Chronicon is an ARPG that respects your time. That's the most concise review I can give - if you are into games with lots of gear, skills andChronicon is an ARPG that respects your time. That's the most concise review I can give - if you are into games with lots of gear, skills and mechanics to play with this is a great game for you.
Chronicon is split into separate main acts, just like in most other ARPGs. Also like other ARPGs I don't pay attention to any of the story because that's not what I play this type of game for - the main story is basically just a load of filler to get you familiarised with how the game feels to play and introduce you to it's systems. I'm not gonna talk about the main game anymore because the endgame is what really matters.
Endgame revolves around anomalies - procedurally generated dungeons which reward special loot after you beat them. Once you've hit max level, you'll start grinding anomalies to get specific legendary (or true legendary) equipment, crystals and memory essence to upgrade that equipment, and gems and runes to augment you're build. You also never stop levelling - you have a separate XP bar for mastery experience in this game and mastery level has no cap. This means endless scaling, which in reality isn't as interesting because once you've maxed out all the interesting skills in mastery trees all you have left are 3 stat bonuses to choose from (damage, health, mana). Anomalies also scale infinitely with a tier system, thought the highest I've seen someone actually beat is around tier 1200.
The DLC Ancient Beast introduced another 4 skill trees to endgame, with them requiring you to beat dungeons, bosses, arenas, solve puzzles and activate shrines in new procedurally generated biomes. To get the actual skills you have to spend crystals and yellow crystals, the latter of which is only obtainable from endless dungeon anomalies (ie. anomalies at tier 1 or higher). You also gain access to a familiar that expands your inventory space and grants new passives which further augment builds. The game has 4 classes with 4 skills trees each, a unique mastery tree and an additional 4 (partially unique) skill trees added by the DLC. There's a shocking amount of content in this game, but it's not in the form of cool art or fun bosses as it's all poured into build customisation.
So with all that explanation out of the way, let's start with the bad. Chronicon's combat isn't particularly challenging. Boss mechanics are basically non-existent and almost every endgame build works by pulling all the enemies into a big mass and exploding them to death somehow. This is kind of true for a lot of ARPGs I've played but especially so for Chronicon - the game is made by like 2 people or something so I can cut them some slack though. The reason I rate Chronicon so highly is because in this genre, it's basically expected that in the endgame your build dictates the outcome of combat. You don't play these games, you scroll through reddit posts and discord servers and create a spreadsheet to min-max your build to the extreme. Chronicon skips the boring part of these games for me by making grinding less of a time sync. All stats on gear can be rerolled, runes and gems easily remove from your gear, and when you hit a high enough tier you will basically be swimming in legendary and true legendary gear.
So that's the review, really cool game and it's got another DLC on the way. If you do get it, join the discord because there are not many good resources for builds on reddit or youtube and there are some nice people on there who answer questions and post builds. k bye.… Expand