Cronos: The New Dawn review – solid gameplay, stellar world, shaky performance

The game takes place in the New Dawn – based on the Krakow district of Nowa Huta – following a post-apocalyptic event known only as 'the Change'.

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.

As a survival horror, Cronos is rather unremarkable; there was never an instance during my playthrough where I was wowed by the gameplay being served up.

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.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, because unremarkable as the gameplay can often be, Cronos nails the survival horror fundamentals so competently, it's easy to forget its faults.

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.

Early on, this is a real threat. Between your feeble weapons and limited resources, a merged Orphan is effectively a death sentence.

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.

Near the end of the game, Cronos does throw a fabulous little riddle at you, and I only wish that Bloober had employed these more freely throughout the game, because it really scratched an itch that nothing else I encountered had.

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.

Early on, Cronos plays fast and loose with its story, telling you almost nothing about your mission or the reasons for it, leaving you to piece together crumbs of lore from letters, notes, posters and more that litter the world.

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.

Anyone with an interest in Cold War history, and of course Polish history in particular, is sure to find plenty of fascinating callbacks to life in the Polish People's Republic.

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.

As you near the final hours, Cronos reaches its peak on all fronts. The linear levels give way to dense, winding labyrinths, while the jumbled story elements begin to align, coalescing into a tale with real depth and moral conflict.

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.

That brings me on to my biggest issue with Cronos, at least as a PC player. Unfortunately, it's quite a big one.

Not to hop on the recent anti-Unreal Engine 5 bandwagon, but Cronos is another below-par UE5 title.

Now, I don't have a supercomputer by any means, but it was powerful enough to run Expedition 33 on High settings at a stable 60fps. I wasn't expecting the world, but I was expecting decent performance.

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.

Between being stopped from reaching the game's ending and my performance woes, I went back and forth between scores, before eventually settling on four stars, but with a disclaimer.

If 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.

But, as I say, Cronos is a wonderful experience and a real must-play for fans of the survival horror genre.

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.

It tells a story unlike any other, and perhaps most importantly, it's a story and world that could only be created by the Krakow natives of Bloober Team; a wonderful and evocative spin on their own city's history.

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.

Cronos: The New Dawn releases 5th September on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. We reviewed on PC.

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