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The Lamplighters League is a turn based tactics game similar to XCOM, where a group of thieves and adventurers must stop the Banished Court from using occult magic to enter an ancient tower and conquer the world.
The game was developed by Harebrained Schemes, who are experienced in the turn based genre, having previously worked on Battletech and the Shadowrun trilogy. I enjoyed all of those games.

Turn Based Combat

• Depending on the mission type, you’ll control a squad of three or four characters. On your turn each character has two action points to move, attack, activate a special ability, or use a consumable such as a grenade or medkit. Attacks have hit percentages so there’s a chance you’ll miss, and environmental objects provide full or half cover.
• Before entering combat you can move around in real time and use stealth abilities to eliminate enemies, reducing the number you’ll have to fight.
• The Banished Court’s army includes Human soldiers, mummies, skeletons, shades, and other monsters. Enemies have a mixture of melee and ranged attacks, and other magical abilities such as summoning minions, slowing your characters, or setting large areas on fire.
• There are also three powerful bosses, the leaders of separate factions within the Banished Court. They have unique abilities, and you’ll definitely have to fight them during important story missions, but they can also appear in regular missions.
• There are ten characters to recruit who have their own unique skills, which could provide interesting tactical combinations, although I only got six of them because of the campaign’s time limits. My favourites were Ingrid, a melee specialist who can gain extra ability points for each kill, Eddie, whose guns can hit multiple enemies per attack, Lateef, who specialises in distracting enemies and evading their attacks, and Ana who is the healer.
• I played on the “adventurer” (medium) difficulty, which was quite challenging, mainly because of the high number of enemies. I regularly saw 10-14 enemies per encounter, plus 1-2 teleporters which would each spawn 3 reinforcements after a few turns, plus some enemies can summon minions. And of course the more powerful enemies have lots of health, so you have to hit them multiple times. Meanwhile, with so many enemies on the map, it can sometimes be hard to find opportunities for stealth kills because they’re all standing in each other’s vision cones. Plus most non-Human enemies are immune to takedowns anyway.
• Thankfully, as your characters level up they can acquire several abilities which give them extra attacks or free movement. Ingrid in particular is pretty much essential for crowd control, if you use other characters to wound enemies so that Ingrid can get the kills. You also don’t have to kill every enemy on the map. After completing the mission objectives you could just try to run to the exit. And you can save during missions, so I got into the habit of saving after each encounter just in case something went wrong.
• Characters who participate in missions can also equip magical playing cards which give them passive or active abilities, including powerful attacks, extra ability points, increased health, an area of effect heal, or regaining health from each kill. However, if they take too much damage, they’ll gain a temporary debuff card.

World Map

• On the world map, you’ll see three separate Doomsday clocks relating to each of the Banished Court’s factions. As they complete activities each week, their progress meters will advance. When they reach specific “break points”, the enemies you fight in missions will become more powerful. And if either Doomsday clock reaches the maximum level, you’ll lose the campaign.
• Every completed mission will set back one of the faction’s clocks, but as you can only perform one mission each week (even after you’ve recruited enough characters to field two teams), the other two factions will usually advance. And you can never reduce them below a break point. This means you can’t stop the clocks fully, you can only try to slow them down long enough to complete your own objectives. When I reached the final mission, each Doomsday clock was around two thirds full, so I wasn’t in immediate danger of losing, but you can’t afford to waste much time.
• In addition to story missions where you’ll steal various items needed to enter the tower and sever the Banished Court’s connection to magic, there are optional missions to recruit more characters or reset a Doomsday clock back to the last break point. You can perform missions in any order.
• Characters who aren’t in your active squad for the next mission can be sent to gather information to reveal new missions, or to collect supplies needed to craft consumables, improved armour, and special upgrades.
• You’ll also see a random event each week, which gives you a choice of reward. This can include various supplies, but for obvious reasons I always chose to reduce a faction’s doomsday clock when that was an option.

Story

• Story is basic, but its at least good enough to provide motivation to complete the campaign. You’ll get more details from post mission debriefs as well as lore documents which can be found during missions.
• Between missions, characters will talk to each other which lets you learn about their personalities and backstory.
• Voice acting is quite good.

Technical

• It took me 36 hours to finish the campaign.
• I didn’t have any problems with crashes or framerate.
• Unless I set all the graphics to low, this game pushes my graphics card temperature higher than AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West and Last of Us. While I would describe Lamplighters League’s graphics as “fine”, they’re certainly not AAA quality.
• There are a limited number of maps, so I regularly saw repeats of maps I’d visited previously. One time I even saw the same map for two consecutive missions.

Recommendation

The Lamplighters League is a good game which has challenging combat, and while it has some flaws, fans of the turn based tactics genre will probably find something to enjoy. Its worth picking up on a sale.