I love pulp fiction. Whether it’s pulp horror, pulp SF, pulp adventure or pulp crime, it’s up my street and always in my sights. So when I saw the first trailer for The Lamplighters League and its pulp adventure, Indiana Jones feel, my interest was immediately piqued. That 1930’s, 1940’s feel of globetrotting adventure, of a race against the forces of darkness to secure a powerful artefact is pulp adventure in its purest form. It’s the type of adventure that I feel we just don’t get enough of anymore, either in games or cinema.
And The Lamplighters League is exactly that kind of Indian Jones style story. Set during the 1930’s, The Lamplighters League puts you on the adventure of a lifetime as the forces of darkness are close to finding a way into the Tower of Babel. The goal: to get hold of the mysterious power held at its summit. It’s up to the eponymous The Lamplighters League to brave the houses of evil and its various minions to beat them to that goal.
It won’t be easy because there’s only one Lamplighter Left, and the only card he has left to play is getting help from a group of scoundrels because they’re the only hope the world has left.
Developer Harebrained Schemes have crafted a rip-roaring, globe-trotting adventure that has the best aspects of pulp fiction in play. There’s the impending end of the world, artefacts of great power, anti-heroes with dubious pasts, supernatural hijinks and bad guys galore. It’s also crafted a rather fun, if somewhat flawed, strategy title.
The Lamplighters League combines multiple mechanics and ideas to craft its gameplay. There’s some exploration, a little bit of stealth, turn-based strategic combat and a healthy dose of board game mechanics to add that little bit of pressure and a ticking clock to your escapades.
Across the campaign you’ll have to assemble your team, usually by saving them from the bad guys in missions. Each team member has their own role and special skills to use, which makes choosing the right members to sortie with a necessity. As does choosing which members to rescue first as, while all skills are useful, some are more important than others. Synergy between skills and preparation can make all the difference in how long a fight lasts or whether or not you survive it!
Each team member comes with their own skill tree. While small, it opens up new attacks and buffs. Skill points are awarded at the end of each mission into a pool shared between members. Enemies as well have their own set of abilities you need to pay attention to in the field, with new enemy types appearing across the campaign. Paying attention to each enemy’s abilities is vital to winning later fights, especially those that push you up against the supernatural.
Board and card game mechanics make an appearance with the Undrawn Hand and a Doom Clock. Or Doom Clocks as there are three factions in the game, each with their own countdown timer to pay attention to. The Undrawn Hand are cards that you are awarded at the end of each mission based upon your performance. Do well and the cards are useful. Do poorly and you may get debuffed instead. Lamplighters can hold up to three cards each so deciding which cards to stack on your agents for synergy can be very useful going forward.
The Doom Clock determines how long it is before you reach the end of the game. Missions have threat levels that add-on to the clock if you don’t complete them. The trick is that you can only do one mission a week, which means sacrificing some time to that clock by picking and choosing which ones to do from the multiple missions on offer.
In play, The Lamplighters League plays like a squad based, isometric game with limited exploration. You can group up your squad while controlling one team member or you can ungroup them and place them where you want around a level. You can explore the levels for resources, lore and extra offensive or defensive items like bandages and grenades. Levels are designed to provide a lot of cover for you to sneak around in as some agents can knock out enemies from behind without alerting them to your presence.
In practice, the stealth elements are only useful for scouting out an area – though this comes with its own caveat – while looking for ways to exploit environmental dangers, enemy placement and positioning up your crew before you go loud. The caveats, beyond the fact that running makes noise which enemies can hear, is that you move incredibly slowly and that enemies are only visible when they’re in your unobstructed cone of view.
You can recon the level by clicking the right analog stick to switch to camera mode and pan around the map, but if your characters can’t see the enemy, then neither can you even in this mode, which makes it ultimately useless. While it’s a good bet that crates of shootable TNT means enemies are in that area, you can’t actually setup a plan of attack until you’re in that area and, hopefully, in an unobstructed position that lets you see all the players and their patrol paths.
While I enjoyed exploring the levels and collecting resources and lore, I stopped trying to do proper stealth as I found it slow and unrewarding, instead using sneaking simply to put my agents into good tactical positions for when I decided to go loud. And when you do decide to go loud, that’s when The Lamplighters League really sings!
The tactical combat side of the game is absolutely fantastic. And if you’ve ever played a strategy game of this sort before, then you know what to expect. You and the enemy take turns placing your agents and trying to take each other out. Each agent has a specific amount of action points to use, whether for moving on the field, reloading your weapons or attacking. Buffs can boost how much AP you have while some skills will give you an extra point for defeating an enemy. Use up all of your agents AP and the enemy gets a go. And so forth until one side is incredibly dead.
Combat is initially simple but gets more complicated as newer enemy types with their own skills get added. The fire mummies, for instance, immolate when attacked and set your agents on fire when they attack. And if you don’t hit them again after wiping out their HP, they’ll resurrect. Couple these situations with traditional attacks, grenades, sharpshooters, cover and distance which determines your success at scoring a hit, and you have a lot to think about.
To its credit though, The Lamplighters League combat never left me feeling like I was floundering in a deep ocean. Each successfully completed mission just made me want to take on the next one, and the one after that and so on. And that’s pretty high praise from someone who isn’t particularly good at strategy!
The Lamplighters League does have some bugs and issues though. Agents would sometimes ungroup themselves of their own accord, not clamber up ledges when in a group and occasionally got stuck in poses until a round was over. Performance needs a bit of work still though as, regardless of whether or not I was in performance or quality mode, the game stuttered. The area most affected by shuddery frame rate performance is in recon mode when panning across the map.
While The Lamplighters Leagues stealth mechanics aren’t all that great, its tactical combat is fantastic. Going loud and dropping goons with a well-co-ordinated attack within two rounds is extremely exhilarating. There’s a cool pulp story at play along with intriguing combat scenarios and mission prioritisation. It may not necessarily be as in-depth as some other strategy games, but it’s a rip-roaring, fantastic adventure all the same.
The Lamplighters League Trailer
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