Set in a pulp adventure 1932 where secret societies seek to use magic to reshape the world, The Lamplighters League combines a strategic campaign layer with real-time stealth and tactical combat to deliver a twist on the tactics genre that’s fun, but doesn’t do anything too radically new. It took a bit to grow on me, with a really slow start to get through, but once it gets up to speed this sometimes absurd, always entertaining pulp story is a blast that plays through to a memorable finale.
The Lamplighters League will immediately hit home with people who love the kind of pulp adventure exemplified by The Mummy or Indiana Jones. The three enemy houses of the Banished Court, all of whom want to remake the world in their own image, perfectly encapsulate the villain archetypes you’d want from the setting: House Nicastro is your classic cult of squid-worshippers devoted to bringing back their dead god, House Strum is a noble lineage of tyrannical conquerors pillaging ancient Egyptian magic to be immortal and control fiery mummies, and House Marteau is headed by an upstart American industrialist – complete with period-perfect pencil mustache – whose wonderful new contribution to capitalism is enslaving your ghost when you die working the assembly line. Now that’s disruption!
Up against this trio of baddies is a crew of mercenaries and ne’er-do-wells hired by the literal last member of the ancient Lamplighters League – occult good guys who got wiped out in conflicts in and around World War 1. In short: The heroes are dead, so now it’s up to the morally gray and the washed-up scum to save the day. The tone, the characters, and the villains all really nail the appeal of the genre, as does composer Jon Everist’s characteristically superb soundtrack. It’s the kind of world where sometimes, to save reality, you’ve just gotta punch a ghost to death.
The one exception is that the art style just didn’t entirely stick for me. The overstated, too-clean, almost plastic smoothness of the main characters really just stands out even amid the somewhat more grounded and dirty environments they move around in. They look a bit too much like living action figures to gel with the dramatic action and gritty conflict they’re mixed up in – to the point where at first I really struggled to even enjoy the voice acting, which despite a few rough spots does have highlights from even the characters I initially disliked. I’ll also call attention to Darin de Paul as the voice of Lamplighter leader Locke (you might know him as Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Valkorion or Overwatch’s Reinhardt), who as usual puts in a memorable performance of which I have zero criticism.
Your campaign is made up of single missions. Those are stuff you execute with three-person teams like stealing supplies, assassinations, sabotage runs, and rescuing new members for the League. You do all that to advance your goals or slow down each enemy faction’s doomsday clock, which as it ticks upward gives them access to new units and strengthens their existing ones. It’s the kind of excellent strategic layer where you never have enough time and resources to do everything you want. You can always survive, but never thrive.
Most of your missions, which you can only venture out on once per week, take place on maps that are clearly hand-made but still incorporate a lot of random or generated elements – a camp layout with an open plaza may have a guard tower at the center next time. Others are story missions that either set up or have you execute one of three heists against the Banished Court – for those, you get four-person teams and are up against much stiffer opposition. Every one of those is a good structured mission in an otherwise procedural campaign.
Side note: Discovering that no matter how large the League you can only do a single mission each week was pretty frustrating. I don’t understand why once we have ten members we can’t put together a couple three-person teams at once. Locke can certainly afford a second plane.
A full campaign on the stiffer difficulties takes around 20 to 30 hours, or 40 hours for my own rather brutally difficult run on the highest difficulty, with individual missions taking from 30 minutes for short raids to 90 minutes for big heists and major battles.
Once in mission you’ll alternate real-time stealthing with turn-based fights. It’s an imperfect combination, but a compelling one. The stealth stuff is very simple and barebones compared to other real-time stealth games (such as the very recent and outstanding Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew). But The Lamplighters League does sometimes turn up cool patterns to pick apart as you whittle down enemy groups into manageable sizes with stealthy sneak takedowns, shock mines, and bruiser rushes to take down whole groups at once. At the same time, basic staples like a clear way to lure enemies off path aren’t quite there, and there’s no way to know exactly how far you’ve got to get one patrol away from another before you can ambush it in turn-based and not magically alert every baddie on the map.
Late game, however, can get frustrating, as the huge hordes of enemies present on missions make stealth nearly impossible to pull off on the first try – meaning you either play a resource-intensive grind of a fight or reload to try again. That feels bad because there aren’t any quicksaves or quickloads and because there are wounding and even optional permanent death mechanics that are well tied into the strategic layer.
The tactical combat, undeniably the meat of The Lamplighters League, is pretty dang good though. That’s chalked up to two things: Good playable character design, and good enemy design. Each of the 10 Lamplighters you can recruit plays in what I can say is a truly unique way. Say you want damage: Sneak-thief Lateef is a short to mid-range combatant who specializes in never getting hit, whereas sniper Purnima lays out brutal single hits, and fragile skirmisher Celestine uses poison knives and mind control. Even better, on higher difficulties you may not even have time to recruit them all, forcing you to make a meaningful choice as to how you want to play – and giving you a good reason to do so all over again when you’re finished.
My favorite study in contrasts was in two different Bruiser characters, ostensibly acting as front liners for the team. First up is two-fisted femme fatale Ingrid, who while lackluster at the campaign’s start due to her complete lack of ranged weapons, becomes by the end a furious whirlwind of knockbacks, knockdowns, downed enemy killing, and generally sowing chaos on the battlefield. The other is Judith, whose armored shield and protective barriers let her maximize her teammates’ effectiveness by slamming into enemies and taking their attention onto herself.
The typical routine of cover-based tactical combat we see in similar games is broken up here by an emphasis on chaos – in a good way. Fiery cocktails leave lingering flames that turn to obscuring smoke, ghosts summon void terrain that causes you to miss attacks, electric blasts turn puddles into shock hazards. It’s all predictable if you know what to look for, but learning all of those effects is constantly surprising. At the same time, we don’t see the same level of destructibility as modern tactics games like XCOM 2, with the only changes to level architecture coming from a handful of very underused character abilities that let you do stuff like unlock doors or break down weak walls – they’re very cool, but you really only ever use them to find hidden treasures rather than to change the tactical scenario in your favor.
An even larger wrench thrown into the gears of a one-size-fits-all strategy you might come up with is the Lamplighters’ magical advantage: the Undrawn Hand, a deck of cards dealt out after each mission that lets your team gain new powers and abilities. It’s a whole second layer of character customization that I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface of after just a single campaign, and many characters came complete with unique dialogue for an ability you may or may not even give them. Between that and the fact that there were four entire characters I’d barely brought on more than one mission, by the end of my playthrough I really was ready to jump back in for more.
What gives me pause before I do are some notable glitches and bugs. I had no crashes at all and I never saw notable performance slowdowns in combat, but issues did crop up in places where it mattered less. Loading screens, for whatever reason, had a lot of chop. The battlefield-previewing recon mode did as well, also more annoyance than hindrance, but irritating because that’s how you see what an enemy’s status is via a large, less than ideal list. That itself is an example of how the UI didn’t tell me what was going on. I wasn’t always sure if the way an ability played out was a bug, or if there was some legitimate reason a character ability didn’t apply a debuff, do any damage, or make me immune to an effect it said it would. That, and an overall lack of tooltips and explanations contributed to a feeling that I had to work harder to learn the ins and outs of this system than I probably should’ve.
Honestly, though, by the end I didn’t care. Once I’d made it past the first few hours The Lamplighters League really sunk its teeth into me – and the villains are key to that. First there are the gas-masked, fascist-coded footsoldiers of the Banished Court, who quickly trot out in classic flavors like flamethrower, grenade launcher, commando, and peak-capped officer. Then each house has its own spins on some of these baddies, with more of them showing up as their doomsday clocks tick upward. Nicastro brings ever-more-eldritch cultists, eel-people, and tentacular horrors to the front. Strum finds ever more terrible ways to misuse mummies. Marteau deploys mad science gadgetry to back up swarms of spectral shock troops. There’s enough variety that I know there were at least two enemy types that were mentioned but I never encountered in my 40-hour run. There’s even a common late-game mission modifier that guarantees forces from two houses will show up in tandem. Oh boy, fiery stormtroopers backed up by psychic squids! That’s absolutely my idea of a party.
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