Customer Reviews

League of Legends

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Summary:
---Having played this game for several months during the closed beta, I can only state that the game keeps getting better. At first impression, gameplay was already an amazing experience.
---The game consists of a matching system, where you are matched with other players to form a team. You each select a hero and are placed against another team of heroes to invade the enemy base while defending your own.
---By purchasing the collector pack, you are giving yourself a head start into the world of LoL. You will not regret the purchase and even if you do, the Riot staff has superior customer service and will complete your satisfaction.


Pros:
---The characters are very lively and fun to play. Each has their own fun attitude and great sound clips. While the graphics felt a bit childish at first and too bright, I've grown quite fond of them as they are quite personal. Animations are great.
---The gameplay is always changing, meaning each match always feels like a new game. The re-playability of the game is amazing, all things considered. You can make excellent come backs and really get great satisfaction from playing a match or two.
---The game rewards talented players with excellent tactics. There is little luck involved in the game and your skill can determine the success if your entire team. Each player has a key role in victory.
---No cost of entry. While you do not have to purchase the game to play, having the collectors pack aids in future development of the game while giving you a head start on hero selection. The 20 heroes included are very well balanced and give you tons of playing styles to choose from. There are 3 ranged DPS champions, 5 melee DPS champions, 2 support champions, 5 tank champions, and 5 mage champions.
---Friendly staff to assist problems. Quick response time with a fast resolution.


Cons:
---The launcher leaves a lot to be desired. You will be forced to install Adobe Air in order to use the launcher and thus play the game. The launcher contains more than half the bugs in the game due to performance and server sync issues. The friend tracker is built into this launcher and needs quite a bit of polish.
---Game matching is hit and miss. When selecting the solo gameplay where you are matched to 4 other allies, you are often matched against a full arranged team of players which have a strong upperhand. These games are often not enjoyable due to the landslide which occurs.


Game Contents:
---Access to the Beta (No Longer Applies)
---$10 of Riot Points for use in the store
---4 Summoner Runes
Greater Mark of Malice (Improves your critical chance)
Greater Seal of Vitality (Increases your health per level )
Greater Glyph of Knowledge (Increases your mana per level)
Greater Quintessence of Revival (Decreases your Death Timer)
---20 Playable Champions
The actual champions that we are including in the collector pack are:
Alistar
Amumu
Annie
Cho'gath
Evelynn
FiddleSticks
Janna
Kayle
Malphite
Morgana
Nasus
Rammus
Ryze
Sivir
Teemo
Tristana
Tryndamere
Veigar
Warwick
Zilean
---Human Ryze Skin (No Longer Applies - Preorder Only)
---Silver Kayle Skin

I've been beta testing League Of Legends since early July of 2009. What can I say, I loved Defense of the Ancients (WC3 Custom Map), and I had to see how well this game related. It really is a beautiful game, the graphics will please you regardless of what system you run (as long as you meet required specs). Best way to categorize this game? Session based RTS/RPG hero team fights and continual summoner progession.

This is a fast paced game that will always keep you on your toes. The summoner progression and character progression will literally keep you striving to better yourself for as long as you see fit. You could literally play this game for 5 years, and not get bored. For example, I played DOTA since the Reign of Chaos DOTA maps came out, and continued to play the game for about 6 years. I replaced DOTA with League of Legends, and I do not regret my decision one bit. This game is so good, I even got my wife to play it! She never plays computer games, and she loves LoL (best acronym ever for a game?).

Another thing that puts this game "leagues" above other free games, Riot Games will not SELL gamers advantages over others! I love this, I've played too many games where you can simple buy your "power" or items, and stomp on players who do not have the money to compete. The only thing Riot Games sells in alternate character skins and other things that don't really give other players unequal advantage.

I encourage everyone to try this game for free, and if you really like it, please, PLEASE, support the developers and buy the game guys, they're doing really great things, and come on, they built the engine from scratch! Hook 'em up!

I recommend playing this game casually. If you have a competitive streak or care about winning it can be very frustrating. Unless you play with a group of friends, you'll have to rely on the random teammates given to you by MatchMaking. There is a huge amount of variance in the teammates you'll have, from competent to brain-dead to trolls who intentionally cause your team to lose. Your gaming experience depends very heavily on who your teammates are.

MatchMaking also tries to balance the teams, meaning you will probably lose around 50% of your matches no matter how good you are. But that doesn't mean the match will be close- matches are usually one-sided. It often becomes clear very early that one team will need a miracle to win. If you're on that team, you'll probably have to play for another ~15 minutes, getting stomped the whole time, until it finally ends. If you're on the winning team, it's nice knowing that your rank will be higher, but it's not very exciting.

The company (Riot) is heavily focused on creating new characters because that's how they make money (micro-purchases). And playing new characters usually is pretty fun. But it seems that they devote very little time or resources to addressing any other issues. There are numerous client bugs which often go many months before being addressed (if ever).

Pros: Playing different champions gives lots of variety. The game is potentially free (though in practice many people end up spending some money).

Cons: Gaming experience is strongly dependent on many factors outside of your control, around 20% of the time your team will be losing and there will be almost nothing you can do about it.

Bottom line: Play casually. If you must play competitively, don't do it alone- play with friends. Otherwise it's frustrating too often to be worth it.

So before I get into the review let's get this out of the way. Currently there are 40 heroes, with plans for more to be added. If you buy this game you will get _25_ heroes unlocked, with the others needing to be unlocked via playing (riot points), or paying ($$). Also you won't get all the runes you'll end up wanting either, you just get a few. Keep in mind they give you credit towards the Riot Store which can be used to buy characters/runes, but know you don't get everything for ~$25.

LoL is very much in the same vein as DOTA (5v5, creeps, towers etc), but there are things I like much better i.e. buying items is just from one shop, and if you have enough money you can buy a high lvl item and it will automatically buy the items below it. (i.e. you could buy Sange & Yasha straight up) This game is _much_ more newbie friendly, from the "recommended items" you can buy, to lack of denying, to even the community, I found it much easier to get into, and even now I'd say 80% of my games are good games, vs about 5% with dota. (Solo queue both games)

The heroes are all very enjoyable to play, and all have unique models, (everything from moogles to pirates, yarrr) voices, and abilities (and /dances!). The skills are pretty awesome I must say, I think they are much more aesthetically pleasing than DOTA. (once again, engine limitation)

LoL has a couple of leveling systems. You get masteries as you level, which allow you to be more offensive, defensive, or utilitarian (think talent trees). You also get runes, which allow you to load up "rune pages", i.e. a page of runes that enhance your particular character. So, if you have 3 rune pages, one offensive, defensive, caster, you can choose which page you want to use after character selection, whereas masteries are fairly static, one mastery tree applies to any characters you use. On top of these two leveling systems, you'll have your champion spells, and your "summoner" spells, which are basically two spells you can choose at the beginning of a match that you'll be able to occasionally use on top of your particular champions' spells. Summoner spells range from a mini teleport, to spawning a seige unit, to revealing a portion of the map for some time.

The community is a bit better in DOTA, RIOT has said they have plans to help keep the community civil etc, there's already penalties for leaving, and you can report people using swear words etc.

***Keep in mind this game is _free_ to play, but at the expense of lots of time. Buying this game will probably save you anywhere from 50-300 hours of playtime depending on how good you are to accumulate the same amount of characters/runes as you would playing the free version and earning everything yourself. Keep in mind RIOT does not sell power, so aside from having less heroes to choose from, you should be on an even playing field if you play it for free. On that note, keep devs alive and support games you love!

Amazing deal if you don't have any of the champions that comes with this pack. (see front page review for champion list)

-Most, if not all of the 20 included champions are viable/competitive in ranked matches.
-The game comes with a code that can be used on existing accounts. Mine, for example, is a 2 month active account, and the code worked just fine.
-The way I see it is: it's 10$ for the champions, and 10$ for Riot points - which can be used for Skins/Exp Boost/etc.

Good deal!

There's not much I can say about League of Legends that hasn't already been said, but I must say that it is an amazing game. I played quite a bit of DotA and found out about this game and downloaded it right away. I was blown away - it's so much better than DotA ever was. I played LoL for free for a month or two before I decided to buy this box, and I'm very glad that I did. The 4 summoner runes weren't all that useful, but that's not why you should buy this - it's all about the 20 free champions and the $10 in Riot Points. If you're currently playing LoL for free and thinking about purchasing this - it's well worth it.

If you haven't played LoL - why haven't you downloaded it yet? Go to their website and download and play the game for free for awhile, and if you like it, come back here and buy this. It's one of the most fun games I've ever played, it's free/cheap, and Riot constantly updates their game every week or two! What more can you ask?

I was lucky enough to come across this game on the clearance rack at my local target for a mere [...] bucks. It goes without saying that I was more than pleasantly surprised and to this day my wife reports that it's the best money I've ever spent on a video game considering the use I've gotten out of it. I should mention that this game is actually FREE TO PLAY! though in hindsight I would gladly pay full price for LoL.

As far as the gameplay itself, it's free so I urge you to find out for yourself. I would definitely compare it to DoTA as it is a spinoff and one of the founding games of the new "MOBA" genre though it's quite different. All of the benefits of having a stand alone game are definitely obvious. It's also worthwhile to note that there is a robust community that is ever growing and that the developers are heavily engaged, churning out new champions to play monthly.

The only cons that I would give it are that people can be a little harsh, unfriendly, and unsportsmanlike at times. It's nowhere near as bad as DoTA however and since LoL has a leveling system built in there is an accepted and visible learning curve. This is unlike the DoTA community which seems to hate newbies and thinks everyone who plays needs to magically already know how to play and have experience before ever entering a game. The LoL devs are also committed to trying to make the atmosphere friendly, they've showed this by adding a reporting system to report players who are intentionally disruptive to gameplay or are verbally abusive.

All in all I'm really excited for the future of the MOBA genre, LoL was included in the 2010 World Championship of Gaming and there's more stand alone MOBAs on the way to include DOTA 2 by Valve!!! For now though... I'm hopelessly addicted to LoL and enjoy my time on it very much. I honestly can't believe such a great game is free to play!

This game has basically taken over my life. LoL is my WoW. It offers 43, as of this writing, champions with which you play. If you have played DotA or HoN, you will love this game even more because it gets rid of the negatives from those two. The Riot staff is excellent, too. They actually listen to what players want to see. I can say they do have their hands full, though. The game skyrocketed to over one million users in a little over three months. So it does have it's bugs and unexpected server shutdowns, but if you can get past the couple of flaws, you'll find an excellent game I would easily recommend to anyone.

Great game.

fixed everything i hate(d) about DOTA.

very good community support and active communication between RIOT and the community.

still a bit buggy, but worth it as the bugs do not affect gameplay (just menu issues in pre-game)

Let me just start off by repeating that the entire game is free to play (signup link here [...] ) but this package provides you with tons of champions and a couple other great benefits.

This is NOT a game for casual players. This is a game for competitive, focused people who really enjoy team-based gameplay. Two teams of five (in the current map) square off against each other, with each player controlling a different champion. Generally, every champion has a unique playstyle, i.e. high magic damage with low survivability (caster), low damage output but very high hitpoints (tank/damage absorber), etc. Champions level and gain gold by killing computer-controlled minions and enemy players. With each level comes new or upgraded abilities, and with gold players are able to buy new items.

A big part of the fun is in developing your champion in the optimal way you see fit. You can pick what abilities you'll use, what items to get, and what summoner skills (spells), masteries (like skill trees in WoW), and runes (bonus stats) you can use. There are many, many diverse ways to play the game, and if you ever get tired of playing one type of character you can simply try another the next game.

League of Legends can be incredibly fun to play, but as your team's performance is based around how your teammates play, the game can be extremely frustrating. Every time someone on your team is killed by the enemy, your opponents grow stronger. If a teammate is being foolish and dying frequently, your fate is essentially sealed and you have lost the game. Games always last at least 25 minutes, so you can potentially feel like your time has been wasted if you get teamed up with less than stellar players.

Another issue I should mention is stability: as the game has grown, the servers have seen more downtime. Also, and this may be temporary, client crashing has become an issue with the latest patch. On the upside, there are no known hacks for the game.

In summary: League of Legends is an extremely deep, challenging, fun game to play, but it has a steep learning curve and can be an aggravating experience if you are teamed up with other players who are at a different skill level than you are.