These sites are ad—free

Easy mode added

I was very interested of playing Cronos: The New Dawn when it launched back in September 2025. But my hype soon withered as I learned that the game is rather difficult and doesn’t offer any difficulty level choices. I love Bloober Team, every since I played their Layers of Fear and Observer games they became my favourite developer. So, no wonder I really wanted to play Cronos: The New Dawn but I’m not interested of extremely difficult games. A little while ago the game got an update that allows the game to be played on easy mode. Immediately, I bought the game and here’s my late review of it.

I played Cronos: The New Dawn through on PS5 Pro and using Easy difficulty. This review is spoiler-free.

Plot

You are a Traveler working for the Collective in 1980s Poland, where Eastern European brutalism meets retro-futurist technology. Your first task is to find the previous Traveler who sadly had perished. Soon you’ll find time rifts that makes you able to travel to other timelines. There you’ll must seek people who didn’t survive the Change and collect their minds to unravel the truth.

The story was very gripping right from the jump. It had a little bit Bioshock wibes with the storytelling. Everything was surrounded with mystery, not just what had happened to the world. Why it became a wasteland? Why are you here? Who are you? I did love the whole story and how it was told; very mysteriously and barely anything was explained enough—things just did happen leaving me wondering.

Gameplay, controls audio and visuals

Cronos: The New Dawn is a third person survival-horror, shooter and action game. Player must go on—rather straightforward—path from place to another as the mission requires. There are some areas that are little bit bigger and gives room to breathe from the narrow and dark corridors. There are many weapons to collect, such as handguns, shotguns and rifles. The main character also has two melee moves; hit and stomp. That are used to hit enemies if they get too close (or if you run out of ammo) and stomp them as well, and to break boxes where players can collect loot.

Ammo are scarce sometimes, but I did find that the Easy mode gave lot of things like ammo and health items. The enemies are rather easy to kill, but the thing is that they can merge to another enemies or bodies lying around, thereofre becoming more difficult to kill.

As Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival-horror genre, there are item slots and in the begin I got six of them, which means there are an item box in very Resident Evil style. I did store everything I couldn’t carry into the box. The suit, that your main charatcer is wearing, can be upgraded as can the weapons in very basic ways. I first upgraded more firepower to my handgun and more item slots. There are some little environmental puzzles in the game, that I found to be very easy to solve. Cronos: The New Dawn has boss battles and a few of them took me a couple tries to beat, but I think they were well-designed and not “shoot as much as you can” type of bosses. They had some tricks to be beaten. Lastly, about the gameplay, I wanna say that there is no map! Yes, only a waypoint, but no maps of any kind which I found to be annoying in couple of areas. The game doesn’t need maps as it is rather straightforward, but there are a few larger areas that might feel little bit confusing without map.

Controlling the main characters was good and natural. Even aiming felt good, but I used the aiming assist (can be added from the settings) that helped me a lot.

Audio was one of the best things of the game, especially the music that was very 80s synthwave. I did sometimes try to play without the headphones, but it was very difficult to know where the enemies were that way. Graphically Cronos: The New Dawn was very impressive. It had this movie-like quality on everything, even the cut-scenes, even though I think the game looked too dark and it was hard to actually see around. There are two graphical options to choose from: Quality and Performance.

Too difficult or too easy?

I personally though the easy mode of Cronos: The New Dawn was just perfectly balanced, only sometimes a tad bit challenging. I did enjoy this survival-horror game that instantly became another amazing title for me from Bloober Team. I played it through in about 12 hours and I recommend this game to—not just survival-horror fans—but everyone who likes horror and action games with a mysterious and compelling story.

Cronos: The New Dawn is available on PS5 (reviewed on PS5 Pro), Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, Windows and macOS.

SCORE:

4/5

“I did love the whole story and how it was told; very mysteriously and barely anything was explained enough—things just did happen leaving me wondering.”

RELEASE DATE: September 5, 2025
GENRE: Horror
DEVELOPER: Bloober Team
PUBLISHER: Bloober team
PLATFORMS: PS5 (reviewed on PS5 Pro)
Xbox Series X|S
Nintendo Switch 2
MacOS
Windows

 

These sites are ad—free