The Lamplighters League

The Lamplighters League is intriguing from the first second, sucking you in with a great art style, fantastic voice acting, a jazzy score, and supernatural mystery. It manages to keep this going by offering compelling gameplay systems that give you lots of freedom and feel immensely satisfying to use. For me, this combination makes The Lamplighters League the best turn-based tactics game of 2023.

Fancy, compact turn-based strategy with an Indiana Jones setting, tricky, tactical battles, cool heroes, and great soundtrack.

What it deserves praise for is the turn-based duel system, which has everything we need. [Issue#330]

I am having a lot of fun with The Lamplighters League, which is mainly due to the fact that it designed its rules around highly individual characters that create great room for synergy effects. This results in maximally satisfying combat scenarios in which you feel really clever when you have once again taken out five or six enemies in just one round.

The Lamplighters League is a solid turn-based strategy game that gives players a good amount of gameplay to sift through. Although the gameplay can get a little repetitive, its ability to continuously offer up new gameplay features or agents is impressive.

Small-scale combat and excellent character work combine for a memorable turn-based strategy game. The Lamplighters League doesn’t have the scope or depth of its genre stablemates, but it has a whole lot of heart.

The Lamplighters League is a fun turn-based strategy game that keeps things fresh with its pulpy aesthetic and characters, boasting a solid gameplay loop that's not afraid to dish out the consequences of your actions. While the decision to add a real-time element to missions doesn't fully pan out, it's not enough to diminish the game's best qualities.

The Lamplighters League has enough meat on its bones to make it a comfortable crowd-pleaser for tactics fans, and the careful integration of its many systems couples with a smooth learning curve to make it accessible to genre newcomers. The game taps into some of the best elements of customization and management while neatly avoiding crunchiness, and the only thing that's likely to become overwhelming is the occasional drawn-out battle. Simple to pick up and satisfying to master, The Lamplighters League is a polished tactical adventure that carves out a niche with swashbuckling swagger.

Harebrained Schemes have done an excellent job of continuing to do what they do well - turn-based strategic combat - while adding some new game mechanics to expand the scope of combat. They have also done a fine job creating a set of unique characters for The Lamplighters League and injected some personality into the characters without flooding the gaming experience with too many extended cutscenes. Learning the traits and motivations of each character added to the experience, and I found myself more attached to this group of agents than I generally do with the generic Rifleman I and Rifleman II units of other titles.

The Lamplighters League's stimulating turn-based battles encourage you to carefully consider your actions each turn. Use your agents unique abilities in just the right order and you can go well beyond the default number of action points, while taking down entire groups of opponents. Pairing different agents allows you to unlock ability combinations that, aside from being outright satisfying to pull off, also help even the odds, given how you're always outnumbered. While its ambitions as a global adventure aren't quite fulfilled, its – admittedly good – writing feels pushed to the side, and the procedural generation it employs doesn't always keep things fresh, taking control of this group of unlikely allies and helping them save the world is well worth it.

It's an enjoyable turn-based strategy, but there's nothing striking about it that makes it stand out among other games in the genre.

If its level of challenge is your bag, you'll have a great time with The Lamplighters League. If not, then the easy charm and likable characters might just win you over anyway.

To be sure, even with its bugs and glitches, there’s still a decent game to be found in The Lamplighters League. It doesn’t quite hit the highs it could, however, so if you’re enticed by the promises of XCOM-meets-Indiana Jones, be aware that performance issues mean it’ll never quite be as good as it could be.

In its current state, I’m not happy about a new playable character being sold as paid DLC day one, but almost everything else The Lamplighters League does is very good. It has some camera issues in specific modes and I don’t care for the stealth implementation, but I ended up enjoying my time with The Lamplighters League on Steam Deck quite a bit. I’d recommend getting it on sale if you aren’t sure it is for you, but those who enjoy the developer’s prior work will find something very interesting here.

The Lamplighters League's approach to mixing real-time and turn-based tactical gameplay is enjoyable, and its charming misfits make banter a delight. If it can fix its technical issues, it has a chance to be a hit.

Competent and stylish in its real-time strategy, The Lamplighters League puts an art deco spin on a simplified XCOM formula, but is let down by real-time segments that dilute and distract from its core offering.

The Lamplighters League attempts to deviate from tradition, promoting creativity over power, but ultimately falls short. However, its simplicity puts it into the more approachable realms of turn-based tactical games and is a great choice for anyone looking to try the genre for the first time.

The Lamplighters League is an interesting and ambitious, albeit flawed, tactical adventure which invokes the fantastical elements of Indiana Jones (plus you're fighting Nazi's). The blow by blow gameplay is well developed and features interesting and varied characters, in both gameplay and narrative, but is let down by a large amount of repetition. A few technical flaws also let the game down in a market where stronger competition has already done the game thing. It's a decent game, and you could have a good time with it, but one to pick up on discount.

An over-ambitious and technically flawed tactics game that can't live up to its more accomplished influences.

Given all the admirable character work and tactical substance on display, it's a shame that individualism isn't spread more evenly. [Issue#391, p.118]