First impressions: The new Akali is more fun, engaging, and satisfying to play—but at a cost

Riot’s gone on a roll with its major updates to League of Legends’ most outdated champions. Over the past year or so, the updates to Warwick, Galio, Urgot, Evelynn, Swain, and more have all been a hit. Depending on who you talk to, the Aatrox update wasn’t bad, either.

Today, after a bumbled YouTube upload resulting in a high-profile leak, Riot officially revealed Akali’s brand new look and abilities.

Our first impression, after looking through all of the abilities and the mechanics, is that the new Akali is truly badass. Her identity as a stealthy ninja is fully realized with this new iteration of her kit, but it comes with a price. After all, she looks like she’s straight out of an anime, and to pull off that level of flashiness, Riot had to sacrifice the simplicity of her old kit.

For Akali alone, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Her playstyle was stale, and she didn’t really feel like a ninja at all—she was just a person that dashed at you, whacked you with her blades, and deleted your health bar. Apart from her very strangely-animated shroud, nothing in her kit said, “ninja.”

She certainly doesn’t have that problem anymore. She looks like a blast to play. She’s high-speed, and from what we can tell, devilishly complicated. But when those complex combos are weaved together in the right way, like in her gameplay trailer, it looks divine.

The main problem here is a larger one, and transcends just Akali’s update. One of the big problems frequently mentioned on both the game’s Reddit community and the official League forums is the dwindling simplicity of its champions. When all the older champions, who were previously the only simple ones to play, have been reworked into these complicated, high-skill monsters, what’s left for the new players and those in the lower ranks?

Between Akali, Evelynn, Warwick, and even the old Aatrox and Swain, the past year has turned quite a few simple, easy-to-play champions into far more complex projects for the sake of improving their identity and satisfaction. While the satisfaction factor skyrocketed, the simplicity was dropped off a cliff. The two main exceptions are Galio, who’s still pretty simple post-rework, and Urgot, who might not be that simple now but was a dumpster fire beforehand, so no one cares.

So the big question is this: Can a champion’s identity and fun-factor be redone without sacrificing simplicity? We hope so, or the game will end up with far fewer simple champions for noobies than there are Zed-level champions in the game. It seems that almost every single newer champion, like Pyke, Zoe, Kayn, and Kai’Sa, will be a complex machine, too, so we’re left with the oldies.

We still have champions like Garen, Annie, Cho’Gath, Morgana, and Ashe to fall back on when we need to pick up a champion that doesn’t require much brainpower to play. But if the current trend continues, they’ll soon be largely outnumbered—more than they already are.

All in all, Akali looks like a win, but we hope Riot will experiment with simpler designs when redoing a few future champions. The perfect candidate, to us, would be the upcoming Nunu update, but Riot hasn’t revealed much information on that front just yet.