The Lamplighters League

Just finished my first quite thorough playthrough (55 hours). This game is good but it felt like it needed 6 more months in the cooker to be perfect. The aesthetics, voice acting, plot, dialogue, characters, early and very late game play are all excellent. This between-the-wars era is criminally underutilised in games and movies and the setting is very well realised here. I especially liked the undrawn hand mechanic, both cosmetically and gameplay wise. Learning the synergies between your agents is fun at first and the (very) late game power spike is great fun. What's lacking is mostly the mid-game. The maps are quite repetitive tactically, though there is a lot of love and attention to detail in each aesthetic. Your agents basically have 4 abilities each and as they level up those just get better, so your game play loop gets established early and remains the same for 25 hours or so of play time until you unlock AP-Maxxing at the end and suddenly have new strats. Similar situation with the enemies - all types pop up early and then just scale up. I would have preferred less scaling and higher level enemies to appear later and be buffer, almost like mini-bosses, with hordes of the little guys in the headquarters missions. I also would have preferred if there was more incentive to cycle your agents between missions so that you have a greater variety of teams in play, but the skill point system and especially not being able to share undrawn hand between agents or stockpile it somewhere encourage you to have a core team of 3 throughout (I ended up with 5 maxxed out agents and did cycle between them a bit, but a bigger team with more combinations would reduce the repetiveness). The equipment from the allies is surprisingly powerful in practice but needed cooler relic names - get occultic! The game is very well-balanced, including the doomsday clock mechanic, but well-balanced means you will feel stressed sometimes, even on normal difficulty. I am a veteran of turned based strategy and quite confident that I'm very good at it, and there were times in this game where things we touch and go. I had all three clocks at about 9pm at the end, all my agents maxxed in skills and appropriate gear, and fights could still feel like they were about to go to ♥♥♥♥, especially the shipment intercept missions where enemies just keep spawning in. Then suddenly a couple of stress breaks and the tide turns dramatically (granted I had a stressed based team). Overall maybe a 7/10. Just the first and last 5 hours of play are 9/10.

I've really tried to like this game but eventually couldn't. Started with normal/adventure mode and found myself in the end in quite difficult missions only to game to crash just before about to reach the end of the mission level / escape. This happened many times and I had to redo the whole mission because this game has no save game option and it's has a save-bug-loop that's really annoying. This got mis this frustrated after many 'grind-it-out' tries that today is finally the day I'm putting this game behind me - just not worth the time. Although the main game mechanics work and play out well, they're not enough alone save the game. Bugs, very long loading screens, not funny small-talks between characters + a story that's not worth focusing on - all adds up to a not good review. I've played a looooot of combat turn-based games and this really disappointed me despite getting it via sale - still would refund it today if only got back 1/3rd of it. I'm not the one deinstalling the game before finishing usually but now it's happening. This game has the main foundations right but some of the bugs and annoying things I listed here just do not 'save' the game in the end. Maybe one day if there's nothing else out there, I'll pick this up again and complete it with easy mode.

A game that I can't help but love, flaws and all. Despite a few rough edges, I’ve really grown to adore The Lamplighters League. First off, the Indiana Jones-inspired art style is fantastic, perfectly complemented by great graphics and atmospheric sound design. While the overall story is mostly just functional and serviceable, the characters themselves and their banter back at Locke's hideout are brilliantly and authentically written. As someone who occasionally gets overwhelmed managing larger squads—like commanding six soldiers in XCOM 2—I especially love leading a smaller, tightly-knit team here. Unlike the more anonymous soldiers in XCOM, these characters have distinct personalities. (Of course, looking at the bigger picture, XCOM 2 is objectively the better game, but this hits a very specific sweet spot for me). On the downside, the environments can feel a bit repetitive after a while, even though the game tries hard to keep locations varied, and you will have to deal with some occasionally imprecise controls. Ultimately, if you can forgive those minor flaws, I wholeheartedly recommend The Lamplighters League. It’s a wonderful, underrated gem.

Game is broken, which is a shame because the gameplay itself is actually pretty fun, indiana jones xcom crossover. But there are too many serious bugs to justify buying it, the game sometimes will not actually save even after you manually save so you will 100% have hours of lost progress, and I had to stop playing in week 7 because missions literally won't load. The game is so broken it is unplayable. Tried to get a refund at 9 hours and was rejected, I guess I understand since that is past the two hour mark but still a bummer since the game it literally unplayable for me at this point

反派进度压不下去导致了各种问题 没时间刷技能点、装备、卡牌，而角色强度又极大依赖这些玩意，特别是卡牌，这玩意影响其实比其他都大，又还尼玛随机的需求量也夸张 导致基本就固定3人在玩，其他人基本没空去练（甚至只允许3个人点武器强化） 如果能让进度保持在个平衡点上，这游戏应该还不错

Игра которая имея приятный геймплей в начале, спустя 8-10 часов начал приедаться из-за однообразия локации (притом одних и тех же), и абсурдно большого количества врагов, которое создаёт дисбаланс сложности (не описать по сколько раз приходилось перезагружать игру из-за провала. Те кто дошёл до финала против Никастро поймут). И это обидно, в ней колоритные персонажи со своими навыками и характеристиками, годная озвучка, привлекательный сеттинг, но удовольствие уходит на второй план, когда сталкиваешься с поджимающими сроками конца света и приевшимися локациями.

I’ve played loads of turn-based games and it’s my favourite genre, but this game is a disaster. The controls are unintuitive, the targeting is odd, and you can’t issue a command to one agent whilst controlling another (the first one just stops in its tracks when you switch). Real-time movement is odd, you can’t move the camera (WASD), and enemies are very hard to spot. What’s more, the game is very poorly optimised; it freezes even during loading screens, and loading times are far too long even on a fast machine – given that the graphics aren’t breathtaking and the environment isn’t particularly demanding, this is simply unacceptable. I won’t even mention the bugs and game freezes – for me, it’s a real disappointment.