Review: Pathway to Glory
Score:
90%
Version Reviewed: 1.03
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Hype. There's no getting away from the fact that Nokia believe this game to be the game that will, finally, make you want to get up and buy an N-Gage. And if you've already got yourself a game deck, then Pathway to Glory will be your reward for all the strange looks you've got from your friends. Make no mistake, if Pathway to Glory fails, then it's pretty much Game Over for Nokia as a serious games company.
Pathway to Glory has been pushed since as far back as December 2003. Its first public outing was at E3 in May, where those in the know managed to grab a quick look, and the majority of journalists walked by because Nokia "don't do games." All through the summer, we heard of items being added to PtG. The ability to challenge on the N-Gage Arena. Radio messages over GPRS to your team mates. Huge pan-continental games in playtesting from Finland to Vancouver and Los Angeles. Leaderboards and internet pairings by skill and experience in the game.
But all of this feature hype would fall apart if even one element of the game was wrong. If the underlying game was rubbish, no amount of features or hype would save Pathway.
Believe the hype. Believe everything you have read. And then prepare yourself. Because Pathway to Glory might just be one of the best multi-player computer games... Ever.
We Have Seen this Before.
One thing we've heard quite loudly from Nokia is that Pathway to Glory will redefine mobile gaming, that it's revolutionary in its approach and certain features are "never before seen in the history of mobile gaming." That's not to say that they've never been seen before in computer gaming, because almost every element in Pathway to Glory has been seen in other games.
Turn based war games have been around since the start of computing. Strategy games such as Julian Gollop's "Lasersquad" saw you equipping men and taking them into battle against a computer or human opponent. "UFO: Enemy Unknown" let you hold back action points so you could shoot on your opponents turn. "Email X:Com" let you play opponents around the world. In game voice communications thrive in online first person shooters.
Where Nokia have succeeded, is taking all these elements, putting them into one game, and making it work. But not on a PC or home console. No on a mobile device. It's this final step of putting it all together that matters. And in this respect, Nokia have encountered a huge number of sceptics in the gaming industry. Not only are Nokia hyping an almost perfect game, they're hyping an online experience that goes far beyond what mobile gamers have seen before.
See what I mean about Nokia gambling a lot on Pathway to Glory?
Inside the Game
No matter the trappings, Pathway to Glory is a war game. it comes down to you controlling your soldiers, doing your best to achieve your objectives before your enemy achieves his. Your enemy could be a computer AI (as it is in the solo game), someone sitting next to you (in a local multiplayer game) or on the other side of the world.
A typical Pathway to Glory game will start of your men grouped together close to your objective, but with a lot of terrain and enemy soldiers between you and victory. Each soldier has a certain number of "action points" he can use per turn. Anything you do (apart from turn round to look at things) will take a certain number of action points. Running for cover in a bomb crater, ducking down and sprinting behind a wall, crawling in a mud filled trench, all of these take points. Walking upright will take a lot less action points than crawling somewhere, but you're less visible. So straight away we've got something to think about. Do I run upright, crouch or crawl?
Of course the controls in a game like this need to be pretty easy to use. I'm glad to say they are. 8 and 0 move your body position up and down, and the D-Pad control an on-screen cursor. This cursor gives you lots of feedback as it moves around the screen. It lets you know how many action points it will take to move the current soldier to where the cursor is. It helps you aim and lets you know if you have line of sight. And when you are aiming, it lets you know just how accurate your soldier thinks he will be.
Aiming a weapon is a simple matter of choosing the ordnance (button '4' cycles through the weapons) and placing your cursor on the target. It will glow anything from red ("I really don't think I can hit that") to green ("no problem, Sir, I'll take him down"). Once you click on the target you can allocate more action points to get a good aim (and improve your actual chances of hitting the target).
"Move and Fire" is a military principle as old as the hills (and there are a lot of hills in Pathway to Glory). The freedom of movement in this game is amazing. As a programmer, I know there's some kind of small grid of squares underneath the ground, but the ability just move into a ditch and duck, peek round a cliff wall, or hide behind a tree means that I don't actually care. I'm moving real men around a real landscape. And blowing things up.
Each soldier is controlled separately. and you can switch between them either by clicking on them with the cursor, or scrolling through them using the '1' and '3' keys. This quick switching can get a bit disorientating, so I'd always recommend keeping the '2' button handy. That brings up an overhead 'tactical' view of the game map, and the currently selected soldier glows a little bit brighter. Congratulations go to Red Lynx (the Development Team) because not only can you move the overlaid 'screen' around the map before switching back to the main view, you can also scroll through your men until you select the one you need, and can zoom in on him.
All of these controls take about, ooh, five minutes to pick up. Nokia even have a fold out diagram in the retail packaging (separate from the manual) on the keypad layout - The Soldier Survival kit - with some handy survival hints. "Take cover by hiding behind objects" sums up another possible strategy.
Say What You See
Something that's quite different from this game is that you don't get any detailed information about your terrain. There's no notes on what sort of terrain you're standing on. You don't get nicely shaded line of site maps, or a detailed breakdown on your opponents. You see what's in the screen, where your soldier thinks he can defend, and not much else.
Strangely, this actually makes for a better game. It makes you think more, and the emotional attachment you have to your soldiers is all the better for it. And you really begin to care for them. When you start the solo campaign, you're given a pool of men, each with their own skills, attributes and voice. With every battle, they improve. They get more action points per turn. They can aim and fire with more accuracy. They get promoted. And when you loose your sharp shooting sniper and have to replace with a green rookie... it's bad.
Fast and Furious Fun
For all of this, though, Pathway to Glory plays really quickly. Moving your men, firing and getting to cover takes only a few seconds, so the perception of war-games as being slow is blown out the window. The graphics are spot on, the amount of detail is incredible. You really get the feeling that you are in the terrain you see, crouching behind a wall with a forest on one side and an open path on the other. Your men are accurately drawn, with full body movement as they dash around the map.
That's if you want to dash around. Your strategy is never dictated by the game engine, you can go for a full on frontal assault, running straight at the enemy. You can keep a group of them pinned down, send your sniper to high ground and watch as he takes them out. While at the same time another three soldiers are sprinting for a mortar position.
And if all that fails, you can call in an air-strike from the RAF.
It's a Good Engine
Indeed it is. The core gameplay is what makes the biggest impression on a player in my opinion. And Pathway scores on all these fronts. It's easy to use and understand. It leaves your brain free to work on your tactics. There's been a huge amount of development work and play testing gone into this game, and specifically into the user interface.
But what about the fancy stuff Pathway to Glory has to offer?
The Packaging
No I don't mean the box, I mean what Nokia have wrapped around the game in the centre. The Solo missions have voice over briefings setting out what's actually happening in the War and why the emission you are about to do is important. One nice touch in the text briefing after the cutscene is the historical perspective to the battle, explaining how a similar scenario to the one you are about to fight came about in World War Two, and what the result was.
There's been no skimping in the artwork or in game graphics. They all have a lovely washed out look, and feel like they are from the war, almost like an artist of the time. The menus and interface have had time spent on them so they fit the artwork. Nokia and Red Lynx have spent a lot of time not only making the game play well, but also making it look and feel right.
I mean, I'm sitting here with a CD of the "Official Soundtrack of Pathway to Glory." What does that say about how serious the Finns are?
Who Do You Want To Fight Today?
Combat is all about your enemy. Pathway to Glory gives you three types of enemy to fight. A computer AI. Local multiplayer games, and global multiplayer games.
Local AI
Fourteen scenarios are present for individual players to work through. Starting with a small precursor to the invasion of Sicily (which will be familiar to you if you've played the one level downloadable demo), through to the storming of France in Operation Overlord and the battles over the Rhine.
This campaign, on it's own is challenging enough. Battle three starts getting silly, when you have eight men and a machine gun turret to halt maybe 20 or 30 Italians, and a couple of tanks as well. You'll need all your tactics on that one, and it doesn't get any easier.
The computer AI is really smart. It's not the same moves over and over again. They do react to your troops, and can get themselves organised. But the true test of combat is taking on your friends, and people around the global.
The campaign missions? Honestly, they just train you for the real thing.
Local Multiplayer
You've two choices here. Playing over bluetooth or playing on the same N-Gage. The latter is called hot-seat, and when you finish your turn, you hand the N-Gage around and your opponent takes his turn. You can't see any of his details, and he can't see any of yours. The program takes care of all of this.
One thing to note, in all the multiplayer games, you only get a limited amount of time to move your men. When that time runs out, it's turn over, even if you haven't moved. You'll need to decide on your movement, fire and tactics quickly. Just like in a real war. Remember the comment that the solo games were just training you? this is what they were training you for.
All the multiplayer games are based round capturing 'rally points.' Each side starts with an equal number of these points. You capture opponents points by walking onto them. So do you defend with lots of men and send a few soldiers out to sneak into the enemy positions? Or do you risk an all out attack. It's up to you.
You've also got the option of a multiplayer local game over bluetooth. You still take turn about with your opponent, but now in your opponents turn, you can watch his moves (if your men can see his men) or you can look over the map and decide what you're going to do.
Arena Multiplayer
Finally, we come down to the jewel in the crown of Pathway to Glory. Toe to toe combat over GPRS. It's exactly like playing a local bluetooth game, I kid you not. There's almost no latency. You're playing real time, and it's with other people logged onto the Arena no matter where they are in the world. Arena games can have up to 6 players on a battlefield, each controlling up to eight soldiers. Yes that's 48 troops on one map. When you join a game, it could be close to the start, or you could be the reinforcements in an ongoing battle. It's fast and furious, great fun, and it means that Pathway is going to have a huge amount of replay value.
And if you want to talk to the other players on your side, then just call up the walkie talkie function, speak into your N-Gage, and your voice will be carried through the arena and broadcast to everyone else on your side. It's touches like this that make the Arena play even better than the solo play. You wouldn't think it possible. But it is.
What's also great is that you can choose to log in to the Arena in two ways. Filtered is a general free for all. You join the first game available, no matter who is there, and fight.
The Ranked game is much more interesting - and stops one of the big worries of online games, that of the new players having to fight the online gods who can win everything at the drop of a hat. In the ranked games, you start off with the military rank of Private. And you can only fight other Privates. As you advance and win games, you will eventually get promoted, and will continue to fight people with the same rank. So you're always pitched against someone of equal ability.
The most stunning thing about Arena play in Pathway to Glory? It just works. No tweaking, no loss in gameplay, no slowdown. It just works.
And it's great fun.
What About The Score?
All of Nokia's hype makes it hard to have a clear view on this game on how good Pathway to Glory really is. Just because it is the best N-Gage game so far doesn't mean it's an automatic Mega Game.
Reviews come down to personal opinion. When I saw the demo back in the summer, I was on the phone proclaiming the simple joy that this is "Rebelstar" done perfectly. And remembering that first experience of the game really makes me want to give it the Mega Game award. Technically, the game is unlike anything on any mobile gaming device. Graphically it's at the edge of the envelope, but everything stays clear and understandable. Addiction levels keep me coming back to it. The Arena games are growing on me. Pathway to Glory is a winner.
My one concern is that war games are not for everyone. On the other hand, Nokia have taken the time to educate everyone about Pathway to Glory, what it can do, and how it works. The decision to release a single level demo version was a wonderful piece of marketing, and that one level means people know exactly what they're getting.
If I could award it 89 and the Mega-Game, I would. But there's no half measures here. So Pathway to Glory... you're a Mega-Game. The first in the history of the N-Gage. Go forth and bask in the glory.
Everyone else, go and buy it. Now.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at