League of Legends Review

League of LOLs

Graphically, League of Legends is a striking and vibrant game– and one which reminds us heavily of Battleforge due to the garish colours, stark outlining and exaggerated designs.

It’s also a game which enjoys excellent performance, despite an apparent lack of video options. We had no troubles running it on our standard gaming system, which uses 3.25GB of accessible RAM, an Intel X6800 clocked to 2.93GHz and Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 (the native screen resolution is 1920x1080).

That said, the front-end system that pops up when you log in with your account and try to find a match was a bit chuggy in places and we heard more than a few complaints (from the unbelieveably aggressive community) about it’s reliance on Adobe AIR. The matchmaking system was especially flaky at times too and would often be trying to find a match for a number of minutes, while the games themselves take awkwardly long to load.

Where League of Legends really falls down though is when it comes to the details, the amount of content and the way in which the game is paid for. So, here comes the biggest bomb shell; League of Legends is free to play.


Totally, utterly free. You can download it from the official site, create an account for free and then sit down and play. Approached this way you can steadily unlock everything in the game through either playing and accruing influence points that can be used to unlock new spells and champions, or if you’re in a rush then you can pay for specifically what you want using microtransactions.

There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a familiar way of financing a game these days. It does make the retail versions of the game highly suspect though – what exactly are you getting in the store-bought copy that isn’t in the downloaded one?

Well, nothing. It’s the same content and there’s the same roster of heroes, it’s just that 20 of them are unlocked from the moment you start playing. You also get some runes from the get-go, an exclusive skin and $10 worth of credit at the in-game store. It’s worth highlighting at this point that, even though the game is available to buy now and has been available online for a while, the online store still isn’t open. There’s conflicting reports from the developers about when it will open, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. Anyway, right now at least everybody has been able to play with all champions regardless of whether they paid for the game or got it for free. So, again, why would you pay for it?


Obviously, this is a huge problem. Champions are the most important thing included in the retail version of the game since skins are essentially useless and have only perceived value, but you’re unlikely to use all of them in the bundle. It’s more likely you’ll have a preference for a certain play style of character, in which case you’d be better off unlocking or buying those characters individually. If you know you prefer ranged characters then what are you going to do with all the melee and magic champions in your £30 collector’s edition?

What’s even more shocking though is that League of Legends is spectacularly undernourished when it comes to actual game features and content. Case in point; there is only one map, with another one currently in beta. Just a single map is all that’s available and, to be brutally honest, it’s not a particularly complex one. It’s square with bases in two corners and three paths connecting them. That’s it, and while it looks very pretty it doesn’t exactly provide any variation for players. You have to look to the champions and items to find and we’re firm in the belief that most people will just find a few favourite champion builds and then stick with them.

It’s actually quite astonishing that League of Legends is on sale at all, to be blunt. It feels like it’s still in beta stage, with on-going release issues and contradicting information to be found everywhere; some announcements claim the game has launched, while the store is supposed to be opening next week, last Monday and at officially launched, while the in-game store will be opening next week, last Monday or early next year depending on who you listen to.