If you’re a DotA fan, you’ve heard of League of Legends.  If you’re not a DotA fan or don’t even know what DotA is, then chances are you’ve never played Warcraft 3 online against other people on Battle.net.  If that’s the case, the next paragraph is for you. If not, go past the break to see if it’s worth your time.

What is DotA?

DotA stands for Defense of the Ancients.  The game is a Warcraft 3 mod that focuses more on just fighting with and leveling your hero. Unlike like regular RTS games, everything is about building, tech trees, micro-managing and so forth.  For the people that would rather get straight into 5v5 battles rather than building orders, this is the game for you.

What is LoL?

League of Lengends (LoL) is the evolution of DotA.  Basically, the guys who first created the original DotA mod, wanted to do more with the game, but they were hit with many walls due to legal reasons. (Understandable, seeing as how WC3 is Blizzard’s game and not theirs). They then decided to create their own DotA in their own game to have complete creative freedom.

To read up on my review, go past the break.

The good stuff

The graphics, so far, look great. It’s nothing too photorealistic, but when I play a game, I could care less about graphics.  The sounds are basic.  Nothing too surprising. But again, I am playing this game purely for gameplay reasons. But, there is one voice actress for one of the characters, Katarina, that sounds like she’s trying too hard to sound mean.  Also, there are not music tracks on the games. Other that that though, the game sounds great.

After playing a couple of games as a complete DotA noob, I started getting frustrated. But, as with every learning process, you look to the Internet or friends for knowledge.  The gameplay isn’t hard to pick up, but the strategies and learning what every spell and special ability does may take some deaths and losses.  For me, it was about 10 losses until I figured out what I was doing.

In LoL, you are a “summoner” who summons champions to fight for you.  As you win or lose matches in the game, you gain experience points.  The more you level up, the more you access you get to higher leveled special abilities, gain mastery points, and runes. What mastery points are is basically just like World of Warcraft’s talent tree.  You can put gained points into 3 different trees to help your champion either hit harder, defend better or get more power behind his/her spells.  What the runes are is just like those in Diablo or World of Warcraft.  You can put runes into a runebook to help your champion in the battlefield.  Just like WoW and Diablo, you can combine a combination of runes to create one better rune.

The UI design very well organized.  Everything in the bottom toolbar is designed to streamline your game experience.  This is the part of the game that really caught my eye.

The bad

If you’re a noob to the genre of games, you will get frustrated and die a lot.  But if you can get over that “hump” of a noob losing streak, you’ll learn how to win.

PUG games will usually net you a loss if no communication is used.  So, by all means.  If you’re in a PUG, communicate! Use the chat box, read the chat box, and use the minimap notifying exclamation point.

The in-game store will take a little getting used to.  There are many categories and sub categories for items that you can buy with the gold you acquire from killing creeps.

Should you get this game?

It’s going to be free. What do you got to lose?  So, yes, get this game when it comes out next month. But, if you want in on the game now, go ahead and pre-order it now to get a beta key. The game will have 40 characters, or champions as they call it, when the game releases next month.  The game will be free-to-play, but you can pre-order the demo now at LeagueofLegends.com.

Last note about this fun game.  I hear they already have plans for a sequel.  Return of the Fallen Legends. Ok, not really. But how cool would it be to have a game’s acronym be LoL:RotFL.