Sholva Cronos: The New Dawn Review

An excellent, audio-visually stunning, pure Survival Horror experience. What can I say, after the phenomenal remake of Silent Hill 2, I had no doubts Bloober Team had reached that point where I could easily look forward to their next project. Well, that new game is here, and it is pretty good. Cronos is an UE 5 game and I’m pleased to report that, at least on my Ryzen 7 5700X and Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, the game has substantially less Traversal Stuttering, compared to their previous UE 5 work on Silent Hill 2. Some stutters remain but they are way more uncommon and less frequent in this title. A patch with some extra polishing there would be nice, but the game is not in such a pressing need for stuttering improvements as SH 2 was on release (and, in some ways, still is, depending on the area of SH 2 we study, still plenty zone with tons of traversal stutters). On my system, the game is able to run 1440p with Performance DLSS 4 (using the Nvidia App Override, to make it use the latest version and the Transformer Model), Epic Settings, Hardware Lumen (the RT setting set to “ON”) and Multi Frame Generation, at normally above 110-120 FPS. That is enough output frame-rate for a smooth experience on my system, with PC Latency usually between 50 and low 60 ms which, for Blackwell GPUs using MFG, is imperceptible in a game such as this one (tends to be noticeable in single player games, for me, above 100 ms, this game will never reach that on my system). Gameplay wise, Cronos is quite a treat, if I’m honest, if you like more classic survival horror games, it has a bit (in some cases quite a bit) of what makes other top games in the genre shine: - Limited inventory, yet upgradeable, space. - Somewhat scarcity on ammunition, but it has crafting, so you can balance that too. - Visceral, weighty combat, including the option to melee and stomp, to finish weakened enemies, stop then from merging, etc. (saving ammo). - Incredible vibes, atmosphere, and sound design: this game looks very detailed, and the environments are quite varied. - Exploration is very rewarding, which helps with the somewhat harder difficulty compared to other games in its genre: when you explore, you get resources and in special cases (and with the help of some feline friends even) you get useful upgrade modules for the Suit, and other gadgets. - If you are skilled at aiming and carefully plan your movement in the various environments, you’ll realize there are quite a few options to deal with some situations, not every time shooting like a madman is the best solution: look around, run, kite enemies, get a better position to make that charged shot hit the head of the enemy, observe their movements and patters, etc. The Story is very intriguing and, obviously quite inspired with other great games a bit, like SH 2, many Resident Evil games, even some of the previous games from Bloober, and media classics like 12 Monkeys, even. If you like all of that, this game is for you, it’s also full of documents and lore you can collect and read, including audio-logs. Speaking of Audio, we have yet another incredible sound design by Bloober here: everything sounds so punchy, in combat, and when walking around dark corridors, the ambient sounds are on point, and so much more. The Music complements perfectly the overall vibe and sound design, it’s quite good. Overall, to continue praising this game, I would need to get into spoilers, so I won’t. Cronos: The New Dawn, is a pretty good survival horror game, and it’s very nice to see a new IP in the genre and the AAA space, being this good.