Bloober Team pulled off a near-impossible task with its remake of the cult classic Silent Hill 2. Creating a remake that captured the atmosphere and feeling of the original game was nearly impossible, and it showed that Bloober Team had a ton of potential. Cronos: The New Dawn is the developer's first stand-alone game since Silent Hill 2 was released, and I had high hopes for it. The result is a strong concept and cool idea that feels a little underbaked and unpolished. It's a horror game that's fun enough but far from being a new classic.

Cronos puts you in the role of The Traveler. You are part of The Collective, an organization that has left Earth after the planet was overrun by a biological threat known as The Orphans, zombie-tentacle creatures that emerged from a plague. You venture down to this infested world to rescue people considered to be important to The Collective by finding special gates that allow you to venture back in time and "harvest" those lost souls. Of course, not everything is as it seems, and your trips across time will reveal there is much more to the outbreak and your people than meets the eye.

The storytelling in Cronos did not work for me. It feels disjointed and awkward, with characters veering from being weirdly inhuman to being weirdly human without much rhyme or reason. Several scenes feel extremely off, and there's at least one cut scene that I'm convinced must be glitched because it suddenly cuts off mid-scene as if I'd hit the skip button. (I redid the preceding boss fight multiple times just to be sure I hadn't.) I had a difficult time getting engaged with the world or characters, and things felt rather bland.

On the surface, Cronos has a lot in common with popular horror franchise Dead Space, and that isn't a bad starting comparison. You play as a person in a big, heavy space suit who's wandering through monster-infested corridors, collecting items, stomping evil creatures, and being haunted by the ghosts of the people who came before. Cronos isn't subtle about its inspiration, and it has more than a few callbacks to Dead Space, but it also does enough to separate itself as its own beast.

The basic combat is standard survival-horror fare. Your primary enemy is The Orphans, mutant zombie monsters that come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They love to play dead in the environment and swarm you when you least expect it, and they're pretty durable. Headshots do additional damage, while shots to the limbs or the legs can stun or even knock down the beasts, leaving them open for follow-up attacks or a good old-fashioned boot-stomping. You also have access to a few emergency tools, like an AoE fire burst to stun and damage everything nearby.

Cronos emphasizes environmental item usage. Most areas in the game are littered with explosive barrels or fuel tanks that you can shoot to deal massive damage. You can even manipulate "oddities," which can change the environment around you or make used items in the environment explode. A good chunk of combat in the game boils down to luring enemies near these objects, so you can damage or kill several in a single shot. Traps are important and are often essential to defeat powerful enemies; it's probably the most enjoyable part of combat.

Cronos has a distinct way of limiting your mobility in combat. Most of the weapons in the game fill the standard shooter mold (handgun, shotgun, etc.), but those weapons aren't always at full power. To do maximum damage with an attack, you need to hold down the button and charge it while aiming at a foe. This will amplify the damage and modify the attributes of the attack, such as increasing the spread of a shotgun. However, this takes precious time during which you have to effectively stand still while a barrage of mutant monsters is bearing down on you. This is another reason why environmental objects are useful, since they don't need a charge to activate.

Resources are tight. There's some behind-the-scenes weighting of what resources you get based on how well you're playing, and it seemed to be tuned to never want you to have more than an additional clip or two of ammunition. As such, the game is pretty strict about making every shot count, and that plays into the way the charge mechanic works. Every bullet is precious, and more often than not, you'll find yourself wanting to charge up attacks unless you have absolutely no option. There are weapons you can get that don't require charging, but I'm not really sure they're worth it, since maximum damage overcomes all else. It also means you have to be careful about which weapons you choose to bring along, as it takes a long time before you get enough space to bring along more than one or two weapons. You eventually get the ability to customize your character slightly with different spirits harvested from people in the past, which grant passive bonuses like increased item drops, but this doesn't really change the fact that every shot counts.

Probably the biggest element of the combat system is the fact that enemies can merge. When an enemy is killed (or if there is an enemy corpse in the environment), it isn't completely out of action. Living Orphans can merge with dead ones, and in doing so, will take on their traits. Thus, if an armored Orphan merges with an acid-spitting Orphan, you'll get an armored, acid-spitting Orphan. Understandably, this is a pretty bad situation to be in. The only way to prevent this is by hitting a merging Orphan with a powerful attack or by setting the bodies on fire, which will permanently end the threat of the merge. Fire is relatively rare, so you can't burn every Orphan you come across, and you need to save various burning instruments for the right spot.

The "merge" concept feels underbaked. It's cool in theory, but the game errs too much on the side of giving players ways to stop the merging. Early on, it's basically a net positive because any enemy who is attempting to merge stops attacking, puts up a big gloopy shell, and waddles past you toward the nearest corpse, where it stands still for several seconds while being easy prey. As things get more intense, I never felt pressure from the attempted merging of enemies. In the rare situations when enemies merge, they're certainly more dangerous, but despite the game giving Dead Space-style reminders to "don't let them merge," it never felt like a central part of the concept.

The combat in the game left me feeling a tad cold. The comparisons to Dead Space are inevitable, and in that regard, it comes up a little short. I get the areas where they tried to put their own spin on the mechanics, but none of them felt as natural or well put together as Dead Space did. In particular, the merging felt too canned and safe most of the time. The boss fights also were rather dull, especially since many of them don't have any merging mechanics and feel like big generic things to hit. It wasn't bad by any means, but it never left me as engrossed as Dead Space or Resident Evil.

The general structure of Cronos tends to involve exploring the current decaying monster-infected zones and then traveling back in time to see how it ended up that way. It's a neat bit of flavor as you gradually uncover the mysteries of your current location through notes, audio logs, environmental details and more, and then you can see how it played out. The game was at its strongest when it played into this aspect, and uncovering the mysteries of what happened to the planet is easily the most compelling part of the experience.

The overall design of the game is pretty linear. You're generally loosely guided along a path, with a few branches for extra supplies, bonus lore, or petting one of the cute collectible cats. While you revisit areas, you're usually guided by the level design, so there's almost always a sense of forward progress. As the game progresses, you'll get various items to use in the environment, such as an "oddity" manipulator that changes items between states or a pair of very Dead Space-like anti-gravity boots that can be used in certain locations to launch yourself. There are also more mundane things, like a pair of bolt cutters to enter optional doors.

However, I did have some complaints about the level design. It can be a little difficult to navigate. The biomass-infested corridors can look similar, and while the game is linear enough that this is rarely an issue, it's annoying if you want to backtrack to use a password that you'd found. I sometimes found it tough to remember where I'd been or where I needed to go. I know I've left more than one secret uncovered simply because I didn't want to backtrack to figure out where the newly available door was located. This gets a little easier later, when you get more tools.

Cronos is largely a good-looking game. The creepy dilapidated environments are nicely spooky, and there's some solid environmental design. The enemy design is strong enough that I instantly knew which weird mutant I was facing and, when they merged, what power-ups they had, so the constantly shifting foes feel easier to understand. The monsters are creepy, and there are some spooky fog/mist effects. The game's performance was a bit lacking. I primarily played on Performance mode, which was mostly smooth and clean, but there were some rare performance hiccups.

The audio and sound design in Cronos is excellent. There's lots of ominous creaking, wet squishing sounds, and strange rumblings that make it creepy to wander through the various environments. The act of moving through the environments can make you jump as an uncomfortable noise lurks in the distance, heralding a potential nasty foe around the next corner. Unfortunately, the voice acting was kind of weak. The Traveler and their ilk speak with a heavy robotic overlay that was annoying to listen to for long periods of time, and the human characters felt rather awkward and occasionally comical. It was very much a drag on the tone and atmosphere.

Cronos: The New Dawn feels like an average game coming on the heels of the amazing Silent Hill 2 remake. The reasonably fun gunplay is dragged down by a lackluster story and occasional moments of annoyance. It has a lot of cool ideas, but none of them quite hit the mark in the way I hoped. It's still a perfectly fun little survival horror romp but doesn't quite go anywhere above that. It's absolutely worth a shot if you're looking for something to fill the Dead Space-shaped hole in your heart, but it could've used a little extra punch.

Score: 8.0/10