Starmancer reviews3/5/2023 One of Pathway’s main draws, at least for me, was its aesthetic and the potential for worldbuilding in a setting that’s familiar but rarely used in games, so it was disappointing to scratch the surface and find it was only a thin coat of paint. Most of the adventures you get into, both the central plots and individual scenes you come across along the way, have very little detail and rarely go beyond a basic functional explanation. That the journey feels like window dressing shouldn’t be an issue since you are meant to see each portion of it many, many times as you replay it, but the writing is drawn too broadly in most cases. The stories are basically inconsequential, as you only hear about the plot a few, very brief snippets. No matter what you do, the functional task is the same: Race the Nazis and/or an ancient, zombie-loving cult across the desert to save… something. One is essentially a retread of Raiders of the Lost Ark another sounds very similar to the 1999 action movie version of The Mummy. You choose one of five campaigns at the outset, each of which has a setup that’s loosely based on popular movies set in the period. To maximize its variability, Pathway’s story is broken up into smaller chunks that give you more options from run to run. While it takes a little bit of drama out of crossing the desert, I found that starting with extra resources offset the frustration that arose the few times fate left me high and dry. Wisely, Pathway gives you a way to avoid this: In addition to the varying difficulties of each campaign, there are two difficulty sliders - one that makes enemies weaker, and a second that lets you start with more gas and ammo. But that level of randomization goes a little too far, as it’s all too possible to run out of gas by virtue of a few bad dice rolls early on, through no fault of your own. The emphasis on randomization keeps each scenario exciting even if you’ve seen it before, as you can't ever memorize how to handle them. The tactical maps and the scenes they offer are procedurally generated when you’re presented with a choice, such as whether to sneak into a Nazi campsite and steal supplies rather than just fight, the results are decided with a dice roll. Almost every step of each journey is randomized to some degree. “This is where Pathway gets really interesting and starts to fall apart all at once. Each node presents a flavorful text-based scenario that generally leads to a handful of options, like giving or taking resources, presenting a tactical choice, or combat (some of which is optional and some mandatory), which plays out in turn-based tactical battles on a grid. You lead a crew of up to four adventurers on a road trip across the desert, charting their path by moving their jeep from node to node on a large and relatively plain game-board-like map. It delivers the promise of putting all those pieces together seamlessly, but only to a point: Pathway is designed to be endlessly replayable, but barely has enough variety to sustain a single playthrough of its five mini-campaigns.Pathway is, more than a strategy game or an RPG, a run-based procedural adventure game. All of this is neatly wrapped in pixel art representing World War II-era colonial Africa and the Middle East, which loudly calls back to Indiana Jones. But upon closer inspection, you’ll also find shades of Into the Breach, Diablo, and Dead Cells. Most obviously, it is a hybrid of XCOM-style combat and board game-style movement punctuated with text-adventure-style scenarios, a la FTL. If you’ve played your fair share of roguelikes and turn-based tactics games, Pathway presents as a familiar and extremely appealing package.
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