Pathway Review — Russell Troxel

When I was a young boy with my very first PlayStation, I fell in love with Final Fantasy Tactics. In my mind, Final Fantasy Tactics is probably one of the greatest video games ever made, and is easily the best Final Fantasy game out there. The depth of character and strategic customization has yet to be matched, but I’m always paying attention to the latest Tactics RPGs to see if someone has finally caught lightning in a bottle again. Pathway tries, but just ends up with a few lightning bugs.

Pathway, developed by Robotality and published by Chucklefish, first caught my eye when it advertised itself as a tactical RPG in which you shoot Nazis and recover ancient artifacts like Indiana Jones, but with even more violence. I was doubly convinced to buy the game when they said I would be able to shoot Nazis, Nazi warlocks, and Nazi zombies with disintegration rays. I was ready for a thrilling adventure in the cradle of civilization, but ended up on a tedious guided tour through a movie studio backlot.

Before I get to my complaints about Pathway, I want to say what it gets right, because the heart of this game is good. Pathway is a procedurally generated, run-based game. This means that when you pick a story or “adventure” to play, you’re choosing the difficulty length, and final encounter of that run, but everything on the path to the final encounter, including the path itself, will change every time you play. And players are expected to play one adventure multiple times, because the protagonists don’t exactly come prepared. As you play through an adventure, you’ll complete several smaller encounters, mostly with violence, and unlock new skills, equipment and characters to employ against the Nazi threat. Inevitably, your characters will be killed and you will have to start the adventure over. However, all of the new skills, equipment and allies your characters earned remain with them, making the next attempt that much easier. It forms a rewarding gameplay loop where you can improve with every attempt, dying over and over until you finally make the Nazis die more than you and end up victorious.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay loop of Pathway is rewarding, it isn’t exactly fun. Though your characters are constantly improving through the encounters on the way through the adventure, the encounters all feel like barely different variants on the same two scenarios. The first kind of encounter involves reading a text box and sometimes given the opportunity to select one of 3-4 dialogue options. These remind me of the non-combat encounters in FTL: Faster Than Light, except they aren’t as well-written and special dialogue options unlocked by certain character skills don’t guarantee an interesting new way to succeed. The second kind of encounter is combat, which is where most of my problems with Pathway can be found. Much like the XCOM reboot series, combat in Pathway is turn-based with a heavy emphasis on cover. Unlike XCOM however, Pathway does a poor job of letting you know how combat works. I have played Pathway for 12 hours and am still unclear on the following topics: How much of an accuracy penalty the different kinds of cover provide, what angles of attack the cover applies to, how much my characters’ personal aim ability interacts with a weapon’s base accuracy ranking, how much damage bonus is applied when targeting a favored enemy, how much a character’s evade score reduces their chance to be hit by an attack, if a character’s evade score is even factored into attacker’s “to hit” percentage, how much more accurately a character will shoot if I unlock a dexterity score increase, how many more experience points a character will earn from combat if I increase their intelligence stat, and how much damage an unarmed melee attack will do. Pathway does feature an in-game codex to explain game mechanics, but is so sparing in detail it almost feels more frustrating than if it didn’t tell you anything at all.

Making matters worse, Pathway has a number of problems outside the gameplay. This will seem strange, but one of my biggest issues is in the options menu. In the “game settings” menu, there is an option titled “Dog-Friendly mode.” This is present because Nazi soldiers are often accompanied by attack dogs. You might assume that Dog-Friendly mode would take these dogs out or replace them with some other enemy, but all it actually does is mute the sounds dog enemies make when they are injured or killed. I, like most people, don’t like the idea of hurting dogs and this option of simply muting their pain does not make the task any easier, but in fact makes it seem somewhat creepier. When a game like Wargroove handles dogs in combat so well, it’s tough to see it done this way. I wish they had made Dog-Friendly mode replace the dog units with something that looked and sounded different, but behaved the same way. Since zombies and ray guns are already in the game, why not replace dogs an undead beast or robo-trooper. You could even use a Nazi armed with a knife, hopped up on that bizarre Nazi meth Germany used in the early parts of the war. My other major issue with Pathway is that the only playable German character has a trait called “Qualms” which reduces his damage to Nazi enemies by 25%. Not only does this make the character markedly less effective against the majority of enemy units, it also paints a picture of a Germany where everyone was more or less on board with the whole Nazi thing. I know that family and friends can persist over wide political gulfs, but having 100% of the German playable characters be hesitant to pull the trigger against one of the most powerful and evil groups in the history of the world is a bad look. The last of my noteworthy issues is that, in order to see how far an enemy unit can move, you have to hover your mouse over them and hold Tab. This doesn’t work, because you must keep your cursor over the specified enemy as you move the camera around, and if the enemy moves off screen, you stop being able to see their range of movement.

Since the release of Pathway, the team at Robotality has been very public about their desire to improve the game according to player feedback. I am a big softy, so I am plenty willing to wait and see how they improve this game, but I know not every one is that way. At $20, Pathway is far from pricey, but PC gamers do not lack for choice even at that price point. Unless you’re dying for a serviceable Nazi-shooting treasure hunt, give this game a few months to get itself together and pick it up during the inevitable autumn sale.