League of Legends Review: Who’s Your Champion?

Ever since the “Warcraft 3″ custom map “Defense of the Ancients” has reached its peak, many developers have been trying to be first to emulate the mechanics of this popular map into a commercial game. Dubbed as the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (or MOBA for short), Riot Games plans taking the roots of “DOTA” and putting them into “League of Legends,” a much more marketable and simpler package. To make the transition easier, they even have the original designers from the older versions of “DOTA” working on the game. While this sounds like the perfect formula for a successful game, is it enough for “League of Legends” to win over “DOTA”‘s veteran crowd, as well as gamers who never touched the custom map before, even at the cheap price of free?

When you first start the game, you’ll be given the option of learning the game via a tutorial, which will go through the basics, such as the concept of lanes, creeps, and controlling your champion. The idea behind “League of Legends” is to push one of the three “lanes” by destroying defensive towers and eventually going for the main structure. Once the main structure is destroyed, your team wins, and if the reverse happens, you lose.

Your champion, one sole character you control in a RTS fashion, will gain experience, gold, powers, and items as the game progresses. It is very similar to a roleplaying game, only you can reach maximum level within a half of an hour, and you only have four skills that can be levelled. Besides your champion, you have A.I.-controlled “creeps” that spawn every half a minute and they serve as cannon fodder for your side. These creeps march in their lanes and are trying to push the tower, like you, only they give a gold reward to the enemy champion if he lands the fatal last blow.

This might sound confusing to read, but in practice it is much easier to digest due to the “LoL” tutorial; however, the usefulness of the tutorial stops there. While explaining how to navigate the interface, controlling your champion, how towers and creeps work are all done very well, it doesn’t explain how the items or champions interact with one another in detail. As someone who has played a bit of “DOTA” and put in an unhealthy amount of hours in “Heroes of Newerth,” this information is vital to perform, even in mediocre standards. You cannot thrust a new player into this type of genre without explaining the importance of specific roles like disablers, carries, nukers, and initators. Because of this, new players are stuck in the position where they are completely overwhelmed due to omitted information, which will cause veterans of the genre to get annoyed with their presence, since the game is very unforgiving.

Fortunately, this can be somewhat forgiven, because “LoL” doesn’t have a huge learning curve like “DOTA.” Many of the gimmicks from “DOTA” are gone, and if you don’t what I’m talking about, I’m not going into detail about it. All I’m going to say is it makes the game much easier to learn, and the only Herculean task for new players is understanding the abilities and roles of each champion. To make things easier for new players, the interface doesn’t try to hide information. When you use a spell, it will display the range of the spell and the area of effect. If you’re trying to figure out what items to get for your champion, it will display recommended items for your selected champion. There is even a champion information panel that displays the type of strategy you should use to be more effective.

While “League of Legends” tries very hard to get new players to understand the game, its downfall is keeping gamers playing. Unlike other MOBA games, there isn’t much depth to “LoL.” The big problem is everyone scales in the game. If you played the original “DOTA,” you’ll understand heroes become strong and weak in different phases of the game. For example, if you picked a mage-type hero who has a lot of powerful high damaging spells, they are good at in the “early” game, but will be weak later because everyone will likely to have more magic resistance and more hit points. In “LoL,” you can get items that increase your spell’s power, meaning that no matter what phase of the game you’re in, your always going to be doing the same thing and it’s still going to be effective. In short, whatever you’re going to be doing early in the match, you’ll be doing later on, only with bigger numbers. This leads to a rather predictable and dry experience.

The other problem is the items themselves don’t have a lot of thought put into them. Again, unlike other MOBA games, there are no items in “LoL” that have no powerful secondary abilities. Everything in this game is passive, and all you’re really doing throughout the game is simply increasing your numbers as high as possible, but performing the same flowchart-like manuevers on your enemies. At first it might seem like the game is very laidback, but after a few matches, you’ll realize there isn’t whole lot to understand or room for any sort of creativity.

To try to make up for this, “LoL” has a persistent system. For each game that you play, no matter if you win or lose, you will gain experience points and influence points on your account. When you have enough experience points, you gain a level and have an extra point in “mastery” (think skill trees from RPGs). The influence points are used at the game’s store, which consists of more additional features like runes and unlocking heroes. Runes and masteries add small upgrades such as increased critical strike chancee or extra health points. The problem with this is that the game dumbs it down to no longer being based on skill, but rather who has the most time. This doesn’t help when you can use real money to purchase more points to get these better items and champions. To say the least, it’s very hard to take “LoL” seriously when you know you are going to lose, because someone threw in an extra ten or twenty bucks. Whatever happened to simply buying the game at a fixed price and getting everything?

Speaking of getting a complete package, there are many things missing in this game. You are only given one map, there is only one game mode, and the ranking system doesn’t even work yet. For a game that expects players to grab the Collector’s Edition instead of downloading it for free, there isn’t much incentitive to go fork out your money besides getting all the champions unlocked. This is perhaps one of the most barebone games ever released.

With all these problems in “LoL,” it’s very hard to recommend, even as a free game. Despite the efforts to get new players to understand the mechanics, there isn’t much depth or strategy involved to keep them coming back for more. To make this worse, Riot Games have implemented an online shop and persistent levelling that gives an advantage for people with way too much time on their hands or have plenty of cash to throw around. This doesn’t necessary make the unenjoyable, as the game is still somewhat fun to play, but don’t expect “League of Legends” to change your gaming schedule or challenge your mind.

Rating:
 
“League of Legends” was developed by Riot Games, and published by THQ for the PC, for release on October 27, 2009.

Related Posts:

• July 7, 2009 -- E3 ’09: League Of Legends: Clash of Fates – Riot Games Founder Inteview
• August 30, 2010 -- Mafia II Review: Old School Gangstas
• July 30, 2010 -- Maestro! Green Groove Review: Classical Rhythm Gaming
• July 21, 2010 -- Blacklight: Tango Down Review: Doing Your Duty
• June 9, 2010 -- UFC 2010 Undisputed Review: Hittin’ The Mat Hard