Eezay

A really great RPG experience. The universe is huge and the new additions of the HD version make the game a lot more interesting. The game is however, nothing for graphics junkies: Spacebound action looks okay, nothing special, its perfectly playable, but dont expect much. There are also a lot of text-based quests. They are really a great and at times hilarious read if you give them a chance, often they are also really tricky and demanding. The real strength of this game lies in its incredible strategic depth. You will have a great fun upgrading your equipment, searching for new weapons etc. If you are not a fan of this, you should reconsider, as you will spend a lot of time doing exactly that. The game also has a unique sense of humour, that however doesnt degrade the atmosphere at all (for example a quest where you have to deliver an old MS Windows Version to some planet). Combat is turn-based and in my opinion incredibly well done, as it allows for a lot of tactical possibilities, while being fast paced and satisfying aswell. Also the world is extremely open, you can choose from five races, you can be a pirate, a merchant, a fighter, whatever you want. You can visit any planet you want, you can look for secret equipment on unpopulated planets with research probes, you can explore black holes, which throw you into an oldschool arcade shooting style world, IMO great fun. You can defeat the different dominator races in a multitude of different ways, you can support the governments in many different ways. You can be a lone wolf, or you gather the strongest rangers you can find under your command. Theres just so many ways to play this game. The only two drawbacks that I can think of: The pirates are somewhat overpowered if left on normal pirate aggression. I recommend tuning them down a little in the advanced difficulty settings (thats right, the game allows you to adjust the difficulty of pretty much anything in it seperately). They are more like some super-well financed, organized cyber-rampage crew, rather than a bunch of outlaws. The second problem is that you now have to repair dominator weapons with nodes. This is on one hand really annoying, on the other hand somehow fair, because they are really, really strong. The game has a steep, but fair learning curve and a lot of replayability value. I highly recommend it.

I have been playing this game for nearly 3 years now, and I have to say that I don't like the state that the game is currently in and the way it is going. LoL had its best times in season 2, but since then continually got worse. I was deep into the pro scene and ranked at high platinum, so I do have some insight into the game. First off, this game is rather easy to get into if you compare it with other MOBA's. The reason why most MOBA players consider LoL rather "easy" is because the gameplay is very straightforward. It removed things like denying (killing your own creeps), destructible environment (trees), different shops etc. compared to its spiritual ancestor "DotA". Which is not a bad thing at first. The problem however is, that the developers removed every other demanding tactical element of the game one after one: -New champions and reworked older champions become one trick ponys; almost no champion allows different playstyles anymore because there is one way of building/playing him that makes all alternatives pointless. Players call this "meta" and Riot (the developers) more and more enforce said meta, which I consider a bad thing, since it strongly limits your playstyle, forcing you into roles, itembuilds, etc. -The itempool is extremely limited at the moment. Compared to DotA, the items in LoL lack some form of uniqueness. Over the past seasons, the developers continually removed items that were out of line or too weak. Newer items were useless in most cases. There are items that simply do nearly the same thing, with one item being superior however. There are items that just fit certain roles and types of champions too perfectly. All this leads to a poor diversity in itembuilds: You will see ADC's build the same items in 9/10 cases, you will see midlaners build one of two itemcombos 10/10, you will see toplaners get the same 2 items in 9/10 cases. Junglers and supports get enforced on specific "support" and "jungle" items, as even the developers call them. And at least 30% of the items you will almost never see built by any semi-experienced player. This combined leads to overall very thin item diversity between all players that played enough games to understand at least a bit of the meta, and increasingly thin champion diversity the higher the level of play is. As an example, within a typical week of LCS, the eSports league of the game, you will see (from a pool of 120 champions) around 60-70 of them being not picked at all, 30-40 of them being picked 1 or 2 times, and around 20 being picked or banned almost every game. This differs between roles aswell, midlane and jungle have the most "viable" champs, while there are at the moment only 3-4 viable toplaners and marksmen. This is because of serious issues in balancing. The game designers fail at balancing at a reasonable level, which is why you will see certain champions being catapulted up and down in strength on every patch, which happens way too often. Why spend money on a skin for a certain champion when he can become completely unviable or reworked within the next month? Also, the developers flattened out the champion power overall compared to "DotA". You wont see any gamebreaking abilites, extreme manacosts or 1vs5 hypercarrys when extremely fed. This is at first not a bad thing, as it leads to a higher need for teamwork, but it also has disadvantages: The game is sometimes too forgiving, and a vast portion of tactic in laning phase is removed, often reducing it to pure mechanical skill. Especially the current meta in pro play is extremely boring, super safe lanes that do nothing but farming gold from minion kills until the 20 min mark, and then the game breaking down in 2 or 3 importan teamfights. (for example the developers made it unworth to get objectives (epic monsters and towers) in early game, even when most of the community and pro players told them it was a bad idea) All this champion and item problems lead to the developers only being able to balance the game by numbers, which often results in said meta enforcing and poor diversity. Other aspects of the game: + paying model is fair and functional + runes add to strategy and diversity + the eSports scene is big and accesible + the game is especially fun with friends and has some different gamemodes for casual players +/- graphics look more and more stale, being mostly unupdated since 3 years, but the game runs very smooth as a result - the community is at least 50% immature flamers that all want you to get cancer on doing a mistake, report you if you play bad and all did your mom - the developers dont really care about the community, especially on the EUW shard. The forum has almost no developer communication at all. - the servers have frequent problems - more and more players consider the game to be on a downhill trend, also some retired pro players - event content is more and more often effortless - the banning system is poorly functional - the air client is outdated and unstable