Review – Cronos: The New Dawn

After the excellent, we have a new game from Polish developer Bloober Team. Cronos: The New Dawn puts the player in a dystopian future to travel in time during a mysterious cataclysm. Controlling the traveler, an agent of the collective, its goal is to find important people and extract their essences before they perish in the apocalypse dominated by biomass abominations. A survival horror authorial, but with influences from Dead Space, Resident Evil and even The Last of Us.

My expectations were high for Kronos: The New Dawn, but what I found was an unbalanced game in their own ideas and rhythm, quickly tiring the player with poor narrative choices and the repetition of combat, this designed to be difficult from the beginning.

This is our mission

The traveler ND-3576 begins its journey with the mission of finding its predecessor, the traveler ND-3500, to recover a relic called anchor. With her our protagonist can travel in time, returning to the 80s to explore the district of, in Krakow, and discover the events that left humanity on the tightrope. A place whose brutalist architecture matches a lot with the game’s visual proposal, which brings together anomalies that deform reality and grotesque creatures known as the orphans.

For its defense, the EPH-611 mutant blade is granted, a pistol that has a fast and another (stronger) shot that will be used for most of the journey. The traveler also gives a body-to-body blow and a useful, to finish a fallen enemy. In a short time you will bump with the first orphan, a creature that fuses with other bodies and gets stronger and stronger.

In exploration, which occurs through outdoor and mainly internal areas, such as the typical housing estates of Poland (Os Bloki), you will find items and boxes to destroy and get things such as ammunition, energy (game currency), nuclei (upgrades), shell recovery (life), metallic waste and resource manufacturing chemicals. Purposely scarce, these items force the player to think of strategies to move forward. But in most cases running will be the best option.

The orphans

The orphans arise in various ways. The weakest present themselves as disfigured humans with a long transmuted arm. If there is a body on the floor, it can absorb your biomass and evolve into a tougher version. And so the game presents its variations of the same enemy: with a harsher carapace, which spits acid, which crawls the walls, which is larger and stronger, and so on. The concept is pretty cool in the early hours, but you quickly get sick of these enemies because they are very similar. And the way of killing the orphans also falls into repetition: susceptible to fire, you will be most of the time using the flames to weaken or explode gas cylinders.

Dead Space inspiration ends up getting more in the user’s look and interface, as in gameplay we have only a few aspects. Arsenal does not have the same creative impact as the Electronic Arts franchise. There are two variations of pistol, a shotgun and a carbine, the latter with guided firing when carrying the aim. Other than that we have some upgrades for weapons and explosive mines, for example. The subtle side of The Last of Us comes in the combination of items to use in the manufacturer and create items by accessing a menu. And Resident Evil provides his influence on the camera, signaling items and wooden boxes.

What Cronos: The New Dawn adds “different” to gameplay is control of the anomalies to redo or undo details of the scenario to allow the passage, such as rebuilding a bridge in pieces. You do this by interacting with a vortex, looking for the right angle for it. Ahead in the campaign, the traveler also has gravitational boots to navigate the scenery at various angles. Cool at first glance, but quickly delivers its simplicity to only taking the player from point A to point B without any challenge.

Cadence and unbalanced combat

The story of Cronos: The New Dawn starts interesting, with audio recordings and documents giving tips on what happened. The initial pace gives more room for the setting than for combat, which is a positive thing. The game gets it right in the scenarios and especially in the sound, creating an inhospitable world to let the player warn all the time. The problem is that this choice is too dragged on the game, bringing the orphans in predictable places or in larger areas, crashing the advance as long as they do not eliminate them all – or die from the lack of ammunition, a softlock that unfortunately happened to me frequently. And there is not always for cylinders to help, including the option of redoing them by manipulating time through a vortex.

The winding of history also contributes to the loss of interest of the player. Halfway through the game, about 8 hours, I couldn’t stand to read things that described events already handled from the plot. Even worse is coming far knowing so little about the protagonist and the collective. Cinematics occur with monologues and conversations with other characters, never to intensify what is coming. There was that touch of urgency, total despair, tension around every corner. In fact, Bloober Team lost the chance to present orphans variations in a more impactful and cinematic way. Bosses? It has very few.

It’s boring to be comparing one game with another, but hey life… Who has played Dead Space will never forget their striking moments, how. Or the countless ways of him dies, one more creative than the other. In Cronos: The New Dawn, the traveler just falls lasts to the floor and end. And this will happen a lot, since the orphans are challenging, requiring many shots. Worse than that is to return a big stretch when dying. In addition to the safe areas where you save, upgrade, use the chest and such, the game offers checkpoints in certain areas. But in others, with long stretches of course, they were inexplicably without. Such a game design failure has frustrated me at various times, especially because I have to get important items all over again.

I really wanted to have liked this game more. Cronos: The New Dawn is a little better than half for the end, although it remains repetitive in combat and scenarios, with walls taken by unified bodies warning of imminent danger. The game also does not hide to be increasing its duration with the orphans in large quantities, especially when there is no room for escape. At least, in times of calm, there are some cats for you to find and make affection.