League of Legends or LoL is a F2P (Free 2 Play) multi-player online battle arena game developed and publish by Riot Games. LoL is considered by some gamers to be a possible successor to the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients.

Requirements

• Windows XP/Vista/7
• 750MB HDD space
• 2Gz processor
• 512MB RAM
• DirectX 9.0 capable video card
• Internet connection for online play

Installation

Installing LoL was pretty straight forward, all you have to do is download the LoL_setup.exe file from their website and the rest is history. However, patching the client after installing it can be quite frustrating especially if you have peer-to-peer enabled. It's because when you have peer-to-peer enable, you share your bandwidth with other players a.k.a. you're seeding the file. I don't know why they enable it by default but honestly, I don't think most players out there want to share their bandwidth with a random person. Sure it's a great idea, but I prefer it to be disabled by default and it's up to the player if they want to seed the client or not.

First Impressions

Having played Warcraft III and DotA for quite some time now, you'll notice that LoL looks a lot like DotA. Afterall the some of the developers that worked on DotA are now working on this game. Albeit you could say that it does look more cartoonish than DotA. So some people might like it, some people might not...whatever floats your boat buddy. Some of the champions are very similar to their DotA counterparts as well, making the transition for DotA players in finding their favorite champion easy.

Singleplayer

Technically, LoL is a multi-player game but you can also play with bots if you want to just practice by yourself and find out what each item does to your favorite champion.

Multiplayer

Playing against other players in LoL is like opening a box of chocolates, you'll never know what you'll get. And this will stay true all throughout the games you randomly join. Unless of course you have your 5 man team ready all the time. Each game can make you feel like you've just got your first girlfriend and sometimes it makes you feel that you want to beat someone up real bad. Why? Because from time to time, you get to have good players in your team who know how to support you and the whole team as a whole. These kinds of players tend to be really rare because most of the time you'll get players that think if they can win the game all by themselves. Some players will join a game...play for 5 minutes and then either go AFK (Away From Keyboard) or leave the game. Since new players can't join an on-going game, this puts your team at a huge disadvantage against the other team especially at the end-game where spawn time is around a minute or more.

Final Thoughts

If you're wondering why there hasn't been any new reviews the past few weeks, it's because of this game. Because honestly even with the random player skills that you get every single time you play, it's still fun to play especially if winning and losing doesn't mean a lot to you and you just want to enjoy playing your champion. Since this is still in beta, there's still a bunch of nerfing to do on some champions as some really do stand out in every single game. I can easily see this game as a heavy contender with the other DotA-lie games out there when most of stuff have been ironed out.

Ratings

Installer - There's no problem installing the game. But having the peer-to-peer option enabled by default when patching without your consent is a big no-no for me. I think it should be disabled by default and let the player choose whether he wants to share his bandwidth or not with other players downloading the client.

Graphics - The graphics may be a bit too cartoonish for some hardcore players who would like their champions to look as fantasy-like as possible.

Sound - Sound effect and background music wise, it's nothing special not is it something to laugh about. It suits the game just fine.

Gameplay - If you're playing the game casually then you'll enjoy LoL as much as I did. But if you're the competitive type of player who pretty much wants to beat everyone out there, then you better find a good team because no matter how good you are if you've been matched with four newbies against a complete highly skilled team then you're going to lose no matter how good you are. And don't say I didn't warn you!