had some issues with this page and rewrote it, sorry, come back later and it will be re-finished!)

as someone who has always been an exclusively console player, valorant and league were the biggest games that i pretty much couldn't play, everything else major got a console port of varying quality, but these two remained elusive and were two of the few elusive PC exclusives i actually wanted to play, while they're not the only good big PC games, some like WOW or DOTA2 are also exclusive, but those seem a little boring and i wouldn't want to play those, visually and vibes wise those just don't seem for me, but league and valo didn't have that issue, they had cool designs and they played super differently to anything i'd played on console, last year i caved and gave league a few month try on my roomates pc and very very recently i did the same with valorant, but on console with its ps5 port that got shown off at summer games fest, even for someone who has never touched either genre it ended up going pretty well!

i'll start with valorant since it was the more familiar one, it was on console now for a start and i was able to get a beta code pretty much instantly as soon as signups went up. while games like it existed in some forms before like the original xbox port of CS or ps3 CSGO (this game icks me out it just looks like a gambling sim) i'd never touched one since these games always had very boring aesthetics, boring military men with boring levels and boring vibes, stock even as many valve games tend to be and honestly you really couldn't pay me to play a valve game not called L4D, so this specific subgenre of shooters was always a mystery to me, valorant was the first one that ever really hit my radar, it had more interesting looking levels (like cool towns and beaches and snow levels!) and some really good character designs (killjoy and yoru and viper my beloveds) , you could play as a woman which the CS games still don't even seem to have as an option and the hero abilities made it seem much more varied and accessable, since you didn't have to rely as much on your gunshoots, you could even play as a support healer which sold me enough on its own, it finally made this genre look cool. i did briefly play a few rounds before this console port but with how unfamiliar i was with a mouse it never went well and i only made it a few rounds in, enough to unlock killjoy and viper but not enough to really get the game or its mechanics, it wasn't until this console port that i really give it the time to learn.

as far as the port goes it's very solid, i think, it transferred everything over seemingly well and it played well too! i have so little experiance with a keyboard and mouse that to me the game controlled a lot better since it was a little more familiar to me and i seemed to play a lot better too once i managed to unlock killjoy, which you can do pretty quickly since it gives you 2 free hero tokens in about an hour of playing. it's a lot more precise and intense a shooter than i've ever played, it's a nearly one shot one kill kind of game where firefights are over in a second and death means spending the whole rest of the round waiting, i'd seen something similar when i tried rainbow six siege once when a friend begged me to (i hated it) but this is even more swift in its time to kill than that game was and thankfully its rounds are significantly shorter to the point where it's not as eggregiously annoying to die early as in that game. i also do like how the currency system works, where you purchase weapons and abilities at the start of the round and doing better will give you more and as such better guns and items or you can just steal them from dead enemies too. i mostly stuck with the snipers and the rifles, the snipers i just liked that it was an instakill and it let me stay out of the fight a little more, which fit with killjoy (a cool techy german engineer that gave me d.va vibes for some reason, d.va was my main during prime overwatch for years, i even owned every skin for her) being my main since i could set myself up a perch to stay in at the points i guarded, never worked well but it felt like a fun time anyway and it did help give me much better map sense since her alarmbot and turret alert you to people, i also used a lot of viper (an evil looking american chemist who was just, she's a lot okay, i have a type) with her area control that came in super handy, but i didn't do as well with her. i did want to play some yoru and iso because twinky cyberpunky boys are hot and cool and the best but the game feels very stingy with its credits so i didnt manage to get enough to unlock them, which sucks. i also preffered the swiftplay mode overall too, the longer 15 round mode just felt like too much, over half an hour games just don't feel good, especially when you spend half of that time dead and watching your teamates play, so that i am really iffy on, especially when you get a quitter or an afk player which happened to me a *lot*. there is one way to fix this though, that's by playing the team deathmatch or deathmatch modes, but these aren't super ideal, it removes the economy so weapons are unlocked as the match goes on in tiers and it's also unbalanced in a way that makes it so many defence characters aren't really useful at all in it, which sucks since my main is one! but it's there as an option.

the maps are all solid too, you play around a few objective zones, usually 2 or 3, with one team planting a spike thingy and the other defending the sites, you get either 5 or 15 rounds depending on the mode and all the maps are pretty varied, some even have cool gimmicks like hidden side routes, doors or teleports! it's not as interactive as something like black ops 1 or a power stone map but it's something above what you would see in a lot of its ilk and it helps to differenciate some maps a lot! map gimmicks are a thing i love. the vibes ingame aren't as good as league though, i guess because it has to stick to that more ridged shooter style, the music isn't as good and it doesn't quite have all the cool kpop collabs and stuff like league does, but i imagine it'll get there, it already has some of the really cool cinematic trailers that league does. that's really all there is to it, it's very hardcore and i wasn't good at it, but i'd go back here and there since i do enjoy the character designs a lot, though with that the grind to unlock them does seem like it'd be a bit much to bear and this style of shooter just isn't something i could see myself sticking with for a long time, i prefer it to be more arcady like a timesplitters ,a battleborn, exoprimal or an overwatch! but i can see the appeal for sure, i'm glad i gave it a try to see what this lil subgenre of shooters had to offer for me, don't expect me to play something like CS any time soon though, if this couldn't keep my attention then a valve game has a negative chance to (i hate valve <3 )

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league was also a neat novelty to me, this was pretty much my first real mouse and keyboard game, i'd played some PC games before it sure, some BL vns and otome, saya no uta, some zoo tycoon as a kid using a laptop trackpad, a tiny bit of FF11 once for a few hours with a controller and i'd played recettear also with a controller once but i'd never sat down and used a full KB&M before until this and i can't say i was all that into it, the keyboard to me just feels like worse, more confusing controller buttons but i do like the mouse at least for these kinds of games, i'm less sure on it for shooters though, with valorant it felt like i couldn't aim well at all and keeping it steady was an issue for me, but this was also basically my first time using one so its really honestly on me, but in league it worked a lot better and i can even imagine this being better than thumbsticks, though i do think controller buttons would work better than a keyboard, i'm sure for some games the amount of buttons on a keyboard work better but here it just felt like too much for me, but again, i am the most beginner of beginners. i'd also never played a real moba before, honestly up until i played this i wasn't even sure what one was, i'd played battleborn before which is a moba of sorts, a really good one at that that i would love to talk about sometime, but it wasn't the same as a more traditonal moba, i assumed it was an RTS with more action and that's kind of what it is? just without the S but, it's all about the action and it's really fun! it probably sounds silly to see someone act like this is some new cool thing since the genre and league itself is so big in the industry, especially on PC and mobile but to me this really is new, it's not something i've ever played before. before i talk about the gameplay though i do want to mention the style, because god, the style, there's so many cool characters here, there's so many cool skins and designs and the vibes are amazing, it's easy to see even without playing just how cool it all can be and there's a ton of variety in styles, from cute critters and more trad western fantasy stuff to some really JRPG as heck designs, it leans into a lot of different design styles and subcultures and it's what really drew me to it first.

the way it's different from an RTS is by not having you directly control the units, the minions spawn automatically and you just need to help make sure they get to the enemy towers, there's 3 lanes, each of which plays differently with different characters being better suited for them as well as a jungle area inbetween them where a player will farm enemies for team buffs, and 3 towers per team in each and you need to destroy all 3 to get to the base and get their crystal (plus another few towers there as well),you do this by controlling a hero and killing minions and enemies for coins that you use to buy new equipment back at the spawn point and there's a lot of depth there, enough that you do feel that even one right item buy can turn a whole match, even if it doesn't always work that way, it's both better and worse for making you feel defeated, the long matches at about half an hour do make it so when you do super badly it can feel like a massive waste but the rush of trying to come back does make up for a lot. there's dozens of characters to choose from all told and they all seem to play pretty differently, i stuck with gwen mostly but i played some others like akali and vi and they all felt super different to play, gwen (a cool doll girl with a huge pair of scissors as her weapon) for example had an attack that she could build up to that had stacks depending on how many times you auto-attacked your enemy, plus a speed buff mode initiated by a dash and she had a shielded area that she could spawn that she couldnt be attacked in, she takes a little bit to get going but when she does she really does, she can shred enemies and towers with her main scissor attack and if you pick the buff that gives you 50% attack speed, very little can stand up to you. I also played briar (a cool vampire who carries around a pair of stock's that shes stuck in) who was a berserker focused on the jungle lane. her whole thing is rushing enemies with the berserker mode and hoping for the best. there's akali, who's a cool ninja girl focused on ranged knives and a smokescreen, though i mostly use the K/DA skin on her so she's just a cool kpop murdergirl to me. other characters i used were sett, a wrestler catboy focused on building stacks from the damage he takes, azreal (heartsteel azreal is so perfect) who's a twinky adventurer who uses ranged attacks mostly and vi who is a cool punky pink haired brawler focused on damage over time with her auto attack! i didn't even get every character i want to try, so this'll change over time for me, but i love every character I've played so far, but i do have to say that gwen is the favourite, i even bought a plushie of her. the main way to play this is the PC but that isn't the only way, though unlike valorants cool console port, this one just has a mobile port that I've been told isn't great, though i didn't touch it. though weirdly there's only one map here and a few modes, which do have their own maps, but the main one only has the one, sure it's a great map and it does change over time, but i can imagine it getting stale.

even outside of the game there's a ton of cool things to engage with, like spinoffs and other games, there's a cool JRPG style rpg by the people who made the super amazing "battle chasers nightwar" called "ruined king" and it's very similar to that game with a league skin, there's an upcoming fighting game that looks very cool, metroidvanias, 3D platformers and roguelikes, you can play tons here without even touching the main game, there's even things like virtual bands with K/DA and heartsteel! K/DA is the big one and the most popular one and they have some seriously good songs, this is actually what got me into the game to begin with, i'd been listening to pop/stars for years before i ever touched the game! heartsteel is much newer and much twinkier and they only have one song right now, but it's a great song and their style is so good, heartsteel asreal is my second favourite skin (K/DA akali being my favourite), though this band has some issues, mainly with the random buff beard guy, he's so out of place and he kills the vibe. there are official kpop collabs too though, like a newjeans song released last year for one of the esports events! there's so much more too, like the tv series arcane that was one of the best received animated series in years even outside of the games fandom (though i haven't seen it, i will soon!) there's also the huge esports scene that's difficult not to mention, so there, i mentioned it, i have no real opinion on it, but it's there and its big enough to even be shown in cinema's where i live. there's so much here to get into that i can really reccomend giving both a try in some form, that RPG especially owns, the scene has its issues like with very extreme and infamous toxicity, some downright disgusting monitisation and there have been some issues with it's womens esports league that make me a little weary of it, but i was only able to see those things when looking for them, i had very few bad experiances otherwise, you can even just play league with bots or enjoy the offline modes if you want, i think there's a lot of cool things here and they are worth at least giving a try to see how you feel about them.