Review
Dota 2
A genuine strategic masterwork and the most generous free-to-play deal in existence. It will take a year of your life to be bad at it.
No. 5 in The Noteworthy 50 · MOBA
League of Legends
Seventeen years on, still the deepest strategy game with a controller in your hand — and still the worst place to be a beginner.
It is easy to be cynical about League after seventeen years, and then you watch a professional game go forty-five minutes on a single warded bush and remember that no other multiplayer game has this much strategy in it. Five players, three lanes, a jungle, an economy, a map of objectives that pull in opposite directions, and a hundred and seventy champions whose interactions produce a genuinely unsolved problem space. Riot has kept it unsolved deliberately, and that is an achievement.
The moment-to-moment is more demanding than its top-down camera suggests. Last-hitting under tower, wave management, tracking an enemy jungler by inference, the fifteen seconds before a dragon spawn where four people rotate on instinct — this is a game about information and tempo, and mechanical skill is only the entry fee.
The community problem
Every honest review of League has to be a review of its players. The design creates the conditions: a 30-plus minute match with no surrender until sixteen minutes, five people whose performance is publicly legible in real time, and a defeat that is almost always attributable to someone. That is a machine for producing blame. Riot has thrown a decade of engineering at it — behaviour scoring, chat restrictions, honour systems, machine-learning detection — and has moved the numbers without changing the culture. Playing solo queue in a language you speak is a materially worse experience than playing muted.
Getting in now
The champion count that makes the game deep also makes it near-impenetrable. A new player must learn what a hundred and seventy characters do to them before they can learn what their own does. Riot's answer has been rotating free pools and a smoother tutorial, neither of which addresses the actual problem. The honest advice is unchanged from a decade ago: pick two champions, play only those, mute the chat by default, and find four people to queue with. Do that and you have one of the great games. Do anything else and you have a bad evening.
Worth noting that the wider ecosystem is now a real argument for buying in: Teamfight Tactics, the Wild Rift mobile version and the studio's television output have turned this into a universe rather than a client. But the client is still where the best of it lives.
What works
- 170+ champions with genuinely distinct mechanical identities
- Strategic depth that rewards a decade of study and still surprises pros
- Free to play with no power behind the paywall, honoured since 2009
- Riot's production values — patches, cinematics, Worlds — are best in class
What doesn't
- Toxicity is structural, not incidental, and Riot has never solved it
- A 30-minute loss you cannot leave is a uniquely punishing failure state
- The champion roster is now a genuine barrier to entry on its own
- Balance churn means your main can be patched into irrelevance
The Catch — what it will cost you
Nothing sold affects power, and that promise has held for seventeen years. But the psychological monetisation is sophisticated: limited skin lines, gacha-style chromas and prestige tiers, and a hextech chest economy that was quietly tightened in 2025 to the loud displeasure of long-time players. Cosmetic does not mean costless.
Who it's for: Players with a friend group to queue with and the patience for a year-long learning curve.
If you like this
Review
Honor of Kings
A superbly engineered mobile MOBA that most Western players have never tried and probably should.
Review
Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
Lighter and less polished than its rivals, but its accessibility and regional reach are genuine achievements.