Pathway - Gameplay Preview

The first gameplay preview for Pathway.

Wishlist Pathway now on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/546430/Pathway/

Pathway is a strategy adventure game from Germany-based developers Robotality, featuring turn-based combat and unique story encounters.

Explore temples, tombs and the desert wilderness in a grand pulp adventure! Coming to Windows, Mac & Linux in 2019!

In this gameplay preview you'll see an insight into the game's second campaign adventure, The Wrath of God. There's 5x campaign adventures in total to discover and complete, each with varying difficulty.

Your quest is to track down the Nazis, and foil their plans to get hold of the mysterious and eponymous object the Wrath of God.

The video shows off team party building, a small selection of the 400 hand-crafted story events with choice-based unique encounters, the procedural overworld map, inventory management, mysterious (and rather horrifying) bunker discoveries, as well as turn-based strategic maneuvers against the Nazis, the undead and even some supernatural forces at work!

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More information.

I played their first game, Halfway, and it was surprisingly good. I'll definitely check this out.

First review seen on steam; provides a lot more details then you provided:

I think I hate this game.

It was fun for a while, eventhough the hit chance had been bugging me from the beginning (if you've ever played an X-Com game you know what I mean), mostly because the visuals are nice and the story is somewhat captivating, but then at some point it became abruptly hard and it dawned on me how tedious and repetitive this game is.

There's no real enemy diversity — grunts and turrets, and the occasionnal bullet-sponge grunt and bullet-sponge turret —and you're always subjected to their waves of attack. There's no real way to ambush the ennemy or flank them, you're always the one stuck in a corner. There's no mine you can plant, no way to hack turrets and turn them to your advantage, "retaliate" almost always misses. Grenades are useful but a bit under-powered, which would be fine if they weren't so insanely expensive and rare to drop.

And then there's the small stuff. Turns don't end automatically when you're out of AP. I literally can't do anything when I'm out of AP, so why am I ending the turn manually? What could I use this idle time for? Managing inventory is item by item by item. No way to sweep through, filter or anything. Stimpaks have a chance of hurting you if you use more than 5 on a character… But there's no indication of how many you've applied so far. If you want to go from one room to the other in friendly territory (where AP doesn't apply) you can't just click in the next room, you have to go open the door, and then click for the next room.

I guess what I'm trying to say is… Maybe skip this one?

JDR13 said:

I played their first game, Halfway, and it was surprisingly good. I'll definitely check this out.

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Cool, but I'm not sure what the point of that was. There are also 443 more reviews there. The majority of which are positive. 77% of them in fact.

I've heard decent reviews on Halfway both from here and friends, so I'll be quite interested in their newest offering. I need to pick up Halfway and test it out for myself one of these days. To me, it sounds similar to Hero-U, and I have some deep love for that game.

I'm looking forward to this one!
Halfway was already a good start, but I had hoped it would have more tactical depth.
Pathway seems to be similar. Well, something light in-between the latest RogueTech patch is always welcome.

JDR13 said:

I played their first game, Halfway, and it was surprisingly good. I'll definitely check this out.

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First time I read a quite positive comment about it. I started play it, and forgot it.

Darkheart said:

I'm looking forward to this one!
Halfway was already a good start, but I had hoped it would have more tactical depth.

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Didn't played it enough, but it's the general problem I read, and first steps didn't counter this feeling.

Frankly first steps of tactical games as Ultimate Space Commando, The Storm Guard Darkness is Coming, Templar Battleforce, Super Dungeon Tactics, and even the Rogulite Steam Marines, are a lot more interesting for combats than the first steps I played of Halfway.

But they still have my buy when they do a Mac release, I can't say I'm overloaded by Tactical games on Mac.

Dasale said:

Frankly first steps of tactical games as Ultimate Space Commando, The Storm Guard Darkness is Coming, Templar Battleforce, Super Dungeon Tactics, and even the Rogulite Steam Marines, are a lot more interesting for combats than the first steps I played of Halfway.

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True that! Although, most of the games you mentioned had their own problems. Templar Battleforce has no loot and endlessly respawning monsters. USC also has unlimited respawns. This might be fun in some missions, but ultimately hampers exploration and nullifies tactical decisions.

Darkheart said:

True that! Although, most of the games you mentioned had their own problems. Templar Battleforce has no loot and endlessly respawning monsters. USC also has unlimited respawns. This might be fun in some missions, but ultimately hampers exploration and nullifies tactical decisions.

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Spawn points nullifies nothing, it's a much better solution that counters. It's spawn points that allow give a structure to a mission and still provide provide random elements, at least for USC.

Both haven't unlimited respawn, but repawn points until you block/close them, there's perhaps a few exception, I don't remember any in USC.

You perhaps failed manage them tactically but that's your failure. In USC there's a tactical management of the progression in the map and manage the spawn points. There's a constant tactical evaluation to do between excessive rush to close a spawn point, and excessive caution. As I wrote it's a much better mechanism than counters.

For the lack of loot during missions for Templar, it's a choice, and loot in tactical combats involve problems and USC don't solve them all. In many missions first you control the area, second you loot and then loot phase is borederline tedious. Loot mixed with combats is more fun, but I never seen any tactical game that did a right balance justifying lost time in loot, ok with counters perhaps, but counters bring their flaws too.

Anyway, t's not about perfect games, it's about first steps in Halfway are pale in comparison, very pale.

Loved Halfway and Pathway is probably the game of this year I am looking forward the most.

Yes, Halfway wasn't perfect. It was a pretty good package though. A perfect blend of RPG/Story and Combat elements. Great graphics and awesome sound/music. The character system and tactical depth were lacking and missing depth. This wasn't totally bad though as the game is also rather short and so it doesn't have time to really break (as even more complex but badly balanced games do). So when Halfway ended I felt like I wanted to play more of it. Which...is actually something very rare to have these days.

COMBAT IS AMAZING Jagged Alliance 1-2 style with excellent sound effects and Bloody Gore!
Strong, professional UI design! Expert presentation of all graphics is clear, texts and borders are very nicely separated and everything is surprisingly readable. Also I can equip my soldiers with stuff, represented by nice and big icons. So I bookmarked this thing.
Story writing is better than the very sucky-disappointing writing of Final Fantasy Tactics.
Pathway's presentation of story reminds me of the amazing work of role-playing gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

Looting seems to be crazy fun! I love to read Diablo-like comparing item tool-tips, fine print & SHT, as they made even the smallest letters readable and visualio-orgasmically-well!

Hero recruiting reminded me of best in the world Master of Magic.

Hats off to this super-talented devteam!!

Kordanor said:

Yes, Halfway wasn't perfect.

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For me it literally was perfect, in the sense that it delivered:
*challenging but not frustrating combat
*satisfying gameplay right to the end
*excellent design everywhere
*great story (this is the rarest thing for me to say about a game)
*interesting characters, tech, everything else

So naturally, Pathway is going to be a day 5 buy for me.