If you are any kind of anime fan and you haven’t heard of Solo Leveling, you’ve been living under a rock. There are plenty of strong opinions about the series on both sides ranging from abject loathing to intense fandom and everywhere in between. With its recent win over Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and The Apothecary Diaries in the Crunchyroll Awards, there’s been a lot of discussion over whether Solo Leveling is as good as people say it is or not but that hasn’t slowed the fandom at all.
Instead, we’ve had English translations of the Korean webnovel in print, an English manhwa released, and a top tier dubbed anime of the first two seasons. The sudden skyrocketing popularity of the series has inevitably spawned a video game and Solo Leveling: Arise from publisher Netmarble was released last year for Android and Apple. This is a free-to-play microtransaction or gacha game that has some decent action and a lot of complexity. It’s a pretty resource intensive game with a large download however and doesn’t run great on every phone. We tried it a while back on a Samsung S24+ and it was a bit of a struggle to play with a lot of extra installs and long load times but the core experience was interesting.
For the few of you that haven’t heard of it, Solo Leveling is the story of Sung Jinwoo, a “hunter” who hunts monsters that come through interdimensional gates that started appearing all over the world which lead to dungeons. If the monsters aren’t defeated, the monsters break out and ravage our planet. Hunters all awakened and gained extraordinary powers but Jinwoo is the weakest hunter that has ever awakened. In a strange twist of fate, he ends up gaining almost unlimited power and is the only hunter that can level up, due to an interface he’s given that essentially turns the real world into a video game. While this isn’t a true isekai, it’s still awfully close to one but it’s an extremely well-drawn power fantasy regardless.
Now Netmarble has adapted Solo Leveling: Arise for consoles and PC with the release of Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE for the PC and Xbox. The phone game is now a premium release that is no longer free to play. Instead, this $40 iteration of Solo Leveling: Arise has some new material and additions that may tempt you. In addition to the same game that was available on mobile, new 3D cutscenes have been added to the game and online co-op gameplay is available for up to four players so you can defeat stronger enemies with assistance from friends or other players.
The structure of the game is a bit chaotic as this was originally designed to be a gacha game. All the transactions have been removed but the structure has remained largely intact. After the intro gameplay sequences that teach you how the control systems work and run you through an abridged version of the anime/webtoon/webnovel storyline, you’ll enter into a central hunter’s hub area where the rest of the game is staged from. From here, you can start playing through the main adventure as well as visiting the world map where you can choose a variety of missions to level up Sung Jinwoo and his companions. You’ll also choose abilities for Jinwoo himself, which is kind of weird since the story really has one clear progression for him.
Regardless, you’ll be playing through various short stages on the world map and gaining a variety of items, experience, and money that you can use in the hunter’s hub to improve your characters. You’ll also play some longer stages that will test your endurance and patience with wave after wave of loosely connected groups of monsters and several bosses. Between dungeon breaks, instance dungeons, and dimensional rifts there is a lot to do here, at least at first. Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE also has a robust management and crafting system and you can arm Jinwoo with a variety of weapons based on your preferences as well as loading out your support hunters and leveling everyone up. Unlike the show, every hunter in your party can level up because video games and occasionally you’ll be thrown into a battle with no Jinwoo, forcing you to use those hunters. That means you have to spend a lot of precious resources in order to keep everyone leveled enough to survive or grind heavily on lower levels until everyone is strong enough to proceed further with the main story.
Combat in Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is third person action but it’s designed around cooldowns rather than combos. That’s a weird choice given that the series would lend itself extremely well to a Devil May Cry style of combat. Instead there are various combos and attacks mapped to the face and shoulder buttons. Each one has a timed cooldown and combat consists of targeting enemies and using attacks as they become available again. Your support hunters will join you in attacks as their attacks charge but they are not under your direct control. As a result, combat consists of rushing into a battle, fighting all the enemies in a small contained arena-like area, then moving on to the next section or through the next rift. Actual fighting is mostly timing dodges (which have an irritatingly long cooldown) and waiting for each skill to become available again but quickly devolves into a button mashing extravaganza where you are simply hoping to have a major combo activate before your life drains too low, especially if you haven’t been grinding enough.
Healing items and bonuses are few and far between, especially in the early stages of the game, so you’ll have to dodge attacks rather than using Jinwoo or the other hunters as tanks. Once you boost their stats, things get a bit easier but it takes a lot of repeat playthroughs of world map levels to get to that point. After beating a few bosses, you end up with some boosts to your health potions that instill additional abilities, but they don’t fix the first few chapters’ issues with health. One of your supporters early on will heal you as well, but it’s an area effect spell that you have to stand in to be healed and that leaves you massively vulnerable to enemy attacks. Eventually your stats will boost your health but it is slow going as the vast majority of Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is designed as a gacha game and shifting away from microtransactions didn’t change the fundamental design of the game.
Health aside, there’s an inherent balance issue in the game. With the conversion to a standard paid release and the removal of microtransactions, usually a game changes the balance to compensate. ARISE OVERDRIVE doesn’t do that however. Where that rapidly becomes noticeable is in the management screens where you’ll have to balance out buying items, upgrading weapons, and spending money to upgrade supporting characters because the drop rates for money and crafting items are extremely low. In fact, by the time you’re ready to upgrade, what you’ll quickly find is that you’re simply waiting for rare items to progress. There are plenty of common items after every fight on the world map and every main story sequence, but they won’t help you and you can’t really exchange them for the items you need. There are just far too many options for your resources here.
This leaves players struggling to progress as they work through the main storyline. You’re artificially limited by your lack of money and the rare item requirements and you’ll end up grinding constantly in order to level Jinwoo enough to squeak a win from the main storyline and get a few rare items so you can upgrade here and there. As a result, you end up playing the same world map stages over and over again in order to slowly build up gold. Spending it poorly on weapons or items that you don’t necessarily need make this problem even worse as there are an absolute ton of options for spending money in the hunter’s hub and your menu system. For example, if you just discovered the weapons menu and started upgrading or just found out that your support hunters can be upgraded and burned all those points, you’re probably already out of funds and you acquire them so slowly that now your progress in other areas is limited until you grind more. Try to jack up the levels of the stages (they’re adjustable) and you may find yourself rapidly outclassed by the new strength of enemies and wasting time as you get killed repeatedly. Grind at too low a level and you won’t get enough cash and resources and the whole time you’re biding your time waiting for rare drops to crank up your weapon strength to make real progress.
While the balance is clearly still geared towards gacha here, Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE has a few new tricks that the original game didn’t. There’s a multiplayer mode that allows up to 4 players to play together in a combination of hunters and Jinwoos (is that a plural?) to take down more powerful enemies and you can also recruit new hunters in the hub once you progress far enough. These new support hunters change the characters that pop up to support you in the main levels and also the hunters you can control when hunters randomly replace Jinwoo in dungeons. Both of those things are welcome additions to the stale formula that Solo Leveling: ARISE follows. However, they’re also very fundamentally at odds with the very concept of “Solo” Leveling. You’re not working alone, you’re not the only one that can level up, and really, none of this make sense in the context of the story.
The best part of Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is by far the visuals. The anime is highly stylized and very cool, especially in action scenes and it’s clear that Netmarble focused entirely on style over substance here. The game looks amazing in every scene and the combat animations are intense and flashy, just like the show the game is based on. Unfortunately, the camera doesn’t always keep up with you effectively in the heat of combat so the visual impact is sometimes lost depending on how your field of vision is oriented unless you remembered to target your enemies. Special attacks are particularly cool, but once you’ve triggered each a few times, they don’t vary at all and the stock catchphrases during attacks get old really, really fast. Regardless, the game looks premium, which is likely to attract fans of the series but the choppiness from stuttering you get even on a relatively powerful system (we were using a 3080 GPU) interferes with the overall impact and after a while, the unskippable boss animations and other visuals become somewhat tedious.
The audio is excellent in the game too, and the voice actors match the English dub, which is fantastic. Unfortunately, because of the way the story is broken apart to support gameplay, much of the narrative feels choppy and that excellent voicework goes to waste because there is very little immersion in a story that feels incomplete. Fans of the anime will recognize what’s going on but key components are often missing. The music is suitably exciting as well, often too exciting for the quick pace you’ll be able to blow through most world map levels. Sound effects are often lost in the shuffle too as stock phrases are triggered every time characters trigger special moves to the point where you start to cringe every time it happens, regardless of how cool the attack looks.
If you’re thinking that Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE sounds remarkably poorly structured, that’s because it is. This problem is actually made worse due to the source content being quite good. SL fans are going to be very disappointed because the story doesn’t flow well and new players will be confused because the story doesn’t make a lot of sense since it’s so broken up. There are no actual “Solo” parts either and with abilities that are triggered instead of move-based, Sung Jinwoo feels choppy and wooden instead of the smooth, skilled fighter he becomes in the story. The game is simply not true enough to the source material, even though most of that material is included in some way or another and that’s a shame because it might turn off some players from the anime and story. The DLC doesn’t really cut it here with a bunch of emotes and alternate outfits and frames that have no real place unless you’re wildly obsessed with playing online or really, really love skins. As a game, it’s hard to recommend Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE unless you just want a button mashing gacha game to play on your computer and even then, there are probably better examples out there.
This review is based on a digital copy of Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE provided by the publisher. It was played on a PC running an 11570 CPU, a 3080 GPU, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is also available for the Xbox Series X/S.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.