The Lamplighters League is an interesting game that falls short due to clunky stealth sequences and repeating level design. Have you played the board game Arkham Horror or Eldritch Horror? The Lampligheters League cribs a lot from the classic board games, throwing in some XCOM-lite tactics combat with the stealth sections of Mutant Year Zero.

The game has a lot of good writing and lore, and it really takes a while for the Lovecraftian horror to actuall manifest which is nice, I dig that. The characters are fun and charming, which goes a long way to creating that scoundrel pulpy adventure that you want. The game has a DOOM meter just like the board games, as you try to keep the various factions at bay while progressing your story.

But the clunky stealth before encounters really doesn't feel good. It's hard to make it work well, and to be honest you really do need to be able to pick enemies off in the shadows if you hope to survive, especially before you start unlocking new abilities and upgrades. That makes those first few hours a slog.

I made it about half-way through a run and decided to bow out. The game uses procedural levels which means I was hitting the same style areas a lot by the 20 hour mark. If the gameplay was top notch that wouldn't bother me, but there were just enough rough edges that I decided to put this down.

If you like tactics games, and want something that feels like Eldritch Horror or Arkham Horror, I would recommend playing it on Gamepass, or getting it in a sale. The Steam reviews are pretty unfair. There is a pretty good and fun B game here, but I have too many other A hits in my backlog to warrant spending more time on this. I actually need to go play XCOM 2!

The Lamplighters League takes place in the 1930s where a man who was part of a former heroic team, now all dead, attempts to recruit thieves, murderers, renegades, and adventurers for hire to fight against his old group's enemies. Your opponents are three different groups that are attempting to access a mystical tower that will allow their leader to reshape the world in the way that they want. Each week you send three or four agents on a main mission and some of your other agents on side missions where they gain items from safehouses or spend intel to unlock new special missions. Based on your actions, you can lower faction progress level but will typically see two factions coming closer to reaching their goal while slowing the third. As each faction's circular meter fills up they gain new benefits when you fight against them. Completing missions gives you skill points to improve your agents as well as giving you random Undrawn Hand cards, of which each agent can eventually equip three of that give access to new active or passive abilities. These cards can be upgraded over time either by spending Ink that you gain from discarded or replaced cards or by drawing the same ability again and equipping it onto the same skill. The goal is to complete the heist missions needed to steal an object from each faction as well as the missions that give you the keys to accessing the tower before you go onto the game's finale.

Each mission takes place on a fairly small map where you move your agents by themselves or in a group trying to avoid, stealth kill, or engage groups of enemies while trying to complete a main or side objective while also gathering items and supplies. The actual manipulation of your characters in real time here is both pretty basic and somehow never feels good to control, even the way enemy visual cones are handled is odd compared to similar games. A lot of the equipment you find will never be remotely useful and the kind of equipment you can buy is very limited in scope.

The combat can be pretty good as you gain varied characters with their own styles of play that can work together well and be further enhanced by different Undrawn Hand cards. Even the characters that seem to be thought of as much worse than others can work well in certain teams and with certain upgrades and consumables that fit with their unique passive abilities. Problems come from the game doing a horrible job at explaining anything. You have no effective way to look up what status effects do, how long those buffs or debuffs last, what will trigger and who has reaction attacks, some abilities only partially tell you what they do, and many improvements have the usual lazy descriptions with text like greatly improved crit chance/increases accuracy/increases damage/increases ammo capacity/etc without giving you the numbers you want to have in anything but especially in a turn based strategy game. It is constantly trying to mess with the target you are aiming at. I've had it randomly perform actions where it used consumable items that I was at no point even close to selecting. Certain abilities like ones that can knock enemies down are so much more useful than anything else and can lead to the majority of fights being extremely easy.

The randomness preventing you from using the characters you want in a playthrough by limiting who or when you can recruit or making it difficult to get the randomly generated cards at the end of the mission that you actually want to use with a particular character who had to have gone on that mission. The terrible, and far to common in the genre, decision to limit party size to three characters (though 4 can be available in recruitment missions when you find the new character and in some of the main missions) is made even worse in this particular game due to the three types of classes each character can be. You typically want to have one of each of in a party to be able to do the interactions with the environment to find alternate paths and items which even further limits how you are likely to make use of the game's agents. While skill points earned in a mission can be spent on any character you have, the random Undrawn Hand cards have to be equipped, turned into upgrades for copies, or discarded right away and can only be assigned to the characters who participated in a mission. This can make it hard to get what you want, or what is even useful on certain characters, making it worse is that there are a few cards that are pretty much made specifically to fit one or two characters and would be of poor use on the other 10 or 11 (and some that just look to be a poor choice on anyone).

Map are frequently reused with no changes other than potential faction or enemy variety based on their current threat level. After 15 random missions two map repeated twice and one repeated three times (this became four times a few missions later). Even if a mission objective is different this does little to change how the maps play out as a main objective can be as simple as picking something up, killing a certain enemy, or destroying a device before having to move to a small area for extraction (that is, for some reason, located in a place that usually requires you getting through one more large camp of enemies).

Random text events that were added to the game after launch are an improvement to the game. Giving you a text scenario with three options to choose that can benefit you in different ways. They did do a strange thing at times where an option might have a specific agent doing something (possibly something that keeps them busy for the weak possibly just them as flavor text) but the option with an agent can sometimes have the exact same reward as one of the other two options, usually having a specific person could give better results but here it seems like that might have been the case while it was in development but then that was ignored. While the results aren't always that interesting, these events add more flavor to the setting, enemies, and agents while also allowing you to potentially gain items you need or to have another way to manage the threat of one or all three enemy factions giving you a bit more freedom to play the missions you want to play. The additional setting information is also nice because the character conversations between missions and there varied personalities is one of the better parts of the game, as is some of the back and forth that can happen between them during missions.

When you aren't dealing with too much randomness and get into a fight with the characters and abilities you want it can feel like a decent game is there but it falls far short of the developer's previous narrative and exploration elements found in their Shadowrun games and the gameplay mechanics of Battletech while completely failing at the overworld system and a desire for multiple runs that the game seems to be going for. Even the 1930's pulp style adventurers dealing with mystical cult like enemies was better handled in the game Pathway that also handles multiple quick rougelite style runs with a small team of characters that some elements of this game feel like it might have been aiming for at some point in its development. It has what could have been an interesting setting as well as fun varied characters whose abilities can synergize well if used in certain pairs but handles nearly every system poorly.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1767053132495040916

this game is doing a lot of cool things but the creative direction is moronic. it is extremely disappointing to be sent into eastern europe in the 1930s and have zero textual engagement with socialism or fascism. this game feels like it's trying to evoke thirdhand historical nostalgia without having even the slightest interest in history. the characters are basically tropes, racism included. the tactics layer is alright. the gameplay premise of a stealth realtime mode that pops into tactics combat is just a bad idea, taken together with the level structure. unfortunately.