Lamplighters League is light stealth, heavy pulp style, and XCOM gun battles

Enlarge / Purnima, the sniper you can recruit, is an assassin who refused to do a job for the evil Council because it involved a child murder. Now, as part of your team, she will kill a gazillion goons. Strange times. (credit: Harebrained Schemes / Paradox Interactive)

Lamplighters League is a modern XCOM-style turn-based strategy game with a Weird War-ish, Indiana Jones-like feel, a light stealth element, and it’s made by the folks who made Battletech and the Shadowrun Returns series. If you pay for Game Pass, or you see this game at any price that feels reasonable (including its debut $50), that should tell you enough about whether to try it. I think you should.

I wanted to get that out of the way because I have some nits to pick with Lamplighters League, some technical and some tactical. But I don’t want to lose sight of how excited I am to have a meaty new tactics game to sink into, especially one based on an original, if heavily referential, world. If you’re a fan of tile-based movements, two actions per turn, home bases full of upgrade potential, and engaging little interactions between your troops, you don’t get that many solid games like this per year, so take note of Lamplighters League. The number of years between XCOM titles is getting longer, not shorter—we need some reserves.