League of Legends: Clash of Fates [PC]

08 Dec 2009 at 14:31:28 by Gunnar Petzall
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

Update on 2010-01-05:
The score has been amended to 8.6 due to the fact that the bugs mentioned and experienced were taken care of.

League of Legends is fun to play. Simple as that. I would even call it addictive and I have spent enough time playing it to justify that comment!  Yet, this is one game I have had great difficulty to grade and review...

The problem I've found is that it's very buggy on the two separate PCs I used. Although it's free to play, you can buy physical copies in shops and expect not to encounter any gamebreaking bugs.  Unfortunately, this wasn't the case for me, but it is important to note, however, that some of my friends say they've never seen a single bug and I could just be very unlucky.

League or Legends (or LoL) is a game inspired by Dcients (DotA), aaiuetor Loge)ds fan-made mod to WarCraft III (WC3) that, to this day, is played by millions – comparably popular to WoW. Even players who hate WC3 play DotA because it's radically different. LoL is created by Riot Games, ex-Blizzard and DotA staff and anyone interested in DotA might want to check out this article which looks at the similarities of DotA and LoL. 

But there are also similarities with other games, notably Heroes of Newerth (HoN). Both games use the same basic concept, but actually have different gameplay. With this in mind, it's important to compare LoL to both of these games.

The basic premise of the game's lore is that each player is a Summoner in this League (of Legends) and in each match you summon in a Champion to fight for you. Besides your teammates' Champions, your home base spawns cannonfodder, AI-controlled soldiers called "minions" who advance on the opponent base through three lanes on the map. Your job is to kill enemy minions, heroes and destroy their guarding turrets in order to reach their base and take it out.

A Champion can gain experience and gold, levels up and can buy equipment back at the base. Items can often be combined to with others to create better items in the very clear User Interface (UI). The individual Champion has four active abilities you can play with and you can choose two additional Summoner spells as well.

The game is mostly about fighting and killing opposing Champions as they are the opponent's strongest force. When a Champion is killed it remains dead for a time proportionate to its level. When it's re-summoned you can continue fighting, a concept utilised in both DotA and HoN.

The game is made more interesting through the different Champion abilities, the environment and tactical team play. The environment has view-blocking features and height differences, making visual intelligence crucial to gameplay. You can hide in the bushes waiting for your friends to "gank" (gang kill) an unaware opponent, or circle around them in middle of the map to ambush when it has low health. The game feels like an action RPG with influence from FPS games – a very potent combination!

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