I am a big fan of the 1930s pulp adventures, and I’ve played a fair share of turn based, tactical strategy games. When I saw the announcement trailer for Lamplighters League, I was extremely interested in it. When it went on sale for the Steam Spring Sale, I was able to pick it up and give it a try.

The first thing you are hit with, and the best part of the game for me, is the music. The main theme that plays at the main menu is a great number that mixes both the jazzy feel of the 20s-30s and the grand scale of an adventure score. I found myself humming it often during my daily life. The rest of the music is much more ambiance. There’s a few select songs that play during combat or exploration that are there for flavor, but don’t take center stage.

The art style for this game goes for a blocky, cartoonish look. The characters have slightly exaggerated proportions, similar to the Pixar design. It works in keeping the maps easily readable as characters stand out among their backgrounds. The only time it really fails is when you see the characters up close, like during the loadout screen. The angular designs make them look like low-poly, early PS2 characters. Seeing as you spend most your time viewing them from a bird’s eye view, it’s not a huge hindrance to enjoyment.

Of all the X-COM style games I’ve played, Lamplighters League probably cribs the most from it. You have a very similar world map where you choose what mission you want to do next, with lots of filler missions of the “steal theses supplies”, “destroy this thing” type. These over world rounds are broke down in weeks, and you are on a doomsday timer as there are three competing factions trying to take over the world that you have to fight. If any one faction completes their goals, you lose the game. Each mission affects one of the three factions and slows their progress. Missions take place on small maps that contain the main objective and often a side objective. After awhile I quit completing the side objectives because they were usually more trouble than they were worth. For the repetitive radiant missions, the same selections of maps are used over and over, so you’ll see the same mountain camp and industrial dock layout several times in a playthrough. The dedicated story missions are where we get unique maps, like a museum, the land of the dead, or an abandoned manor house.

One gameplay idea I didn’t like was how you unlock new agents to play as. You’ll start with 3 and unlock a fourth by the end of tutorial. During the game you may come across a mission to rescue someone sympathetic to the Lamplighters cause. The first few weeks I was able to rescue an extra agent. Then after that, I didn’t get another ‘rescue an agent’ mission until around week 25, which was towards the end of my game. By then, I already had a solid team of agents I had learned how to play and was balancing the completion bars of the three rival factions, so if the agent wasn’t for a faction I was trying to stop, I didn’t see a need to rescue them. Another factor that made trying new agents a chore was this game limits you to 3 agents per mission, except on the big critical missions you can bring 4 agents. Maybe there’s some game balancing reason to it, but I don’t see why they couldn’t make it 4 agents for every mission. That’s a pretty common squad size as seen in X-COM, Wasteland, Empire of Sin, etc.

The combat system is pretty solid and learning how to use agents’ abilities to work off of each other in effective ways is satisfying. One thing Lamplighters adds to the tactical combat genre is stress meters, for both you and your enemies. Certain characters have dark occult powers that can stress an enemy, critical hits also contribute to stress increase. If an enemy ‘breaks’ they open themselves up to a finisher which instantly kills them, regardless how much health they have. When fighting tougher enemies, gnawing away at their stress bar instead of their health bar was the way to go. You can also attach tarot cards to your agents, these are unlocked at the end of each mission and can give them certain boons, like a new attack or making so that even missed attacks do some damage. The only part of the combat system I didn’t understand was armor. Enemies would have an armor score that I’d need to chip away at, but even when my agents were armored, they only seemed slightly more hardier.

So, the big selling point for why I bought this game was the pulp adventure setting, and I feel let down here. Part of it was as a turned based tactical game it’s hard to create that sort of seat of your pants, swashbuckling adventure feel of the pulp genre when your game is a more methodical strategy game. It also plays it a little too straight. Your agents all have fun personalities, but they don’t go so far as to be those larger than life characters. I did have a fun balance for my team with Anna Sophia, the medic with a heart of gold; Celestine, the angsty occult assassin; and Isaac, the cynical mercenary. At your hideout between missions agents have conversations with each other that flesh out their character and their relationships to each other. They don't all get along with each other. The leader, Locke, was a member of the original Lamplighters, who were all killed, and is hostile towards the scoundrels and thieves that he had to hire as the new Lamplighters.

Most of the game is spent in pretty standard, real world locations, you only occasionally visit strange new worlds. The main goal is you must reach the lost magical tower of Babylon. On your way there, you fight mostly generic German military goons, who are the grunts for the Banished Court, the Lamplighters’ enemy organization led by three lords. I’m reminded of the game Strange Brigade, another pulp adventure game that didn’t stick around in the gaming sphere long. As a 3rd person shooter, it did the pulpy action better. Add on to that the 1920s radio announcer narrating everything and the tongue in check, goofy tone. It nailed the pulp feeling better than Lamplighters.

Now, each Court faction has a special enemy type that tries to give the game more pulp. Marteau the American has ghosts, Strum the German has Eygptian mummies, and Nicastro, who worships Great Value Cthulhu, has various ocean monsters in her forces. These do add some flavor to the strategy as they behave different than jackbooted goons and have supernatural powers. They do make the stealth aspect of this game useless though. You don’t start a mission straight into a fight. You have the option to sneak around, avoiding guards and bypassing some combat encounters. Your agents have one of three stealth attack types. Bruisers can bum rush groups of enemies, Sneaks can assassinate lone guards, and Saboteurs can lay down shock mines to knock out wandering enemies. There’s promise there, but all of the pulp enemies are immune to these stealth attacks. So, if they make up half the enemy force, you’ll have to get into a combat encounter eventually. That, or I was just really bad at stealth.

As the three lords get closer to reaching the tower, their forces get buffs. The first buff for each faction is replacing a normal enemy with a faction unique one. I think my game glitched out, because I never saw the faction unique enemies appear. I was fine with the unique enemies not appearing, because some levels felt downright unfair. I remember trying one mission that was filled with 6 zombie type enemies, 4 pulp enemies, and a bunch of armed goons. It was basically an unwinnable situation for my team because they’d just get zerg rushed by the hard hitting zombies. I reloaded a save, completed a few other missions, then came back to this one. Now there were no zombies and fewer pulp enemies. It felt much more balanced this time around. I don’t know if it’s just randomly generated what the opposing force will be made up of, but the formula seems off.

The presentation of this game was a let down as well. The game opens with a fun cutscene showing a courier running through the streets of Paris and our heroes sitting on a rooftop waiting for him. It’s well animated and fun. That’s the first and last cutscene like that in the game. Everything else is either done with still images and narration or conversations on your hideout screen. I don’t expect every little thing to have an animated cutscene, because they’d have to either animate the scene to include the agents you brought or just always use the default three agents, but there are other scenes that could’ve had some animation. Like, towards the start of the game you learn what the three Banished Court lords would do with the tower's power. That would be a good time for an animated cutscene of Marteau supervising his factory of the dead vs a picture of it. The big finale of the game is just a still image and the Lamplighters’ leader debriefing you at the hideout. This presentation style makes the game feel like budget title.

All in all, as a turn-based, strategy game, Lamplighters League offers some fun combat and engaging features. As a pulp adventure, it falls flat. I wanted to like this game, but there was a stretch in the middle where it started to bore me a bit. They use the trappings of the pulp genre without ever really catching it’s wonder. If they pared down the game to be a shorter experience, I’d be a little happier with it. Even with my criticisms, I do hate that this game was written off as a failure pretty quickly by the publishers, because I would love to see more 1930s pulp adventure games.