Championship of Well Knowns!

A game I have been playing a lot of recently is a brilliant Free to play DOTA-esque game called League of Legends.

I have invested a lot of time and some money into it and have finally found the play style that suits me best.

Bearing in mind that I am still only in the beginner bracket and haven't yet gone for any more competitive games (mainly because the community is very competitive and hard to play with) I have gained a large number of different champions to play with. Each with their own unique play style and item selections.
However I have always been a bit of an oddball when it comes to item selections and have been trying out different sets than what would be the most common, most of which work quite well but still need a little bit of balancing.

One major necessity of LOL is communication, you need to know what enemies are where, letting everyone know you are leaving a lane, call for help, etc.

It is a nice skill based, strategy game that is a nice mix of fast and slow gameplay.
You need to be able to react quickly to different circumstances and be able to keep an eye out for everything that is going on.
You can also take your time for the majority of the game as you don't feel any major pressure to get anywhere or finish off any objectives.
One of the main problems with the game is that it is very time-consuming as each game can (depending on how good the team is) last up to an hour.

There is a huge debate between two communities, League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. Both believing their own game is the best. The truth is they are exactly the same (with a few small differences) In my opinion I would rather play LOL as you have to earn the champions as you play, it gives me a reason to keep playing the game, whereas if I bought HON (getting access to all the heroes etc straight away) I would probably play for a few weeks and never touch it again...

I really enjoy this game and as it is constantly updating I feel that there is always something to play towards, being a collector I want to own all the Champions as some stage...

It is a fantastic game and as it is free is worth at least a trial. However if you would rather pay then you can buy Heroes of Newerth which is pretty much the same game.

Not so twirly after all...

Steam recently released a bunch of Free To Play games as well as making Team Fortress 2 Free To Play.

One of the games I tried out was Spiral Knights a very simple and fun hack and slash game.

The premise of the game is that you are a group of Knights called Spiral Knights and your spaceship has crash landed on an alien planet. It is up to you to venture into the depths of the planet and find minerals and materials in order to power your ship and be able to build supplies.

The game is very very simplistic, not to say that is not actually challenging. There are (as far as I have seen) no skills or talents to learn. Instead you have a large range of "levelled" equipment that you can buy or craft, all of which perform the same function but with slightly different special abilities (such as resistance to fire or higher damage). The equipment has a star rating between zero and five, zero being your starter gear and five being the recipes you gain at the lowest levels.

You have the choice of three weapons; a Sword, a Gun and a Bomb. There are also three pieces of armour you can use; Chest, Helmet and Shield. Using any combination of these three weapons you can have a variety of styles with which to fight your way through the levels.

The deeper you travel in the world the tougher the levels and enemies get. You will receive less beneficial drops and it will cost you more energy to travel downwards but the rewards, both monetary and recipe-wise, get better.

The simplicity of the game as well as it being completely Free To Play, immediately makes it worthwhile. I can see myself playing this game for a long time to come.

Magical in a runeish sorta way...

My recent forays into indie/cheap games has lead me to a lovely replacement for a terrible(y-addictive) game by the name of WoW.

Runes of Magic is a free to play, micro transaction, MMO. It is very similar to wow (as any MMO tends to be) But it is created completely from scratch and does not try to be like wow.

You start off as either a human or an elf (new races will get added with each new expansion they decide to release) and can choose a selection of classes.

These classes can be a very crucial choice as later on in the game you can choose a second class that you want to spec into. You will get specific skills depending on the class combination as well as the general skills of each class. This i think is a very very cool way of making classes unique. You could be a warrior/priest and be able to tank and heal yourself or a mage/warrior and be able to deal immense damage AS WELL as getting the unique class combination skills.

I decided to play as a Rogue/Scout as it allows me to do close combat stealthy style and very good long range attacks and the two classes both rely on one stat as the primary.

As you continue on into the game you find you need to learn professions such as mining, woodcutting and herbology.
You can learn every profession in the game but you can only max out a limited amount of them. Each profession will give you specific benefits at higher levels but you have to choose carefully which benefits you really want before you level them up.

I haven't played enough yet to get to the higher levels but i think i might possibly go with leather working (as i can wear leather) and some sort of magic oriented profession such as alchemy to offset being a purely physical class.

There are some really neat features in the game such as the dual-class system, pvp dungeons, pure solo play, temporary mount rewards very early (as soon as you complete the easy tutorial), a teleport system from pretty much any location but for me the most important feature is the fact that there are no queues. There are over 4 million players registered on the game (and rising) and they decided to provide enough free places for everyone to join without having to queue. This in itself is a fantastic reason to play as most server based games will not give you the instant join ability.

Aside from all this the game does have a few issues, quests can be a bit tedious and ask for a few too many items to be collected etc, some of the later game stuff is apparently not working correctly (yet), and there isn't any way (as far as ive found) to find a specific trainer/location/etc (such as in wow asking the town guards). These are all minor issues and so far can be worked around by the smallest amount of work. (I have suggested implementations on the forums that might help but who knows if they'll be taken into account)

However overall i have had no issues with this game (so far) and have found it very enjoyable, even playing by myself, there are alot of things to do and places to see (and more coming all the time), Having a few friends to play along with would make the experience even better as far as i can see.

I give this game 4 and a half dead Darryl's out of 5! (and sure its free so ya aint gonna lose out anything by trying it!)