The Lamplighter's League

I would have waited a bit more before writing my thoughts on The Lamplighter's League, but there is a nasty bug affecting mostly people on Game Pass which you should be aware of: The Lamplighter's League on Game Pass in its current build supports only 1 manual save per campaign, and you shouldn't try to save the same game as more than 1 campaign either. If you save more than once, there is a high risk that after leaving the game and coming back, your save games will have disappeared. Happened to me several times before I found the dev post that confirmed the bug and suggested the "fix" to use only one single manual save. So, quality-wise, not a good start. Save games are a weak point of the game anyway, as there is no quicksave function either, just an autosave at the start of each mission and start and end of the hideout phase. [EDIT: This just in while I wrote my post] Apparently Paradox just released a new version with a fix to the above mentioned bug, but that introduces a new problem with save games. Argh!!!

Apart from that, The Lamplighter's League is a pretty fun tactical combat game, comparable to the XCom series, but playing in an alternative 1932. Three evil scions of the Banished Court want to take over the world, and your group of scoundrels needs to stop them. On a world map you assign your agents, one each to minor search locations, and one main group of three agents to one of the scion activities. If you tackle that main mission successfully, the scion in question loses points, while the scions you didn't take care of are gaining them. Your goal is to fulfil a series of tasks before one of the scions fills up his points meter and wins the game. The missions are tactical combat, with a real time start in which you can use a limited number of preparation actions to already take out some enemies, the rest of which you then have to kill in turn-based combat. After a mission you gain various goodies, like cards you can slot for bonus abilities, skill points you can put into your talent tree, or various currencies you can buy research and items with.

The Lamplighter's League is pretty challenging, and I'm only playing on the medium difficulty. You can fine-tune the difficulty at the start of a campaign, which is nice. And after the tutorial (which also serves as demo version of the game), which has fixed maps, you usually play on random maps against random enemies with random objectives and treasures. Which gives a rather good replayability, you could easily play several campaigns and it wouldn't be too repetitive. Not unlike Jagged Alliance 3, which I played earlier this year, there aren't any fail forward mechanics; which means that if you dial the difficulty too high, the game can easily end in a death spiral with the scions growing in power faster than you, unless you lose your agents and it is game over.

Combat is pretty fun. While in the real-time part there are only 3 different "classes", and it is highly advisable to take one of each on your mission, in turn-based combat there are noticeable differences between all of your agents. So it makes a difference whether for example you take Eddie or Ana Sofia as your saboteur on a mission, because Eddie is better at shooting things, while Ana Sofia has healing and buffing powers. Add to that the fact that you can skill the slightly differently in each campaign, and you have a lot of variability, even if each campaign passes through the same major plot points.

If Paradox manages to fix the various save game issues, I can see myself playing this for a good number of hours.