Pathway by Robotality

Ugh. Well, in that regard, Pathway is a huge improvement. I didn’t get much of a puzzle sense from any of the missions. I’ll take simplistic over puzzle any day!

Hmm, I wonder if I complain about the game including Nazis, they’ll add an option to remove those. Pathway without dogs or Nazis would make for pretty snappy pacing!

-Tom

I may get the game because it’s cheap and because I’m not lagging four years behind everyone experiencing the game for the first time. (I’m looking at you, The Witcher 3!)

Actually, I’ve been using Ruth as my sniper instead of the Baron. She comes equipped with a handgun but if you look at her skills she specializes in multiple weapons and the sniper rifle is her best weapon. She doesn’t have the penalty against Nazis so that helps.

Also, I actually found a nice blue sniper rifle last night with more damage which helps a lot.

You can get a purple sniper rifle as a trophy reward by killing 100 enemies with that weapon type.

I’m enjoying this so far, but there are some significant UI oversights:

  • It’s OK that they just added a confirmation click for movement, but why not a simple UNDO function too?

  • Why oh why is there no way to manage and edit characters and pre-loads from the main screen instead of having to start a mission to do it? That makes hard to manage your gear across everyone.

  • Related note: why no button to remove gear from everyone before a mission so that you can give the best stuff to the people you are taking for the current mission? XCom has the right idea here

  • It’d be nice if the cover system showed when you were exposed on a given side the way XCom does. Right now you have to guess if you’ve been quite flanked

  • The combat system would be enhanced by overwatch fire and reserve points. I guess they don’t because it would radically change the balance and clutter up a simple system. But it does kind of feel missing

  • A vertical axis and related sight bonuses would be nice too, but see above. Might take the beer / pretzels quality from a simple system.

Thanks,
Diego

Probably the same reason there’s no UNDO in Xcom. When you move, you gain information. Undoing the move doesn’t erase the information you’ve learned.

Wait, what? Please tell me where I can see this! I’ve been Xcomming wrong!

Eh, I thought this at first, but it would just give the player an additional advantage in the already cakewalk combat. Pathway’s combat needs more interesting decisions, rather than just importing familiar combat conventions because we’re used to them.

There is a version of overwatch in the game. Not everyone can do it, but those with sniper rifles/or relevant skill can do it. The character can spend some bravery points, you pick a firing arc that they focus on and if an enemy crosses into that arc your character takes a shot during the enemy movement phase.

So it is less pronounced than something like XCOM, but it is in the game.

Those are really good points guys.

I hadn’t gotten far enough to realize that a variety of overwatch is unlocked later.

Also: Believe I remember that in XCom you can tell when you are flanked from one side by a red-colored shield icon.

Diego

I don’t think flanking is a thing in Pathway - you are shown the icons for which directions you have protection (N,S,E, or W) and if you are attacked from any other direction, you have no protection. A lack of an icon is all you really need.

I finished the 3rd adventure last night (Black Pharaoh). It was only 2 maps which I wasn’t expecting. I’d loaded up on gas and ammo right before the end of the second map, expecting a third, but that was the end. It was actually a pretty fun adventure with lots of undead in it.

I wonder if you get paid back for the extra fuel and ammo you have at the end of missions? If not, I wasted a lot of cash for nothing. No matter how much I end a mission with, I always start the next one at 10 fuel and 40 ammo. I’ve upgraded my max ammo to 70 but it hardly seems worth it due to nothing carrying over.

I’ve unlocked most of the characters now. Georgette seems to be the best sniper and I’ve been using her heavily. Annabelle is a very good pistol users with a lot of mobility. I just started using Brunhilda to level her up to the point she gets to use shotguns. She’s a good tank. I’m trying to unlock Shani and Le Fantôme but that’s been quite a chore.

Having 2 pistol users in your party can be very effective with both having double shot. It’s so good I gave Annabelle +1 Wisdom on level-up so she has 4 bravery points and can use double-shot twice.

Still enjoying this.

At about 5 hours, I’m not sure I’m all that attached to playing more. It’s not that it’s a bad playing experience, but I’m not finding it magnetic enough to keep me playing. In all fairness, “simple fun” isn’t usually why I play games, so I might not be the target audience.

I could see me continuing on now and then when I’m in the right mood, and it’d be easy to pick up where I left off. So maybe it’s something that I’ll chip away at over a month or so rather than focus on for a week.

So this may be an idiotic question.

How does one pick a skill in the skill tree? Does it need to happen after an adventure concludes? I am in the middle of an adventure and it looks like I unlocked the first tier (characters leveled up) but any type of clicks or UI manipulation doesn’t seem to select or activate a skill.

You can activate it mid-adventure.

Going from memory, but I thought I just clicked on the grayed out box for whatever skill you want to select. Maybe I selected a “Level Up” box before that, that sits below the traits? Sorry, that might not be that helpful.

Thanks, I will have to poke around some more. Maybe I missed a “Level Up” box as you noted. I can open the skill tree and see that one tier is now unlocked, but I cannot do anything (L-Click, R-Click, etc.)

Haven’t been able to get back to this until tonight, but still really enjoying it. Not the most complex game, but the atmosphere and the variability between characters/weapons has been keeping it fresh for me.

I was being dense, and missed the “Level Up” box above the character (didn’t catch my eye for whatever reason). I was just going straight into the Skill Tree which bypasses that needed step. Thanks again for responding!

I’ve been playing this a bit now and then in between other things, mainly doing the first adventure with different characters. I had a very good run where I thought I had the the second adventure in the bag, but it all fell apart within the first rounds of the battle. I’ll get them next time.

If it makes you feel any better, this escaped me for a good while as well, I kept wondering if they had to gain another level to then select a skill, like the first level gain just gave them access to the tier or something.

Ha! I am not a UI designer by any stretch, but I do think the ‘Level Up’ button could maybe have been repeated in the Skill Tree menu or better highlighted.

Otherwise, I am still playing and loving this game. I am in the middle of the third Adventure now and was pleasantly surprised how quickly this one ramped up in challenge. I just scraped by the first series of missions since I was used to having four characters by the end of Adventure two and was now back to just two.

Through serendipity I settled on ‘Captain Luiz “Piranha” Pereira, Brazilian Steamboat Smuggler’ and ’ Baron von B., German Gentleman Imposter’ as my two main characters. Pereira rushes Nazis and gets right in their face with a powerful shotgun or slits their throats with a knife. Baron calmly and confidently snipes from the distance or provides overwatch for his compatriots.

The little narrative vignettes are great in their Indiana Jones or pulp fiction quality. We stumbled across a Nazi detachment and Baron pretended to be a higher ranking undercover Nazi officer snapping orders at the troops, jovially slapped them on the shoulders, and inquired as to how well supplied they were (taking their fuel and treasures).

I now have 14 hours in this game and have been very pleased with my purchase. Still much more content to get through too.

Still playing here as well. I finally unlocked Shani and she is a beast. I’ve got her up to level 3 now with a legendary cleaver and she will one-shot anything as long as she can reach them. Of course she’s a glass cannon and has been KOed several times so you have to be careful using her. I pair her with Georgette, who’s a sniper/healer and can provide support fire and healing if need be.

I ran those 2 in the 4th adventure and ended up failing my first adventure. My failure was a simple one, I ran out of gas on the 3rd map. I usually have good luck with finding gas but on this one, I couldn’t find much anywhere as rewards and found exactly 2 in the only store I found.

I actually made it all the way into to the third map on foot because I had a ton of healing items. I just barely made it to a trader on the 3rd map but he only had two gas, which got me nowhere. So, I finally had to give up. The good thing was that I found a legendary weapon for Shani on that run, so the loss was worth it.

I immediately did a second run and I found gas everywhere and finished adventure 4 with no real problems. I got a legendary sniper rifle as a reward at the end which was sweet. Shani was using her legendary cleaver on that run to hit undead for up to 160HP a whack. Very satisfying. However, there’s a new Tesla cyborg type enemy introduced in that adventure that is just plain nasty. I had some trouble with them KOing some of my troops.

So, on to the final, 5th adventure. I’m sure it will be a tough one since the difficulty has really been ramping up.

Many changes incoming

Still enjoying this, playing it now and then. I have around 15 hours played so far, and beat the final adventure. I think the game has legs and is good value. I have three characters yet to unlock, and one of them is squatting on a legendary sniper rifle I found during the last mission since you can apparently find and recruit characters that aren’t unlocked yet during runs.

I also found a really good shotgun that pretty much kills anyone on one blast. Fun.