As someone who has played League of Legends for near seven years now I want to say League is a perfect game. But the truth is, it’s not, and like many games it will never be perfect and has its ups and downs. In all of the time I have put into League of Legends, I’ve never actually sat down and looked at what exactly makes it good and what makes it bad, until now.

Let's get right into the most important part of any game, content and gameplay, LoL may seem like a hard game to get into but in reality it’s actually very easy to get the hang of. LoL’s main game mode is on a large map called Summoner’s Rift that has 3 lanes (mid,top,and bot) each lane has 3 towers and 1 inhibitor which all protect the Nexus in the center of you and your opponents team. Two teams of five and minions, which spawn and walk down lanes to help you destroy buildings, have the goal of the destroying the enemy Nexus to win. Each person on the team has their own role, special ones being supports/adc’s which go bot, and junglers who move around in between lanes assisting teammates. Each role that you can have, insures that you feel like you are playing an important part of your team, missing one of those parts of your team due to someone leaving the game, is at many times, a sure loss.  In-game, killing things rewards you with gold which is used to buy items at the store in your base which make your character stronger. There is a leveling system which does not have a limit, and from levels 1-5 you get to choose from a pool of “starter” champions (people you play as). These champions abilities are not to hard to grasp and are fairly easy to use, while giving you a good idea of what most characters in the game will be like be it hard to kill champs, easy to kill with champs, fast champs, and champs who keep their other team member alive. The matchmaking system in the game tries to pair you up with people who are the same as you, be it new or a veteran at the game, most of the time it works but their are people who make new accounts to prey on people who are not as good as them. Out of game there are these things called Runes which boost your character up in-game and give you special traits and abilities to utilize during your matches. After matches you get Exp towards your next account level, which when you level up you get a champion capsule which will give you shards that can be used to unlock specific characters. Leveling can be a bit tedious at times as it takes quite a few levels to get just one level. If you don’t like the characters the shards are for, you can get rid of them for currency called BE (blue essence) which is the main currency of the game used to unlock champions. If you play the game enough you will come to realize that every match is different and every character is unique in their own way and has multiple ways of playing them. One problem with gameplay though is that sometimes some characters are a little too strong and can be a pain to go against, Riot (company who made the game) tries to weaken these champs that are too strong, sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t.

All free-to-play games need a source of income, this is almost always in the form of a in-game or out-of-game store. Most free-to-play games allow you to unfairly gain an advantage over other players, simply because you sunk more money into the game than they did. But League of Legends on the other hand doesn’t have a single purchase you can make that makes you stronger than other players, everything you can buy in the store is strictly cosmetic. Sometimes I feel as if Riot tries a little hard to monetize LoL instead of making meaningful changes to the game, but in the end the game continues to move forward because of them. That being said, I think the things you are able buy in store only being cosmetic, goes a long way to help making in-game an equal playing field for everybody.

Of course with League of Legends being as big as it is with millions of players, it comes with its own community, for better or worse (mostly worse). Out of everything about LoL I would have to say that the community aspect of this game can be pretty bad, of course there is a part of the community that is noob-friendly (person new at the game friendly), and filled with average and kind players. But there is another side that is equally big and makes itself known most of the time in-game, which most of the time is like every 2 matches, where you get one or more people on your team who are less than pleasant to be around. These people tend to belittle their teammates and use vulgar language against them, but sometimes these are just players like you who just had a string of bad matches and are in a bad mood taking it out on others. Back to the good of League’s community, who are generally nice people who care about the game and where it is going, sometimes giving feedback to Riot to help them improve the game, and those who help new players out or tell them what they could be doing better to improve at the game. These people are who keep League of Legends community going. For the most part if you run into the bad sort of league player you could ignore them and send a report their way so that Riot will take care of them, if you do this it won’t really affect your gameplay much.

Like I said earlier, no game can truly be perfect, League of Legends is no exception to this and you shouldn’t expect it to be. And having played this game for near 7 years now I might have come off a bit bias towards the game, hoping I didn’t as my goal was to inform you as to why you should and shouldn’t play league. With that I believe I have given my run-down of what makes league bad and good, and I hope what I have said helps you either decide to try the game out, or maybe say that it isn’t for you.