Lucas Reviews: League of Legends

League of Legends

With the League of Legends World Championship starting yesterday, I thought I would write up my personal review. As I write this, there is a countdown to the first game of the second day of the Worlds event, with TSM (my personal favorite team) playing again KT in Game 1. I have my bets placed with friends and this exciting event is getting closer and closer to starting its second day.

So, what is League of Legends? League of Legends (LoL for the rest of the review) is a game that falls under the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) category, similar to Heroes of the Storm and DotA 2. It is a 5on5, destroy your opponents’ structures to win, style of game. Each player selects a “champion” from the current pool of 126 champions (viewable here) with a new one coming every 2 or 3 months. Each player then selects their “Runes” and “Masteries” which are customizable ways to help boost certain stats based on what runes and masteries you select.

A big part of this game is teamwork and communicating with your team. This can be both good and bad as you’ll see many people who are great and want to work with you, but you’ll also run into trolls whose main goal is to ruin the game experience for you and potentially cause a loss. This often leads to people quitting the game if it happens enough, or solely playing with friends. Which is actually one of my suggestions if you want to play this game; play with friends, a lot. If you don’t know anybody who plays League, try gathering 4 others who would also like to try the game and play together, learning the ins and outs of the game without having to worry about running into rude people online.

To give you a better idea about how long lasting this game is, I’ve been playing since October of 2009, and that’s when the game officially came out. There were open and closed betas before that release as well. This game has been around for roughly 6 or 7 years and doesn’t really show any signs of slowing down. It is still the most played online game in the entire world, with massive tournaments going on monthly and culminating in a World Championship which is currently going on. These have million dollar prizes and the finals were even shown on ESPN2 last year.

So, would I recommend this game? Yes, I would. However, I’d also suggest that, if possible, you do play with friends as it will certainly heighten the fun you have as you play the game together and learn together. I’ve met people through this game that I still talk to this day and occasionally play with and I still have fun even after 6 years.

Stats:

• 126+ Champions
• 3 lanes + a jungle
• 67 million people playing every month,27 million people playing every day, and over 7.5 million people playing at the same time during each day's peak play time.
• Largest prize pool = $2,130,000.00
• Made by Riot Games

Final thoughts:

Personally, I would rate this game 9/10 based on how smooth the gameplay often feels and how often things get updated and fixed in the game. I’m not rating based on how the community is because that’s not not exactly Riot’s fault (and to be fair, they do quite the good job at follow up on reports of rude or abusive players). I honestly feel as if everyone should try this style of game for at least 5-10 hours to see how they feel about the game. I nearly always enjoy playing, and I think many others will too.

Thanks for reading everyone!

If you’d like to play, click here to sign up (and no, this is not a referral link).