Convergence: A League of Legends Story Review

This game was a welcome surprise, all my knowledge of League of Legends comes from that Arcane Netflix series and I didn't particularly care for that. However this was a pretty solid and an enjoyable casual metroidvania game.

Best way of describing Convergence a LoL story is that what if the Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy combined itself with a game like Guacamelee with some RPG elements here and there.

You can rewind time in the game by using pickups for the timewinder and it can be used in combat like PoP Sands Trilogy. You also have forced enemy encounters, platforming challenges and metroidvania moves that can help you out in combat like Guacamelee.

As a whole, if you are new to the metroidvania genre, this is about as a solid as a pick as it gets. The map screen tells you where your objectives are, you have no set save points to save your porgress, it autosaves frequently, bosses aren't the most challenging since there are health and timewinder pickups during fights, the main story isn't that long on top of that there is customizable difficulty that lets you tune enemy aggression and how many pickups you are allowed to carry.

Combat and platforming is pretty well done. You have a projectile disc to throw that you can reach flying enemies with, a dodge roll when timed right can be turned into a parry with a generally forgiving timing window, a dodge roll, a teleport, a circle that slows down enemies, an area of effect push ability and a dash late game.

All of this can be used organically during platforming like in Guacamelee and while the platforming never gets as challenging as something like Prince of Persia Lost Crown, it is very involving, like chaning together jumps(later double jumps), teleports, slowdown, wall runs, pushes, and later on dashes.

Convergence also does a good job at scratching that metroidvania itch of having levels being hard to traverse without certain upgrades but when you get that upgrade, the level becomes liberating to explore.

Story is also surprisingly decent, while not amazing and does require you to know about LoL lore, there are parts of it that resonated with me like how Ekko tried to convince his parents to see his way with the timewinder but he ultimately realizes they should choose for themselves. Future Ekko also gives me Dark Prince from PoP Two Thrones vibes in that he's more pragmatic in getting his goals done but younger Ekko and by extension regular Prince are more heroic and aren't willing to do morally questionable acts to get what they want.

The story is decent for this kind of game and especially since I said before, I'm not a big Arkane fan. However, the bosses of the game do seem to require you to know about LoL lore to understand their motivations, goals and personalities better which is a shame.

Overall, I had a solid time with the game, I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I was going to and it's up there with one of the best video game franchise spinoff games.