League of Legends (PC)

League of Legends is a team-based strategic RPG, of the recent genre emerged from the Defense of the Ancients mod. That's a mouthful. More importantly though, its a lot of fun, and surprisingly, completely free to play. It runs under the microtransaction model with lots of small items that can be purchased one of two ways - either for straight money, or credit earned via game time. What is somewhat unusual is that everything (with the exception of a couple custom skins - visual change only) is purchasable with earned credits. So really they're just banking on people being impatient in order to make money.

The overall gameplay is relatively familiar - You choose a champion, basically a very strong individual hero, who you then take part in a larger ongoing battle with. Throughout the battle small NPCs fight the other team's NPCs while you stomp around and try to push your side to victory. Throughout the course of the game your champion will level up, choose skills, buy items, and refine him or herself into a pinnacle of kick-butt-itude. Sound like Demigod? Yeah, it should. That's the workings of the basic genre that both games are in.

Don't shake it off prematurely, thinking you've already played that. LoL is a really well done version with a lot of winning elements to it. Even if you've spent your hours on Heroes or Demigod you're going to want to pick this up and give it a spin. You're just missing too much goodness if you don't.

Right out of the gate, LoL has some great champions to pick from. There are 55 champions total, and each week about 10 of these are unlocked as free to play. The precise available ones change from week to week, giving you a chance to try them all out over time. In addition to that, you can spend your credits (earnable by gameplay) to permanently unlock specific champions. The champions have a wide range of play styles with a lot of individual personality. Feel like playing a giant demon that eats people and gets larger as it does so? You're in luck. There's the usual assortment of warriors and ninjas mixed with angels, rocket-powered gnomes, and a pyrotechnic little girl who animates her giant teddy bear to romp and stomp! The champions are done with a definite but not distracting humorous nod and lend a very enjoyable air to the gameplay. "I am evil! Stop laughing at me!" announces Veigar, the Tiny Master of Evil, and I still smile when he says it. There's also a lot of goodness in the sheer variety of abilities available. Definitely spend some time trying new champions out and savoring the options.

Gameplay itself is relatively fast and furious, with both sides gaining gold and levels at a fairly rapid pace. Your only real way to slow down the opposing team is to blast them into oblivion, so you end up spending a lot of time doing exactly that. If you are familiar with Heroes of Newerth, you may be distracted by the fact that you can't last hit your own NPCs (killing them when they are low health to deny experience/gold to the opposing team). This means that the only way to actually deny experience/gold is to chase off or kill the enemy heroes, and gameplay adjusts accordingly.

Each side has an assortment of large defensive towers that pack quite a punch in the early game. But since real advantage comes from making sure the other guy is dead, there's a lot of incentive to press dangerously close to them while trying to finish a wounded opponent. The towers are pretty unforgiving so it makes for a nice dance on the edge as you try to build a small positional advantage with one successful skirmish into a slightly larger one with a hazardous foray into tower space.

Another huge win that LoL has over Heroes of Newerth is that it actually has a reasonable beginner path and NPC opponents that you can battle. In addition to normal matchmaker mode, it has a 'practice' area, where games may be set up to include computer opponents. These are worth slightly less credits than normal games, but they're a great place to learn and try stuff out. They also have the advantage of being fast, with a typical practice game vs NPCs taking 11-15 minutes. Don't finish before 11 minutes or you won't earn any credits, but generally speaking most games naturally run just a bit longer than that anyways, so it doesn't tend to be an issue. The computer opponents aren't exactly gifted, but they're a nice way to learn a champion you haven't played before, or simply farm some credits and experience.

Speaking of experience, you also level yourself up a bit and have a minor skill tree full of small bonuses to unlock. You can reset and repick these at any time, so don't worry about 'bad' choices. Nothing you do is going to harm you later. Similarly, you have an inventory of Runes, that also give small bonuses. As you level up you unlock the ability to use more and stronger Runes, which once again, give small bonuses. None of these bonuses are huge, but you end up with loads of them to stack up, so you can tune yourself a bit with them as you grow.

Overall I had a surprising amount of fun with League of Legends. What I originally expected to be just another remake on a known genre turned out to have enough style and flavor of its own to be worth a lot of play. I encourage you to give it a try and get a giant flaming teddy bear of your own. Oh, and when you do, ping me for a referral (or just use the game link up top). Only 9,998 to go until they let me design my own champion!

Cheers!

League of Legends
Rating: 9.1