League of Legends

Similar to Dota 2, League of Legends boasts fast-paced gameplay, wide character selection, a well-designed map, and countless strategies and equipment to vanquish enemies with.

Typifying real-time strategy games, League of Legends involve a top-down mechanics wherein you control your character, or Champion as the gaming community calls it, alongside four teammates.

Basic Controls

Controls are very basic, with your mouse doing most of the navigating and targeting. The Q, W, E, and R keys are the default for your champion's main abilities. Item keys can be assigned to your numeric keypad, which is at one through six by default.

Champions with more than the usual four skills will require additional keys, usually the D and F keys, to play and are thus informally marked as hard characters to play and master.

Gold Farming

Last hits are a crucial factor for winning matches in MOBA games like League of Legends. In fact, it's one of the rudimentary skills you'll need to masterfully wield to play the game. Last hitting as many creeps in each spawning wave gives you more gold, which ultimately gives you more experience points as well as better equipment.

This is not to say that gold farming is the grail-worthy skill to possess for winning matches in League of Legends. While a huge factor, skill will ultimately dictate the victor.

Game Environment

League of Legends is far calmer than, say Dota 2. First blood, which is simply a cooler and more gamer-ish way of saying the first kill, may take around 10 minutes into the game. Nonetheless, you can expect it to be fast-paced and action-packed as Dota 2.

Players will or should cast their champion's abilities more often due to the game's emphasis on AoE abilities and low mana costs. Because of this distinguishing game factor, League of Legends players not only build pure right-click carries, but also ability-powered ones.

Final Notes

Being a free-to-play game, there's no reason not to try out League of Legends for yourself. The friendly and helpful gaming community surrounding LoL makes for a very easy transition, regardless if you're a newbie in RTS games or coming into it with a finite level of experience.