LoL: Wild Rift wins Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year award

League of Legends: Wild Rift, the mobile adaptation of Riot Games’ wildly successful MOBA League of Legends, is already winning acclaim from top-level outlets.

Apple is the latest tech titan to give Wild Rift its roses by acknowledging it as the best iPhone game available through the Apple App Store. Wild Rift has been a wildly successful adaptation of Riot Games’ central IP into the realm of mobile gaming.

Why is Wild Rift so popular?

There are many possible issues when it comes to moving the League of Legends onto a mobile device, from the complicated series of inputs that some champions require to the sheer length and complexity of a League of Legends match on Summoner’s Rift.

By mirroring the game to make it appear the same from both sides, reducing the size of the map, and being careful about which champions to import, Riot Games has done great work transferring the LoL experience onto a new platform with considerably different styles of input.

Riot has also been purposeful in making Wild Rift feel like its own game, with unique skins and events of its own rather than just mimicking its PC predecessor. Wild Rift doesn’t compete for the same audience as League of Legends, but it does bring a quick, condensed game of Summoner’s Rift to gamers in a wider variety of locales than League of Legends. It’s hard to bust out the laptop and play a full-length game while on transit, but a game of Wild Rift on a long bus ride is much more doable.

Wild Rift has been wildly successful, with tens of millions of downloads and even more millions raked in over that time. It’s not a surprise that it took home the big honours at Apple’s year-end round-up given its explosive arrival onto the mobile gaming scene earlier this year. Wild Rift is available on most mobile devices, including the Apple App Store for iOS.