League of Legends: Wild Rift Android and iOS benchmarks ^↺

Until now, anyone who wanted to play League of Legends had to use a PC or laptop; the MOBA is simply too complex for mobile screens. That was also the opinion of its developer, RIOT, which denied a request from its Chinese parent company Tencent for a mobile version of League a few years ago. Tencent persisted, however, and developed Arena of Valor (or "Honor of Kings" in China) together with the studio TiMi, which is now one of the biggest games in the world in terms of the amount of players.

As a result, RIOT Games was also convinced that a MOBA for smartphones could be successful and announced League of Legends: Wild Rift at the end of 2019. This somewhat simplified, but not because of that simple, version of LoL is now also playable in Europe. We took a look at the mobile game from RIOT.

On the whole, Wild Rift is played like its big brother on PC: You play 5 vs. 5; each player chooses one of (currently) 47 champions with individual abilities and then rushes to one of three lanes, where their own and opposing AI soldiers fight against each other.

Or you can venture into the jungle between the lanes and get powerful bonuses for your team by defeating monsters. Items that can be bought at the starting point make the individual champion even stronger. The goal is to destroy the enemy base, whereby you first have to get past defense towers and, of course, the enemy champions on each lane.

If you defeat an enemy champion, he will be out of the game for some time before being revived in the base. Naturally, if you are defeated, the same fate awaits you in return. As the game progresses, this death timer gets longer and longer, so that it becomes increasingly important to survive and take your opponent out of the game.

Each champion has one of six roles that are reflected in the abilities, health points, and other aspects: Assassin, Fighter, Mage, Marksman, Support or Tank. Needless to say, the team should be composed with as much balance as possible and counter the opponent as well as possible, so it definitely requires some prior knowledge and/or training to choose the right character.

The basics are explained quite extensively in several tutorials, and anyone who has played a MOBA before should be able to manage well.

Obviously, RIOT had to scale back the complexity of the original a bit to ensure that the game remained playable on mobile devices. But that doesn't mean that Wild Rift doesn't offer a lot of depth and possibilities to evolve as a player mechanically as well. But there are fewer items, and the character automatically chooses whom to attack with automatic attacks; you can only assign priority to champions, buildings or AI soldiers.

When it comes to the controls and the UI, it's evident that Arena of Valor has been used quite a bit as inspiration, since a lot of things work very similarly here. For example, you have a control element on the left for moving the champion and up to four abilities on the right, which you select with a tap and can also aim where applicable. You can unlock these abilities and make them more powerful as you gain experience.

The matches are not as long as in the PC version, but you should plan on spending 15-20 minutes on them.

League of Legends: Wild Rift is a free-to-play game, which means that it can be downloaded for free, just like the PC version. You can buy new champions for a premium currency called "Wild Cores", but you have to buy these using real-world money first. Or you can earn "Blue Particles", which can also be used to acquire champions, so that real money is not necessarily required.

Champions cost about 7-8 Euros (~$8-~$10) converted to real money, and some sets of champions and skins can cost up to 20 Euros (~$24). The prices are not cheap but also not unusual for MOBAs. To earn a champion, you have to grind for some time; you need 5,500 Blue Particles and only get 30 for a completed challenge. However, since there are quite a few ways to obtain Blue Particles, if you play regularly, you can enjoy a new champion from time to time without having to pay for it.

Skins, on the other hand, have to be bought with Wild Cores, or you can get them within time-limited events as a reward for special tasks.

The system requirements for League of Legends: Wild Rift have been kept as simple as possible to allow access to as many players as possible. In this way, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 from 2013, such as the one found in the Samsung Galaxy J5 2016 or the Motorola Moto G3, is sufficient. The game is playable on smartphones running Android 5 or iOS 9 and later, so theoretically starting with the iPhone 4s. However, the manufacturer recommends 2 GB of RAM and an Apple A9 processor, meaning that it should at least be an iPhone 6s or a first-generation iPhone SE.

Wild Rift does not run on Apple MacBooks with Apple M1 processors. At the moment, you can only use the emulated x86 version.

The game offers quite extensive graphics settings for a mobile game. Several presets offer quick customization options, or you can select the options manually. You can adjust everything ranging from the level of detail of the character models and the quality of the shadows and textures to the brightness of the fog during battles according to your own taste and to the smartphone's performance capacity.

Naturally, the app also detects automatically how much performance your smartphone offers and adjusts the settings automatically before the first game. So if you don't want to, you don't have to adjust anything.

Resolution can be set to three levels, but these are only described as "Low", "Medium", and "High".

In terms of graphics and sound design, there's nothing to complain about: The intros, the loading screens with videos of the champions, and the main menu's animated background all look very good. There are also many details to discover within the game; the UI is quite full, but the overview is still clear. In addition, there's epic music and massive sound effects.

There's even comprehensive voice acting in several languages, including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Japanese. This is anything but a given in a mobile game. For example, the tutorials are fully voiced, and the champions have one or two lines to say during battles.