The Lamplighters League

Developer Harebrained Schemes returns with an evocative and pulpy tactical adventure, where enjoyable turn-based combat just about offsets some woeful real-time stealth.

A strong turn-based foundation and colourful setting held back by grind, blind chance, and a need for efficiency over tactical variety.

Thrilling in all the right ways, The Lamplighters League is a love letter to the adventure genre in film. It’s a love letter to rogues and scoundrels that made those stories an essential part of our cultural history.

The Lamplighters League is a fun turn-based strategy game that keeps things fresh with its pulpy aesthetic and characters, and a solid gameplay loop that's not afraid to dish out the consequences of your actions. While the decision to add a real-time element to missions doesn't fully pan out, it's not enough to diminish the game's best qualities.

The Lamplighters League’s stimulating turn-based battles encourage you to carefully consider your actions each turn. Use your agents unique abilities in just the right order and you can go well beyond the default number of action points, while taking down entire groups of opponents.

The Lamplighters League attempts to deviate from tradition, promoting creativity over power, but ultimately falls short. However, its simplicity puts it into the more approachable realms of turn-based tactical games and is a great choice for anyone looking to try the genre for the first time.

Competent and stylish in its real-time strategy, The Lamplighters League puts an art deco spin on a simplified XCOM formula, but is let down by real-time segments that dilute and distract from its core offering.

If you've ever wanted to play the gaming equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you're in luck. I fully know the connotations of what I just said, and my reference was carefully decided. The Lamplighters League features everything you need from an Indiana Jones title; it has Nazis - not by name, but they are - and fantastical elements that may not be quite as good as the Ark of the Covenant, but they are fantastical nonetheless. Offering a worldwide turn-based tactical romp through the 1930's, it's time to head out and save the world.

Repetition and technical shortcomings hold back this marriage of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics.

The Lamplighters League is a stylish and smart turn-based adventure from a team that absolutely knows its way around this sort of tactical action affair. There's plenty to like about this game's melding of XCOM-styled combat with a tarot card system that gives you lots of variables to play with as you build out your team of misfits and rogues. However, as things currently stand on Xbox, there are some fairly notable performance issues here that drag the experience down from one we'd love to recommend to something that's a harder proposition in its current form. With a few patches in place you'...

The Lamplighters League doesn't quite live up to its promise and expectations. There's a fun mix of real time exploration and turn-based combat, but it's a step short of the best strategy games of the year – others like Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew have done it better. Given more time and more engaging narrative The Lamplighters League could have been great. It will have to settle for decent at best.

At launch, I cannot recommend The Lamplighters League on Xbox.  It runs terribly, while looking ugly, and is a broken and buggy mess.  Once this game is patched up and fixed though, it’s a gem.  Great gameplay, a deep meta-game, intriguing story, and one of the best videogame soundtracks I’ve ever heard will be there waiting for you (and hopefully still in Game Pass).