Loadout:
A great little 3rd person arena shooter which lets you customize and create some pretty insane (and surprisingly well balanced) weapons / loadouts by combining different gun parts (such as magazines, stocks, bodies, barrels and damage types) with each part affecting how the end-weapon behaves. You can have everything from boring old machine guns to fire beams, big spiked metal ball launchers and healing chain-rocket launchers. Gameplay is tight, fast and frantic, remeniscent of UT or Quake (except 3rd person) and everything is spiced up by some visual humor, like being able to blow off someone's head, leaving behind a brain and a pair of eyeballs (which is not fatal), replacing the CTF flag with a pair of underpants and, of course, twerking. All the slapstic is helped by some of the best character animations I've seen in a game.
Business model is quite good, everything related to gameplay is unlockable (at a pretty good rate) with in-game currency, while visual customization and currency rate boosts can be purchased with real money. While I haven't played that much, I never felt the need to spend any money on the game in order to enjoy it. You get enough in-game currency after the first few games to gain access to a pretty wide variety of parts, and I never once felt that another player might have an unfair advantage over me, or a clearly stronger weapon. (I've heard some players complaining that the beam weapons are somewhat OP, but if that's the case, they are actually quite cheap to unlock)
League of Legends:
I've been playing League for years. I have not spent a dime on unlocking characters, or runes, or anything related to gameplay, because I never felt the need to do so (though I did buy a bunch of skins). Sure, if you add up the real money cost of unlocking all the champions, all the runes, all the rune pages and so on you'd get to some insane numbers (in the thousands of dollars) but there IS NO POINT. I'm in the top 10-12% of players and I've only got about 70% of the champions unlocked (I have zero interest or reason to unlock the rest), and of those I only ever play maybe half (and I'm including champs I play once in a blue moon). Realistically, I don't even need that many to be competitive at my level, the only thing holding me back is my own skill.
On the outside, League might appear like a horrible grind that forces you to spend real money to "keep up" with the established player base, but in reality it's far from it. The weekly free champion rotation, the nature of the game's balance and the significant learning curve make it so that owning everything is pointless and possibly even detrimental to new players.
Sure, it's no DOTA2, where you get everything for free, but then again Riot has not yet discovered the alchemy of transforming hats into gold.
Path of Exile:
A surprisingly good Diablo clone, with some clever mechanics and systems in place and one of the best f2p models out there: everything is free and available from the start, no currency, no unlocks. The only things you can spend money on are purely cosmetic.
A great little 3rd person arena shooter which lets you customize and create some pretty insane (and surprisingly well balanced) weapons / loadouts by combining different gun parts (such as magazines, stocks, bodies, barrels and damage types) with each part affecting how the end-weapon behaves. You can have everything from boring old machine guns to fire beams, big spiked metal ball launchers and healing chain-rocket launchers. Gameplay is tight, fast and frantic, remeniscent of UT or Quake (except 3rd person) and everything is spiced up by some visual humor, like being able to blow off someone's head, leaving behind a brain and a pair of eyeballs (which is not fatal), replacing the CTF flag with a pair of underpants and, of course, twerking. All the slapstic is helped by some of the best character animations I've seen in a game.
Business model is quite good, everything related to gameplay is unlockable (at a pretty good rate) with in-game currency, while visual customization and currency rate boosts can be purchased with real money. While I haven't played that much, I never felt the need to spend any money on the game in order to enjoy it. You get enough in-game currency after the first few games to gain access to a pretty wide variety of parts, and I never once felt that another player might have an unfair advantage over me, or a clearly stronger weapon. (I've heard some players complaining that the beam weapons are somewhat OP, but if that's the case, they are actually quite cheap to unlock)
League of Legends:
I've been playing League for years. I have not spent a dime on unlocking characters, or runes, or anything related to gameplay, because I never felt the need to do so (though I did buy a bunch of skins). Sure, if you add up the real money cost of unlocking all the champions, all the runes, all the rune pages and so on you'd get to some insane numbers (in the thousands of dollars) but there IS NO POINT. I'm in the top 10-12% of players and I've only got about 70% of the champions unlocked (I have zero interest or reason to unlock the rest), and of those I only ever play maybe half (and I'm including champs I play once in a blue moon). Realistically, I don't even need that many to be competitive at my level, the only thing holding me back is my own skill.
On the outside, League might appear like a horrible grind that forces you to spend real money to "keep up" with the established player base, but in reality it's far from it. The weekly free champion rotation, the nature of the game's balance and the significant learning curve make it so that owning everything is pointless and possibly even detrimental to new players.
Sure, it's no DOTA2, where you get everything for free, but then again Riot has not yet discovered the alchemy of transforming hats into gold.
Path of Exile:
A surprisingly good Diablo clone, with some clever mechanics and systems in place and one of the best f2p models out there: everything is free and available from the start, no currency, no unlocks. The only things you can spend money on are purely cosmetic.