Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is the most popular 5v5 fast paced MOBA that I’ve obsessed over for such a long time. It probably falls into my top 10 most played games. With that said, it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. I was trying to climb ranks and reach top 100 and in the process of doing that, I spent all of my free time playing ranked.
Unfortunately, against my extensive efforts, as a solo player, the highest I got was Legend I. Not to brag or anything but that was a top 5% percent in the whole world. And with all that, for some reason I’ve never done a review for it. So, here it is.
Gameplay
If you aren’t familiar with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, it’s a mobile version of League of Legends but a little bit less complicated in my opinion. With it being a mobile game, the map is considerably smaller than in LOL. It means getting across the map is relatively simpler. But don’t worry, there are still players who decide that camping one lane the whole match is the best strategy. Also it means the action starts way sooner than in any MOBA. Since we’re talking about lanes, it has the standard top, mid, bot and jungle. The objective still remains the same — destroy opponents’ nexus.
The game offers a huge array of characters to pick from, over 130 of them. Depending on your playstyle or preferred lane, there’s something for everyone. Granted, the difficulty isn’t the same for each character.
There’s a character called Fanny and I found her gameplay extremely cool but no matter what I tried, I couldn’t play her properly. She’s like a ninja/assassin type that throws ropes with a hook(?) and can travel faster across the map but also she can utilize that mechanic to sort of bounce between two walls while dealing damage and evading attacks. If you look it up on Youtube, you’ll see what I mean.
Since there’s over 130 characters, getting all of them as F2P takes a considerable time but it’s not impossible. The developers have provided free means to earn them and occasionally they’ll give out some as a reward.
As for the equipment, it’s separated into 6 categories: attack, magic, defense, movement, jungling, and roaming. Every character can equip 6 items in total. Here’s what I love about it the most — you can purchase equipment and upgrades for it anywhere on the map as soon as you gather necessary gold for it. I absolutely love this feature. It doesn’t make you miss waves, it speeds up progress and you don’t have to wait 15 minutes for action to start. You can also sell from anywhere, though after 15 seconds, you get only 60% of gold back.
Just like every other MOBA, selling skins is their main source of income. Besides making their own unique and cool looking skins they’re also known to do collabs. They’ve partnered with Naruto, JJK, Hunter x Hunter, Star Wars, Transformers, Kung Fu Panda, Ducati, and a few others. If you know me, I prefer to stay on the side of F2P players, especially when it comes to skins. Unfortunately, your boy failed during the Transformers campaign and ended up buying one of those skins.
There’s another cool feature in the game. Mobile Legends has an in-built streaming system where you can stream your matches to other people. And if you’re “popular” enough, people can give you gifts aka diamonds that you can use to buy characters and all of the skins. Unfortunately, you can’t exchange those diamonds for real money but it would be cool if we could, it would make this game 100 times better.
Lastly, let’s talk about ranked and my infamous climb. They’ve split it into 7 main tiers: Warrior, Elite, Master, Grandmaster, Epic, Legend, and Mythic. The first 4 tiers, there’s not much to say. Just pick your main character, farm, get gear, focus on objectives and you’ll be able to 1v5 without any issues.
As for the Epic, this is where most of the playerbase gets stuck. Things get more serious but people continue to play only for themselves and expect to win that way. This is where you’ll notice that it matters that you cooperate but also it matters what you pick. As long as you don’t overextend and help your teammates on a regular basis, you’ll get out of Epic in no time.
The Legends tier is where things got really serious for me. At this point you really need to pay attention to all of the details like team composition, wave management, map awareness, and gank opportunities. Even if you do all those things right, it doesn’t guarantee you a win.
Teammates could decide to troll or just make a bunch of mistakes that snowball into mess. And sometimes the enemy is just better. What happened to me was that I’ve reached the top of Legend tier and I was just a couple of matches away from advancing and the game kept pairing me with trolls. Which to this day I don’t understand. Why would you decide to troll even before the match starts. My mind can’t comprehend that. If someone knows, please explain.
It wasn’t just one or two matches, it proceeded to happen all week, which ultimately led to me giving up on the game altogether. I was so close to my goal and while I do feel bad for letting other humans (if you can call them that) get the best of me, giving up was the best choice for my mental health. Which will take precedence over any video game.
Graphics
I’ve played Mobile Legends: Bang Bang from the start, back when it had a humble beginning. The overall design of characters, skills, map, and other stuff was average at best. So when I say that they’ve made an enormous improvement since then, I know what I’m talking about. The graphics now are on another level. The character design and the skins for them are cool. And animations are up to today’s standards. During the gameplay everything is clean and easy to use. The only part that is extremely cluttered is the home screen. Good luck finding what you need there. Also with such an advanced game comes another problem — battery drainage is faster than usual. That’s sort of common with most mobile games nowadays. It helps to have a good charger with a long cable.
Conclusion
I’ve tested all of the MOBA available on Playstore and Mobile Legends is by far the best one. The player base is very active, the game feels optimized, developers are constantly pushing new updates, and it can be very competitive if you’re looking for something like that but also playing as a casual player is an option.
I’ve been obsessed with this game for a good period of time, but then I quit. Since then, I mostly went back for casual matches and I haven’t touched ranked mode at all. As of late I would be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in trying pushing rank. If I were to do that, I would stream my whole journey to Mythic on my Youtube channel. So make sure to give it a follow and stay tuned for what can only be described as a complete train wreck. Also, it wouldn’t hurt you to join my discord…
