The Lamplighters League

I came into The Lamplighters League expecting a budget footnote, and left it thinking about why more people haven't heard of it. Harebrained Schemes, the studio behind the Shadowrun trilogy and BATTLETECH, built something genuinely distinct here: a turn-based tactics game set in an alternate 1930s where you chase a fanatical cult called the Banished Court across a hand-crafted world map, disrupting their three rival houses before they pull off a world-ending ritual. The pulp-adventure aesthetic is fully committed, voice acting is strong, and the roster of ten recruitable agents has real personality in both writing and mechanical design. The tactical layer is where the game earns its keep. Harebrained splits agents into three classes: Saboteurs who pick locks and lay shock traps, Sneaks who can perform silent takedowns in the real-time infiltration phase, and Bruisers who go loud, bust through walls, and generate momentum on kills. Each mission lets you bring three agents (four on special heist operations), and learning to chain their abilities matters. The action-point system borrows from XCOM but rarely collapses into simple move-and-fire turns. Bruiser Ingrid, for instance, refunds action points on kills, enabling brutal multi-target chains if you set up the board correctly with your other agents beforehand. Post-mission, you assign randomised buff and debuff cards to agents, and skill tree nodes open up over time. The RNG layer here is lighter than XCOM's research tree and noticeably more forgiving for newcomers to the genre. The stress mechanic is worth understanding before you start. Agents accumulate stress from missed shots and taking hits; too much and they suffer a stress break that tanks their combat effectiveness. Enemies are subject to the same system, which creates interesting mid-battle decision points around targeting priority. The real-time pre-combat infiltration phase has a functional stealth logic: guards telegraph their investigation paths when they spot movement, sprinting generates noise, and a clean approach can let you ghost an entire objective without triggering turn-based combat at all. In practice, the real-time layer is the game's weakest seam. Enemy AI in this phase makes poor decisions, the camera clips awkwardly during combat animations, and the stealth becomes increasingly irrelevant once the mid-game throws in enemy types that are immune to takedowns entirely. The difficulty spike past the halfway mark is steep and not entirely telegraphed. The wider context matters for a buying decision. The Lamplighters League was commercially overlooked at launch, in part due to a brutal October 2023 release window and some well-documented save-wiping bugs at day one that generated negative coverage. Those technical issues have since been patched. Harebrained has since regained independence from Paradox, and the studio has been candid that layoffs before release contributed to the bug count at launch. What remains is a 50-60 hour campaign with a genuinely fresh setting, meaningful squad composition decisions, and enough replayability via randomised agent unlock order and card outcomes to support a second run. It is not a genre-redefining game, and against sharper competition it shows seams. But at a discount, it is the kind of hidden-gem tactics game that deserves the audience it never got.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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