Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for The Lamplighters League, a pulpy turn-based tactics game by Harebrained Schemes.
The Lamplighters League Review Transcript
The Lamplighters League is a turn-based tactics game by Harebrained Schemes in which you fight to stop supernatural forces from ending the world.
Each mission features two modes: real time recon, and turn-based combat. At the beginning of each mission, the enemy forces won’t know you’re there, and you can use takedown abilities to thin out the enemy forces, explore to find resources, and move towards your objectives. You have a limited number of takedowns, and some enemies are completely immune to them, so you’ll inevitably end up in combat. Outside of some fiddly detection mechanics, this works well for the game.
In combat, agents start the turn with 2 action points each, which you can spend on movement or abilities unique to that character Everyone has a basic gun or melee attack, but they also have unique passive and active abilities that grant them interesting playstyles.
After a mission, you choose upgrades and heal your group of mercenaries, then pick a new mission from the world map. Three members of the Banished Court are striving to open a tower that will give them control over reality, and each week, the gauges at the top of the screen increase. If any of the three fills all the way up, it’s game over.
If you fight a battle against one of the groups, you’ll stop their gauge from increasing, so you’ll often be juggling missions that have the resources you need, missions that stop a large increase of a certain group’s gauge, and critical missions that get you closer to your overall goal. The choices here feel meaningful, but not overly complex.
New units from recruitment missions come with entirely new sets of abilities, and they’re exciting to experiment with, especially combined with the upgrade system. Each agent has a skill tree, as well as three equipment slots and three Undrawn Hand card slots that can modify their playstyle, and synergizing these different upgrades can lead to some broken, riotously fun combinations.
After each mission, you’ll be presented with a semi-random selection of cards to equip on the agents who completed it. These effects can be quite strong, like an ability that grants an extra AP, or recovers health while attacking, and the cards can also be upgraded. The randomness adds a nice bit of chance in creating truly powerful units, and encourages you to use units you want to upgrade.
That said, there’s no real reason to use or upgrade more than four agents. You’ll often have so many healing resources that the wounds acquired in battle can be banished immediately, and even wounded agents are quite usable. Skill points are shared between all agents, so you might as well stack them onto the same few, since you can only take three on most missions anyway, with four used for the big ones.
Each character is well written and distinct, and the overall story is fun, though meager. The game as a whole looks fairly good, especially the pulpy character designs, and while the music gets repetitive due to the game’s length, the voice acting and sound effects are well executed.
I finished a rushed playthrough of The Lamplighters League in around 27 hours on normal difficulty. There aren’t many unique features to note, but I enjoyed my time with the game’s solid design. It’s reasonably replayable due to some randomness, but there’s not as much sheer content here as in games like XCOM or Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which may disappoint some.
If you’re not a fan of turn-based tactics games, The Lamplighters League isn’t going to sell you on the genre. But for those who are, this is a far above average, if unremarkable, take on the formula with clever character abilities, and it’s worth a few dozen hours of your time.
The Lamplighters League is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X, and PC for $49.99, or included with Xbox Game Pass.
