League of Legends review

	League of Legends leagueoflegends.com Publisher: Riot Game riotgames.com

Strengths:
* Great variety and number of champions/heroes to chose from.
* It is free to play online.
*There is masteries/runes upgrading system /similar to WoW talents/ to upgrade your master summoner and provide bonuses to your heroes.

Weakness:
* The graphics are very cartoonish and the heroes look like placed roughly on the background.
* Some heroes are poorly balanced – some are very strong at start/late games, some are strong only at late games and some are very week during the whole match-up.
* Purchasing system to unlock heroes and runes to upgrade your summoner. Now this could actually be looked as an advantage but for some people it is just not fair to not have access to all heroes from the start.

If you are hardcore gamer you have most probably played Warcraft 3 most popular map: Defense of the ancients, known as DotA Allstars - www.playdota.com. Some time ago the creator of DotA-Allstars.com posted a message for the ancestor of the game and welcomed all former DotA players into League of Legends.

League of Legends has the same gameplay idea as DotA. You select one champion and you team up either with 2 or 4 more people and try to win over the opposing team. All the champions are unique and have unique abilities. So far League of Legends has two maps to play your matches on. The first one is designed for 3v3 matchups and the other map is for the 5v5 matchups. The graphics of the surrounding elements are ok, but champions and monsters look very cartoonish. The characters are well animated though some of the movements look very stiff.

The gameplay is extremely addictive and this will be confirmed by all DotA: Allstars former players. If you never played DotA – the game is similar to Counter Strike but with much greater variety. You level up your champion through the entire game, you upgrade your abilities, you purchase better items in struggle to dominate over your opponents, etc… Hardcore DotA: Allstars players used to play the game for over 5 years. Generally, you do not need to invest too much time daily to become and stay a good player. And the game is interesting even when you are in your game number 1000. There are so many heroes /over 60/ and so many combinations of skills/items available that you will never get tired of trying to find and use different strategies, items and partners to crush your opponents. The champions are basically 3 main types: tanks, DPS and support. The tanks gather items to have plenty of hit points to be able to live after great amount of damage. The DPS characters are weaker regarding health but usually do significant damage to the enemies’ heroes. Support heroes use different abilities to turn around the battle and the match-up in your favor. Some of those abilities are: heal, stun, slow, teleport, move fast, or impact in different ways your other co-players.

The sounds and the voices in the game are pretty ok. There are several improvements in the engine as well. The most important one is that if a player is disconnected from the game/for example due to connection problems/ he or she is allowed to reconnect back and play with the teammates in the same game again. Also the shop is pretty advanced right now, and there are recommended items for every character. No more wondering if this life-steal sword is suitable for your warrior-mage.

Conclusion:
Play League of Legends and you will become an addict in short time. The gameplay is so good that you will come back for more and more battles. The graphics are ok, and if you can live on with the cartoonish style I guarantee that you will be playing this for years.