A decent marriage of dead space and resident evil, while still having its own identity. Unfortunately it is weighed down by its shortcomings in a way that makes me give this a thumbs sideways, leaning slightly up.

What worked: I think the overall art direction of the game was solid, with cool main character designs. The voice acting was nice. I liked the sound design, too. Weapon variety and feel was satisfying enough. The character has a good weightiness to them, but without any sort of block/dodge system, it left much to be desired, because "dodging" essentially gets turned into sprinting away and it's clunky. Also kitties that give loot and then they find their way home is A++

What didn't work: The story started off mysterious, but fell off imo. Boss and enemy variety was lacking. Many larger fights fizzled down to "shoot the conveniently-placed barrels" which got old fast. I usually don't mind limited inventory in horror games, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MAKE SMALL KEYS AND KEYSCARDS TAKE UP AN ENTIRE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ INVENTORY SPACE!! Just have a different tab for key items!! How does a small key take up the same amount of space as a shotgun!?

All-in-all, I'm glad I got in on sale. At least it ran well on my rig for the most part.

I'm a bit torn on this one. First off, incredible atmosphere and art design. Enemies are super well designed, the levels (for the most part) are well thought out and have so many little details that make the world feel lived in. It did get a bit samey at parts with some repetitive level design (there's only so many times you can see the same wall of fleshy biomass and be impressed by it), but art design is the strongest part of the game imo.

Sound design and voice acting are top notch as well. Does a phenomenal job of setting a tone and atmosphere of unease and tension, awesome job by the sound team and VAs.

Story is pretty compelling, but I found it kinda hard to follow at times; maybe that's just me and I'm a little bit dumb, but there were definitely times where I got confused and was thinking, "wait, did I miss something?" But overall, cool story (when I understood what was happening lol).

The inventory management was not a particularly enjoyable aspect of the game for me. So many times I'd find a new room with 3+ new (sometimes key) items, but not have enough inventory slots, so I'd have to run all the way back across the map, store some of my ♥♥♥♥, run all the way back to the room, pick the items up, and depending on what those items were, potentially run all the way back again to store or sell them. No joke, I started to get annoyed when I'd find a core outside of a safe room cuz I knew that it would either have to just sit there taking up one of my precious few inventory slots or I'd have to run allllllll the way back to the stash to put it up/upgrade something before I could continue. Probably added an extra hour to my playthrough of just backtracking for inventory management (I am very much a "I see item, I want item" kinda player tho, so ymmv).

Gameplay is mostly a standard 3rd person shooter, not many other bells and whistles outside of that. But it works for the most part, controls are responsive, shooting feels pretty good. The weapons are pretty decent and the gravity boots were cool, but a bit underutilized for combat imo; would've been cool to have more areas where you are upside down or on walls while fighting enemies, but there was only one spot in the game where that happened. Melee is pretty underwhelming, and by underwhelming, I mean literally never attempt to melee anything but item boxes cuz there's not much point, you'll do 0 damage unless you have the melee damage essence. But overall, gameplay is pretty solid and does the job, albeit a bit limited.

And while the gameplay is a bit limited, I felt that some of the choices they made given the limitations of the gameplay are just headscratchers. Like why would you make the final boss teleport on top of your character and immediately bust out a super heavy hitting melee attack in a game without a dodge? Your options are either 1) get hit or 2) immediately turn around and sprint in the opposite direction and hope you get out of range. Why you do this to me game :( And the game looooooves to throw you in arena fights where you must kill all enemies before you can proceed. Fun in theory (and sometimes in execution), but some of those arenas have ridiculous amount of enemies. So you better hope you have enough ammo in your inventory (hello inventory management my old friend), cuz if you don't, you pretty much just gotta die and hope you have enough supplies to craft/buy more ammo before your next attempt since as mentioned previously, melee is buns. Just feelsbadman when you are in a fight, are fighting smartly and hitting your shots, are perfectly fine on health, but you ran out of ammo & resources so you pretty much have no options but to reload the save and hope you can do it more efficiently next time.

And I have to mention, game did crash on me 3x during my playthrough, but that might be more of Unreal 5 being Unreal 5.

Overall, I did enjoy the game and if you're a fan of survival horror, you should get some enjoyment out of it too. I know that my review probably sounds like I wouldn't recommend it, but that isn't the case. Its just one of those games that is so close to being really good, but misses the mark just a little bit in a few ways that make it really compelling to talk about. Cronos is a solid game overall, but I'd rec waiting for a sale if you are interested in picking it up.

One of the best new survival horror IPs we've had in a good while. Atmosphere is top tier, sound design is great, and weapons felt nice and weighty to use. The main criticism I have is the somewhat weak story, and the constant inventory management - but everything else more than makes up for that. Definitely give it a try if you're a fan of games like Dead Space/Evil Within/RE.