League of Legends: Wild Rift

Wild Rift is not League of Legends squeezed onto a phone, it is League rebuilt for thumbs.

Riot’s rebuild, not Riot’s port

The map is mirrored, the abilities are retuned for a virtual stick and a ring of buttons, and matches are cut down so a game fits in a coffee break rather than an evening. It is aimed at two crowds who want different things: players hunting a portable version of a game they already speak fluently, and newcomers who want the genre without a keyboard full of hotkeys. Champions play recognisably like themselves, which is the hard part and the part Riot got right.

A short match on a mirrored map

A match opens with a champion pick, a rune page and a decision about where you are standing when the minions meet. From there it is the familiar shape done at speed: farm, trade, rotate to a dragon fight, take a turret, repeat until an inhibitor cracks. The touch layout does more work than it gets credit for, with aim assist on skillshots you can override by dragging the reticle manually. Champion models are rebuilt rather than downscaled, recall animations and skin effects arrive intact, and the audio mix is properly mastered, so a teamfight sounds like an event instead of a pile of overlapping clips.

The queue is the problem, not the game

Everything that goes wrong here goes wrong before the first minion spawns. Matchmaking hands you lobbies that are lopsided from the draft screen, and because a short match still has to be finished, one teammate who disconnects after a bad fight takes twenty minutes of your evening with them. There is no surrendering out of a game that was decided by the queue rather than by anyone playing. The thin populations on some servers make it worse, since the pool is whoever happens to be awake, and balance patches that leave a champion dominant for too long bend the drafts on top of that. Anyone who plays solo and takes ranked personally should think hard before starting.

Bring a friend or two into the lobby and most of that stops being your problem, and what remains is a very well made mobile MOBA. Alone, it is a coin toss with excellent graphics. Decide which of those you are signing up for.