League of Legends

League of Legends is a game I just recently got into. It is a free game created by a company called 'Riot' you can find at their website. The genre is called MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), the game play is similar to that of Dota where the perspective is a third person overview and you use the mouse and number buttons to move your character and make them fight.

You create an account and use a username in game. You can add other people user names to your friends list to play with them. In this game, there are many different 'champions' you can choose to play from, some are free to play and some you can unlock with riot points or influence points. Each week there are different champions available to play so if you are thinking about unlocking a champion and have never played it before, wait until it is free to play and give it a try then. If you like it then buy it. I talked about riot points and influence points earlier. They are the games form of currency, riot points you can purchase with real money to unlock champions, buy different skins for them, purchase runes to give your character an extra advantage, etc. Influence points are basically the same, except these build up the more games you play so you don't have to use real money. The only downside to influence points is that it cannot buy all of the items riot points can, like skins.

There are different versions you can play with a different numbers of people on each team. 1v1, 3v3, and 5v5 are the most common, but you can start a custom game and play how you like. There are two different game versions you can play. One I have yet to try out is called 'Dominion mode' so I don't know much about it. The main one that I play is 'Classic mode'. This can be played with the teams as real people or bots (you can also play with friends if you create a custom game and invite people off of your friends list). There is a 'nexus' in each teams base that the players must protect. The goal is to get into the other teams base and destroy their nexus. The nexus helps you out by providing minions that spawn every so often to fight for your team. Along the way you must destroy turrets and defeat the other teams minions to have any chance of entering their base.

As you fight, the game keeps track of your kills, deaths, and assists. For each kill or destroyed turret your team gets, you receive gold. In each spawn there is a merchant that sells weapons, armor, and consumable items that can increase your characters speed, defense, and attack. This helps get more kills so make sure to go back and buy items regularly. When you die, you have to wait a time limit before re-spawning at your base. As the game goes on, the longer the game hold out, the longer the re-spawn time is.

Games can take anywhere between 20 or so minutes to over an hour so be prepared for a long game when starting one. If you leave while in a game or are standing still for too long, the game will register you as afk (away from keyboard) and kick you from the game. You have to be careful of this, League doesn't take kindly to people who go afk and if you get kicked too many times the game will start to ban you from playing. It can even freeze your account and you wont be able to sign on any more so make sure you have enough time to see your game through till the end. Over all, League of Legends can be entertaining for hours and is a fun way to kill a few hours. It can be very frustrating if you die or don't win a lot.