Review: League of Legends

Introduction

League of Legends is a FREE MMORTS (Massivley Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy) which was created by Riot games. LoL (League of Legends) was inspired by the Defense of the Ancients map for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. It was first announced on October 7, 2008 and released on October 27, 2009. The game was in a closed beta from April 10, 2009 to October 22, 2009. It then transitioned to open beta until release.

First Impressions

I played the original version of LoL, which was called DoTA, for a while before I had even heard of this new and improved version which was not being held back by the Warcraft engine. While looking at game videos, I thought that it just looked like they took DoTA, and just made the graphics better, but as you will find out, I was wrong. I installed the game, and logged in. Right away I could see huge improvements with the overall system of of the game was much improved from the old Warcraft servers. I joined a queue for a match, and almost instantly you can enter a game and choose your champion. Overall, the gameplay is fairly similar to DoTA, but there were some improvements on known glitches or abusable features. My first impression was definitely that this game should be really fun, and really addicting.

The Good

There are many good aspects of this game, and probably too many to name in 1 paragraph. First, the queue system is much better than the way you had to find games in Warcraft. Now, you can invite your friends to a match and queue against random other people, and games get started really quickly. The wait times are nothing compared to how long it took to find a match in Warcraft, which makes the game less boring and time consuming. Now, actual in-game improvements include no last hitting your own creeps to cancel enemy experience and gold, tall grass, and the new item buying system. To explain the tall grass inference, with LoL, you will see many areas on the map that look like really tall grass. If you go into this grass, you will be invisible to enemy units, unless they too walk into the grass. This adds a much more aggressive playstyle to the game. As for the new item system, it is much more organized and much easier to use than the old DoTA style shops. Basically, there is ONE shop in town, instead of around 10 different ones. In this one shop, you can choose from many categories of items to find what would fit your style of play for that champion the best. Also, they implemented a new “recommended items” list for beginning players who may not know what items will work well with their champion. The user-friendliness of LoL causes more people to want to play and is really the reason why the game has grown so dramatically in 3 months since its release.

The Bad

One of the only bad aspects of LoL is that since it is a FREE TO PLAY game, the servers will sometimes go down do to server overflows, and you may have to wait a little while for them to get fixed. Also, some champions are still fairly unbalanced, but over time with new patches, this will all be fixed.

Overall

Overall, this game is a HUGE improvement of DoTA, and it is extremely fun and very, very addicting. It is a fairly difficult game to get started on just because of how different the the gameplay is compared to most other games. Once you get started, however, you will constantly improve, and you will not be able to stop playing. I think anyone who loves to play games should definitely give LoL a shot. It is FREE TO PLAY, and it will not hurt to download it and try it out.