On October 3rd, the new strategy game “The Lamplighters League” (PC, Xbox) will be released on Steam and will be available on Game Pass. MeinMMO author Schuhmann has tested the turn-based strategy game and says: The game is ideal for people who use Game Pass to play a genre they would never otherwise touch. But the game punishes me for using more than 3 heroes.
Here’s The Lamplighters League in short: It is a turn-based strategy game consisting of two parts:
- On the world map, you select a mission to play each in-game week. You also assign additional agents to side missions, where they must seize resources or uncover secrets that unlock special missions in the following week. You must ensure that the threat from 3 enemy factions stays within limits.
- In the actual missions, you control 3 characters (normally) or 4 characters in special missions and eliminate a plethora of enemies: from dumb soldiers to ninjas to burning mummies. Occasionally, a mini-boss appears, who has a few tricks up his sleeve and significantly more hit points than his minions.
Small stealth phase before each battle
This is the twist in the game: Before starting a battle, you can already eliminate some enemies by fighting them with 3 different traits. The traits have limited charges per mission, just like your “Ultimate Combat Skills”:
- “Stealth characters” can sneak up behind an enemy and knock them out
- “Shooter characters” throw a mine
- “Brawler characters” charge forward and catch up to 3 enemies at once
This “stealth” aspect of the game sounds important at first, but becomes less significant over time because the “strong enemies” are immune to early elimination. Stealth often leads to frustrating moments for me because I can never initiate a battle quite as ideally as I wish.
The stealth reveals an initial balance issue: Charging at 3 enemies feels significantly more powerful than sneaking. In practice, it is much more efficient and safer. One would prefer to throw mines from a distance or charge in heroically rather than sneak, getting caught and starting a battle with their pants down in the midst of enemies.
You gradually unlock progress systems through allies
What is the gameplay like? In Lamplighters League, you start with 3 playable heroes: However, you quickly recruit more agents throughout the missions, and you also rescue allies who unlock additional progress trees: Allies provide passive bonuses or allow you to buy better armor and consumables like healing items or grenades.
The gameplay is grindy: You complete missions that last between 20 and 40 minutes, collecting resources that allow you to improve your characters or expand the selection of items from allies.
You fight your way through missions made up of a series of battles, usually with a main battle featuring particularly many or tough opponents and some lighter fights per mission.
Between battles, you run in real-time through the sleek mission areas, collecting as much loot as you can carry: This isn’t as exciting as it sounds. You just pick up some consumables and resources that you can spend on permanent upgrades.
However, you won’t find better weapons or anything that changes your gameplay significantly, just items like a grenade, a bandage, or a smoke grenade.
Fights feel like puzzles, but you quickly find a tactic
This is how the battles proceed: The battles feel like small puzzles that you can calculate once you get a sense of how the individual figures function on their own and how they interact with each other. The number of actions and damage values are constant. Only the hit chance is left to chance.
But you quickly realize things like: “There’s a ninja with 120 hit points; if I shoot him 2 times with Eddie, he will have about 50 HP left, and then Ingrid can knock him out and gain another action.”
The characters in the game have clear roles:
- Ingrid is a melee fighter who gains action points when she kills enemies. So the game revolves around getting enemies down to low health so that Ingrid can kill them, gain another action point, and move on to the next enemy.
- Eddie is a gunslinger with powerful ranged attacks; he can unleash a cone-shaped hail of bullets or give a quick shot to any visible enemy.
- The third starter hero, Lateef, the stealth character, is rather unsuitable for combat because he does not deal direct damage but relies more on tricks and distractions. He is likely to quickly land on the bench for many players and spend his time being sent on side missions.
A third “standard character” would probably be the healer Anna Sofia, who can fully heal both teammates once and has a buff ability that allows her allies an additional turn.
A standard combat routine involves luring as many enemies as possible and positioning them to stand clustered in front of your team. Then Eddie unleashes a double hail of bullets that instantly takes out weak enemies and at least weakens strong ones. Then you move in with Ingrid for melee combat and try to gather as many kill shots as possible.
Anna Sofia supports from the background.
This “one tactic for every problem” situation reveals a weakness in the game: The balance is somewhat strangely regulated for a strategy game because the starting heroes Ingrid and Eddie are hard to outshine.
The AI doesn’t really act cleverly anyway: They behave like goons in an action movie: Despite being outnumbered, they don’t attack cohesively but tend to come in waves so the player has enough time to shoot or beat them one by one.
Progress trees as the game’s weak point
This is a problem with progression: Characters have their own talent trees into which you invest the resource “experience points”. The smartest way to distribute the resource is to focus on just 3 heroes and put all points into these heroes. Especially a skill at the bottom of the skill tree, weapon enhancement, greatly increases the agent’s power.
However, the weapon upgrade can only be unlocked by completing a special mission, a “Coup,” for which you can use 4 heroes.
Ultimately, “The Lamplighters League” punishes players for trying out multiple characters because then points go to heroes that you don’t actively use. You should also focus resources on items, armor, or talismans on your team of choice.
Additionally, progression is somewhat strange because you receive resources as a team and can distribute them freely among agents, whether they participated in the mission or not. Only the cards, a special resource, are received solely by agents that are actively used in the mission.
For a PC RPG, I also miss features like a statistic showing how many enemies a hero has taken out, and generally a more granular skill system: something like a hit chance that grows with experience and rewards me for playing a hero a lot. But such a thing does not exist.
“The Lamplighters League” pretends to have depth with dozens of skills and tabs, but is actually rather simply cartoonish in detail. No matter how good or weak a hero was in a mission, what matters is only how I, as a player, distribute the resources.
Also, disadvantages a hero suffers during a mission when hit points drop to 0 remain inconsequential because they can quickly be healed away.
The Lamplighters League: Much quality and love, but some weak design decisions
Is the game worth it? “The Lamplighters League” is crafted with much love, and there is a lot of quality and work put into the game. The atmosphere of the game reminds me of the “The Mummy Returns” films with Brendan Fraser; the missions are enjoyable.
However, after 2-3 hours of a session, I always have enough. It becomes tedious, and you feel like you are not playing the mission because you want to but because you need the experience points for the next skill.
The gameplay loop gets stale over time; the processes in the missions are the same, and the game lacks surprises, new skills, or items that fundamentally change the gameplay.
Gameplay-wise, the heroes get stronger, but Ingrid’s gameplay does not change significantly from the first mission deep into the game. She gains a few tricks, can kick or blind enemies, but remains trapped in her archetype.
The game mechanics unfortunately prevent experimentation with other heroes, which makes the game somewhat monotonous: Other characters that act defensively offer more possibilities, but against the Eddie/Ingrid combo, they feel cumbersome and toothless.
Ideal game for Xbox Game Pass
This is my conclusion: Trying out The Lamplighters League should be a must for anyone with Xbox Game Pass.
The Lamplighters League feels like a strategy game for “casuals” who come from another genre and want to dip into turn-based strategy:
- The game has strengths in presentation and accessibility.
- However, it makes sacrifices in gameplay depth and progression systems.
This makes The Lamplighters League an ideal game for Game Pass, allowing people to sample a game from a genre they would never usually touch.
For me, however, there remains a bitter aftertaste: The Lamplighters League is a stylish genre game that has issues with balance and progression systems. Such a game should actually encourage building multiple characters and developing alternatives, rather than forcing players to limit themselves and invest all resources in just a few characters.
More on the game:
Steam: Strategy geniuses want to promote their new cool game on Twitch – It’s only doing so-so
