The Lamplighters League Review

Brimming with Indiana Jones vibes and eldritch horrors, The Lamplighters League mixes real-time stealth with turn-based tactical combat, and it’s up to you to save the world from doomsday. Developed by Harebrained Schemes and Paradox Interactive, you’ll race against the clock in an alternate 1930s setting — a throwback to classic pulp adventures — gathering a team of misfits and intrepid explorers along the way. Your goal: sabotage a fanatical collective called the Banished Court from destroying the tower at the end of the world. Easier said than done, but thankfully, you’ll have a diverse roster of agents ready to interrupt the cult’s plans.

The narrative and characters are definitely intriguing from the get-go. You’ll find out that the Banished Court consists of three houses: House Nicastro, House Marteau, and House Strum. Each has a Scion backed by powerful magic, such as mind-altering powers or occult abilities. You can’t deal with all of them at once, though. In XCOM-like fashion, you must decide where your team of agents strikes, embarking on heists and sabotaging machinery to delay the three doomsday clocks of the Banished Court. Don’t be like me and take too many missions focusing on one House, though, as the others will amp up their threat and make your race infinitely more difficult as they gain more power.

You’ll make all of your moves from a hideout where you can manage your roster of agents, buy upgrades, spend skill points, and more. This hideout is also where most of the story unravels through brief snippets of dialogue with each character as they talk about the next steps. Despite the world-ending threat at hand, the hideout aesthetics are something out of a cosy title. I really enjoyed the diverse cast of agents. Their cheeky banter with one another in and outside the hideout is great. Each time another recruitment mission popped up on the world map, I couldn’t wait to see who else would join and how their talents would synergise with my misfit crew, as there’s a randomness to the order with which recruitable agents appear on the map. Any time you see a recruitment node pop up, I definitely recommend you take it! However, if you prioritise a critical objective to knock down the threat from one of the Banished Court’s Houses, you’ll likely get a chance to recruit the agent to your cause later on. I loved having my pick of multiple characters, but it was definitely hard to choose just three of them to take on a mission.

As stated, you’ll take on various missions with a team of three agents. You can shift between real-time, recon, and turn-based modes to tackle the objective in a number of ways. You’ll always start a level in Infiltration Mode, which is the real-time movement phase, letting you stealth your way through the level, either grouped up with your agents or individually moving them to select locations. This lets you gather intel, note patrol paths, take down enemies, lockpick doors, and more. It probably goes without saying that subduing the most enemies you can before switching to combat is one of the best ways to ensure victory, as you’re often sneaking through areas crawling with large numbers of foes. Triggering a big fight right away doesn’t mean you have to immediately save scum though, as you can probably survive the situation (albeit by the skin of your teeth). But watching multiple enemies take their turn will get tedious in any game. So make the most of Infiltration — you won’t regret it.

How you carry out your pre-combat preparations is up to you, and you have plenty of options, all of which are fun to experiment with. Your agents fall into three real-time roles: Sneak, Bruiser, or Saboteur. Each brings a special ability you can use to take down enemies quietly. Lateef — one of your starting agents — is a Sneak, and as a master of the shadows, he can easily creep up on a guard even when he’s in the enemy’s direct line of sight. Once you’re close enough, you can use the Sucker Punch ability to eliminate the foe. Ingrid, on the other hand, is a Bruiser who can bring down crumbling walls in the environment and use a Slam ability to barrel through three targets at once. This is a somewhat louder yet still effective way of dwindling the opposition before the fight, and it's a treat to use when you spot the AI grouped together.

Before you go loud, you might want to use Recon Mode, though. Although Infiltration is great for moving around in real-time, Recon gives you a paused, overhead view of the level. While it's active, you can hover over environmental hazards and enemies, obtaining information about their resistances and abilities. For the more monstrous enemies, such as paranormal Shades and Thralls, this comes in handy.

When you’re ready to go loud, switch to turn-based combat. Similar to XCOM, your characters start with two AP and movement is grid-based, costing one or two AP, depending on the distance travelled. You’ll also have a set of special combat abilities that are different from your Infiltration ones. This is where each character truly feels unique. With Ingrid, you can chain satisfying melee attacks, as she has a Killer Instinct passive that gives her extra AP for each kill. Another favourite of mine is Célestine, whose toolkit deals out Poisoned debuffs. Additionally, her signature ability is Mesmerize, which converts a target temporarily into an ally. Across the wide roster of agents, there are so many abilities to use that combat stays fresh as you create different comps. You can also face consequences if you’re not careful with your turns. Stress is dealt out to both enemies and agents on the battlefield, indicated by a bar above their Health meter. If your agent suffers a Stress Break, they’ll be sidelined temporarily after the mission; all the more reason to make sure you’re doing frequent recruitment missions to fill out your roster.

With that said, the fights aren’t a seamless experience. In fact, they can get quite awkward. The Lamplighters League shifts camera angles a lot when you’re attacked or attacking a character. It’s like a zoomed-in perspective of the action, but it only works less than half of the time. Mostly, the camera clips into the environment, and you see nothing at all, or you see part of the attack from a strange angle. However, when the camera does occasionally work, I can’t ignore the stiffness of each character. The animation is definitely lacking in this regard, as agents and enemies take bullets with blank stares and minor flinching. Alerting enemies outside of combat also made for some awkward moments when the AI would aimlessly run around searching for my agents, sometimes in the complete opposite direction of where they last spotted me. All in all, I mostly felt bad for my foes and watched them run straight into fire one too many times. So, if you’re a veteran of the genre looking for smart, challenging enemies, this might not be the one for you. On the other hand, it is accessible to newcomers who might be intimidated by turn-based tactics and could use a more low-key experience.

Like the worldwide spread of the Banished Court’s doomsday threat, The Lamplighters League is equally ambitious in the scope of its mechanics. There are a number of elements that come into play. One is a randomised selection of cards you get after completing a mission. You can assign these cards to your agents, giving them buffs and new abilities to help them in future missions. However, you might get a debuff card if your agent accumulates too many stacks of Stress during combat or if they get injured during a level. RNG is a major element in the game, as it affects not only the cards but also Phenomena effects, which randomly change the difficulty of certain missions. Though, this doesn’t have to determine your spending habits! You’re in full control of purchasing consumables, equipment, and more with the supplies you loot across levels. You can also spend skill points in agents’ skill trees, unlocking nodes and paths to make your roster stronger and learn new abilities. This level of variation is great to see, but I wish it extended to other parts of the game.

While I initially loved the level designs of Lamplighters, the more I played, the more I felt like I was experiencing déjà vu. The levels look the same much of the time. In fact, I played on identical maps for two different recruitment missions, which was disappointing. Additionally, it didn’t take long for the objectives to feel the same, too. Your goal might be to make contact with a recruit or destroy a machine, but on your way there, it's easy to slip into the motions and victory can feel pretty anticlimactic. And although you can loot items or pick up lore pieces throughout missions, you can’t really interact with much in the environment, making it feel like you’re fighting on a stage rather than a living world.

In terms of performance, it's not great on PC. As mentioned before, the camera constantly had issues with those zoomed-in action shots. The frame rate was also poor, making for choppy sessions in combat, loading screens, you name it. It would often struggle right at the start of a level, during the transition between real-time and turn-based modes, switching between turns, and more.

Somehow The Lamplighters League manages to feel a bit underbaked, even with the wide scope of mechanics and cast of characters. If it could improve its technical issues and flesh out its sparser parts, it has the potential to stand out amongst the genre. It blends real-time stealth and turn-based tactics well, and the core gameplay loop does have that kind of unnamable special something that games need. The charm of its characters is a plus as well. Even with its flaws, I’d come back for more, but when it comes to veterans of the genre, it’s unlikely Lamplighters would satisfy.