Cronos: The New Dawn

I generally don’t post negative thoughts because I believe the world has too much negativity in it and I’d like to provide an escape from that. But I can’t help it here and in this review I will explain more about the kind of gamer I am.

I feel I am a weird blend in the spectrum between being a casual gamer and a hardcore gamer. The biggest example of this weird area I’m in is how I feel about difficulty in games. I am not like the content creators, at least most that I see online, who seem like gluttons for challenge and difficulty. Now I enjoy challenges in real life but when it comes to games I am all about escapism. If a game has difficulty spikes, I can handle them and have more patience for retrying a part I keep losing at the further I’m into a game before said difficulty spike. But if a game requires trial and error from the jump that requires me to repeat hours of gameplay. I lose interest fast.

Now to be fair, Cronos isn’t difficult from the jump but about an hour or so in, it became difficult and I kept losing. I don’t care to keep trying because I frankly find losing and repeating an instance in a game over and over and over and over again, pretty boring and frustrating. And on top of that the gameplay itself isn’t fun. When playing a game with guns I like to be able to just unload a clip if needed but with this you are required to charge every single shot to survive, at least that’s what I read from others giving advice for playing the game and I’ve read so much to try to keep myself interested but to me this is just a difference of opinion when it comes to the game’s mechanics and how they feel. For me charging every shot is just not fun.

I am interested in the story and may try picking it up again, especially if Bloober decides to update it with the ability to change difficulty in the first playthrough. For me games that don’t give the choice to play an easier version, I generally don’t like. Which sucks because I’ve always been a fan of Bloober Team. I feel I was the only one who was excited to see they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as oppose to all the talk online that was skeptical at best and downright unfair and pessimistic at worst. I really wanted to enjoy Cronos because I always enjoyed their horror games, not just Silent Hill 2 and Observer like most content creators and talking heads online. And I do find the story intriguing but it taking hours for almost every enemy encounter and the gameplay of charging every shot to make every single one of the few you get count, just gets boring to me. So if you like difficult games for the sake of being difficult and you like games that require a lot of resource management then this is your game. I will say, when it comes to the concept of survival horror being the fear of constantly on the edge of running out of ammo, this game does a phenomenal job.