if you want an interesting take on this whole “vibe”, there are far more visually interesting titles like You are EMPTY, STALKER or, heck, another Polish attempt at creating a Resident Evil 4 clone – Afterfall: Insanity. I can’t believe I am saying that Afterfall is more interesting than anything, but it is actually true.

Storytelling and the plot start very strongly, at least. There’s an interesting mystery and curious events that hook you in and make you wish to learn more. But even by the middle of the game it becomes clear that the most interesting ideas are never developed or followed up, some of the genuinely interesting mysteries are left hanging and the game, in typical Bloober Team fashion, is far less interesting in sci-fi, and more in “what if this was a metaphor about something” plot development that is, at the same time, so non-commital or surprising, that I can’t imagine anyone being interested in it. It’s told very poorly too, with utterly stupid dialogues and cutscenes, wild mood swings between moment to moment and plot points never organically developing or leading from one to another. Things just happen when the developers want them to happen, so there’s no flow to anything narrative or gameplay-related. All while somehow lasting for about 14-16 hours of playtime it absolutely does not deserve.

I’m surprised at this game. Cronos: The New Dawn is extremely mediocre at best, and poorly designed and put together as a game or a story at worst. Yet it is getting far better reception than, say, Post Trauma, which lands in the same range of quality overall. For some reason, people keep giving Bloober a pass and the clout from releasing a decent remake of a fantastic game probably didn’t hurt either. But really – just ignore this one. It’s not good at all and even the already mentioned Afterfall: Insanity is a more interesting project than this. At least it’s often unintentionally funny. This, however, is just boring and frustrating.