What do you get when you cross Atomic Punk and Eastern European Brutalism? If I have it my way, it would be called Atom Brutalist Punk, but we can’t have nice things, either way, Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn combines the two and includes cats!
Cronos: The New Dawn puts players in the suit of “The Travler” as she traverses the dark, grim future of the Polish city of New Dawn that was ravaged by an epidemic in the 1980s. The Tralver must follow her predecessors to help change events of the past while surviving the horrors of the future.
Now, onto the game itself. Players who are used to playing survival-horror games will no doubt adjust well to the controls for the game, though I felt there may be a bit too much going on with the mechanics. For example, there are two separate melee buttons when you could just get away with one.
The sound design is well done, along with the direction of the voice acting. The Soundtrack blends modern and ’80s synth, the perfect juxtaposition of the game’s world.
When it comes to gameplay… I can’t ignore it, and I’m sorry, I just can’t, and I apologize if this upsets anyone… The game strikes me as a fan fic of Dead Space, if it’s not outright copying a lot of elements from the game. The animation of the melee, the loading animation of the pistol, the enemies, the compass/objective waypoint mechanics, and needing to destroy the corpses of enemies, among other things, nearly mirror Dead Space so much that it’s hard to ignore. Overall, the gameplay is alright if not a bit tricky, as there are no difficulty settings, so you will die a lot in combat, but you need to upgrade The Travler and her weapons. I will say, though, I like the Cat mechanics in the game as petting them helps develop the Travler’s character (as well as give you items).
Overall, Cronos: The New Dawn is a unique experience, although I struggle to shake the feeling that it’s a mild Dead Space clone. It’s one thing if they made it clear that it’s a love letter to the game series, but as I mentioned earlier, it comes across as a fan fiction of the game. Though the game has an interesting story and a unique approach, the copy-and-paste approach in a Bloober Team title again is causing concerns, as they made some original content in the past, but with some more recent titles (including this one), I feel they’re a little too comfortable with either copying from others or their own work, perfect example of what I’m talking about can be seen with my Layers of Fear review, and much like that one, I have to give Cronos: The New Dawn a 5/10 mainly for the lack of origonality.
Cronos: The New Dawn is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
