I recently quit League of Legends due to a combination of circumstances. Before I leave it entirely behind, though, I want to take a little time to write about my experiences with the game. It's a fun little game, as are its brethren, but I got what I wanted out of them and am free to go onto other things.
For those who don't know, League of Legends is a free to play game based on mods for Starcraft and Warcraft III - LoL is not the only game of its kind, sharing the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre with Defense Of The Ancients 2, Bloodline Champions, Heroes of Newearth, Super Monday Night Combat, and so on. LoL has the largest player base in the MOBA genre - not strictly speaking because it is the best of them, but it is one of the most aggressively marketed.
The basic premise of LoL is you control a Champion, a single hero with a variety of different abilities - often, Champion powers are built around a theme, as in the case of Leona the sun-worshiping paladin who has sun-related abilities (Zenith Blade, Sunlight, Eclipse, Solar Flare, Shield of Daybreak). Your goal is to push your way through waves of minions, past tower defenses, and up to the home base so you can destroy it. There are a hundred different Champions with their own 'unique' skill sets as of the writing of this post, with more on the way. I quote 'unique' because most skill sets are simply a combination of Deal Damage, Deal Area Damage, Deal Damage And Debuff/Control Target, or Buff/Heal/Protect Allies. The uniqueness tends to come from the skins and the minutiae of statistics, but neither of those things are a big deal to me.
The game's excuse plot is that in the grim future of fantasy land, war is too messy to be fought on the battlefield. As such, each nation now has proxies fight for the honor of their homeland in what amounts to the X-Men's holographic training facility, an arena where people can 'die' a hundred times over and not worry about being permanently offed. The 'big' nations are Demacia (the Good Planets of the Universe) and Noxus (the Evil Empire), locked in an eternal struggle of people who have traditionally good powers - light and justice and chiseled jawlines - and people who have traditionally evil powers - spiky pauldrons and moral grayness and laughing at the suffering of others. There's assorted magical forests, northern barbarian mountains, Moogle villages, and a magitek city that populate the crevices between the two big cliches. Honestly, the only people who care about the setting are the super fans who do fan art and cosplaying and so on. It's not a bad setting, but it's not terribly intellectually challenging.
Despite my early successes (limited as they were), and despite gathering a small friend base to play the game with, much like World of Warcraft, I reached the upper limit of my skill and don't have the interest in slaving myself to the game just to get better at it. I could continue spending 30 minutes to an hour per game, several games a night, honing the very narrow skill set needed to play in the upper levels, but that would not be enjoyable and would be time spent away from things I actually want to do. In other words, the longer I play, the worse I get at the game (or at least, since I am playing with and against people better than me, I feel like I'm getting worse), and I don't really want to do something I'm bad at and have no hope of getting better at.
Ultimately, the game itself isn't that bad. It's a straightforward concept with good training modes and an extremely prolific community (Watch for Part 2 of this review: The Community of LoL). It is, however, easy - perhaps intended - to get into a repetitive funk, doing the same match on the same map with the same character over and over again. Even when I switch up my characters each match, ones with opposite roles and play styles and strengths and so on, the game gets old. I've gotten all I can out of the game, but I'm positive that it will continue to entertain the more competitive sorts among us, the ones who actually care about having high numbers, especially the all-important win-loss ratio.
Go here to visit League of Legends' home page.
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