Review: League of Legends

Since I play videogames a lot, and this blog is about videogaming, I think that its time that I turn my attention to reviewing games, so here goes: my review of Riot Games' free to play "League of Legends", the link in the title is to the game's official website.

League of Legends

First impressions of the game were good; I logged in and found that the game was not in fullscreen mode untill an actual match initiated, making it easy to do other things on your computer while you are waiting in the admittedly inconsistent matchmaking system. Once into a game lobby, you have a choice of 10 free heroes, who rotate each week with a different free hero lineup to keep things fresh. To have access to heroes permanently, you must purchase them. This is where the micro-transaction system comes in. Whats brilliant is that the heroes can be purchased for either real money, which is converted into "Riot Points", or the currency obtained by completing games, "Influence Points". All of the non-aesthetic features of the game, excluding a few item bundles, are purchasable with Influence points. Alternate character skins can be bought with Riot Points only. although the important stuff can be gotten with no actual money (It will take you a LOT of grinding though), Riot points, for what they buy, are a bit on the steep side; you can expect to spend £5 worth of Riot points aproximately to buy one of the more expensive heroes and just as much for one of the high end skins!

What is important though is the gameplay. While It is in some ways more simple than Heroes of Newerth; you can't deny creeps or towers for example, it is in other ways more complex. You can pick two summoner spells to bring with you into the game, which can go with any champion. There is also a rune system and a "Masteries" system, which is comparable to World of Warcraft's talent system, only masteries can be reselected at any time, which is just as well since you will have to repick them each time you want to use a different hero or even just a different summoner spell. The gameplay itself is quite similar to other Dota-esque games, but the feel is slightly different for the melee type characters in particular. This is because most of them seem to have very satisfying initiator abilities that mean that ranged enemy heroes arent as much of a threat as they were in games like HoN and don't have quite the same harrassing power in the early game. The heroes also seem a little more balanced in some ways, with only a few feeling overpowered to me.

The game looks great so far, free to play, an absolute Riot blast to play, so what's the catch?
Well, the servers are as often busy as they are available, and there is an awful lot of bile on the forums about excessive server maintainance. The game's chat system, which is used for chat outside games and forming premade teams, is often down or "experiencing technical issues", which seems to happen almost every other day, cripples my ability to play with friends too. I wouldn't for a moment accept this in a game that i had to pay for; Companies such as NCSoft and Blizzard seem to be able to control their maintainance and keep their extended maintainance periods to a minimum, keeping them well within periods that one would expect people to be sleeping (even me).

In conclusion, i can look past the poor levels of server availability the flakey chat system and the rip-off riot points to an extent, and see the great game that Riot has made. Get it and play it now, assuming the servers are available.

8.4/10