League of Legends MOBA - A review

What really makes the graphical quality of League of Legends is the high quality art and stylized art style. The game does not use any intense, high end graphical features but the game still manages to look quite good. The decision to focus on quality of art rather than high performance graphics is a smart one since the game is all about competetive Player vs. Player action. Throughout this review you will see screenshots and character art that demonstrates the impressive art quality in LoL.

The sound effects are a minor part of the game, but they do add to the overall experience and League of Legends strategy. Many players tend to play with the sound effects off completely or turned very low in order to hear ventrillo / teamspeak communication with their team. There is, however, an occasional benefit to hearing combat sound effects from beyond the fog of war, inside brush, or on the other side of a wall. For that reason, it is recommended that players at least keep the sound on low.

The voice acting is really the best sound aspect of the game. Most characters are very well done in this department and have a nice variety of comments, jokes (type: /joke), taunts (type: /taunt), etc. that they use while you issue commands.

This is really the only serious weak point of League of Legends. The user interface design lacks many features that one would think were industry standard from 10+ years ago. The most glaring example of this is the cap on maximum zoom out. At maximum zoom out you cannot even see your own character's visual radius on screen. This forces you to play with the camera unlocked in order to have any idea what is going on around you. The result of this is that while running around the map, you have to constantly slide your mouse cursor off the edge of the screen to slide it in a certain direction. This is a completely unnecessary and growingly uncomfortable way to have to operate a user interface.

There have been official polls on the issue of zoom and around 90% of players want to be able to zoom out further. The problem has become so bad that the player's community has developed numerous hacks, config file edits, and even memory edits in ordet to increase the max zoom. Instead of listening to what the players want, Riot has chosen to ban people who modify their UI for more zoom. This is a very unusual reaction because in almost all other areas of community management and customer service Riot performs very well.

It would appear that this is an issue where the developers have chosen to dig in their heels and be a bit stubborn. Hopefully they will see the error of their ways here and eventually increase the max zoom. If they made this one change to the UI, I would change this rating from a 1 to a 4. The only other UI weakness would be an inability to move around your UI elements.

To someone who has not played LoL, it may seem that I am obsessing over this one issue. But I really cannot overstate how dramatically and negatively the lack of a better zoom out affects the user interface and ability to operate the game. The more you play the game, the worse this problem gets. That is one of the many reasons why I consider it such a glaring problem. It starts off bad, and gets worse right when you start to love the rest of the game.