Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive Review
Solo Leveling Anime Experience in Video Game Form
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN DISCUSSIONS involving SPOILERS FROM Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive and content from other forms of the franchise. It also contains discussions about violence. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE.
Platforms
We Reviewed our copy of Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive on PC via Steam.It is currently only available now on PC.
With over 14 billion streams worldwide, Solo Leveling is one of the most successful Anime series ever. Since its release in early 2024, two seasons have been released, and season one was awarded Anime of the Year in that same year. However, not everything in the Solo Leveling franchise has been met with success. A failed mobile gacha game, Solo Leveling: Arise released around the same time in 2024 and was dead on arrival - failing to meet any of expectations set by the Anime. This is where Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive comes into the picture. Effectively, Arise Overdrive is the Arise video game without any of the microtransactions associated with the gacha version of this game.
I never played the gacha version of this game and I did not realize that Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive was the recycled version going into this review. Unfortunately, after only a few hours of playing, it was obvious why this game failed as a gacha game. Nevertheless, I continued playing the game so I could give it an honest review. After over 40 hours of gameplay, I can confidently say that Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive is not good, but also not bad, it is just a decently average game. There are some fun aspects of the game that draw players in, but also some really annoying aspects push players away.
Lazy Level Design
In a game with leveling in the name, of course levels will play a huge part. In this instance, the word “level” has multiple levels of meaning. The first is the levels (i.e. maps) in which the game is played, and the second is the leveling up of your character to get stronger as the game progresses. Starting with level/map design, there are only a handful of maps in which the entire game is played in with dozens of levels played within this handful of maps. Not to mention that all the enemies are all effectively the same just with different designs. This makes the game feel really stale after going through the same map and same enemy for the tenth time. It is like the developers only made this game for the money and put no creativity into creating it.
Entering a portal to a dungeon
Regarding about the game’s namesake, leveling in Arise Overdrive is tedious and unintuitive. Leveling your main character is standard, just like any other video game, but time-consuming. The tedious and unintuitive part is everything else you need to level up to progress into harder content. Literally everything in the game needs to be leveled up, and players spend more time and effort leveling everything else up rather than the main character. Weapons, equipment, non-main characters (plus their weapons and equipment), shadow summons, hunter guild, each instanced dungeon in the game, and the list goes on for everything that needs to be leveled. It is all just a massive amount of unnecessary bloat that makes the game longer than it really needs to be.
In both uses of the word, this lazy level design is by far the worst part of the game. In my view, it is probably the reason why the gacha version of this game failed. Between making each level/enemy feel the same and the massive amount of unnecessary leveling mechanics, it feels like the developer made this game to intentionally try to waste the player’s time. On the bright side, at least Arise Overdrive does not waste your money as well with predatory gacha microtransactions.
Comic book Story
It only makes sense that story is good because it is based on the hit anime: Solo Leveling. Arise Overdrive sticks to the story of the anime very closely (as it should) because it is the main draw to the game. However, there are some large shortcuts taken so that players aren’t rewatching the entire anime throughout the game, which makes the story in the game notably worse, but still good enough to make players continue playing. Unfortunately, the story in the game only goes through the first season and half of the second season, so there is basically nothing new story-wise that the game adds the anime plot
Solo Leveling was originally a manhwa – a Korean comic series. One really cool thing that the game does is that it incorporates the comic style cells from the manhwa into the storytelling. This gives a really unique feel to the story and does a great job of honoring the origin of Solo Leveling. Speaking of the story, here is a quick summarization of the plot for people who have not seen the anime or played Solo Level: Arise Overdrive.
Portals to other dimensions called “Gates” began appearing across the world. These gates lead to dangerous dungeons where monsters reside, as well as vast amounts of valuable raw materials and treasures. With the first appearance of gates, special powers began to awaken in humans. People who get these powers are known as Hunters and are ranked from S (the best) to E (the worst).
Our main character, Sung Jinwoo, begins as the weakest E rank but still decides to pursue a career as a hunter. In one of these dungeons he participates in, his party encounters a rare double dungeon. Unknown by his party, the second dungeon in this double dungeon is extremely dangerous and Sung Jinwoo is left behind to fend for himself while all the stronger hunters leave him behind to save themselves. At the brink of death, he clears the double dungeon and undergoes a reawakening.
With this reawakening, Sung Jinwoo becomes the only known hunter to be able to infinitely level up and become stronger, along with gaining other unique powers and abilities very similar to ones that can be found in a video game. He begins to clear these dungeon solo and level up, thus the name Solo Leveling. Quickly becoming the most powerful S-rank hunter ever, Sung Jinwoo gains the attention of the world and other worldly powers.
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While story is the main draw to game, the playable combat in Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive is what keeps players playing. The combat gameplay is cool, customizable, and addicting. There are four classes to choose from, and each have their own style and specialties. It also has dozens of active and passive abilities, status effects, ways to immobilize enemies, parrying, dodging, and ultimate abilities.
The “Shadow Monarch” form that every class has is very thematic and really lives up the power fantasy set in the anime, not to mention the shadow summons you can earn and command throughout the game. Some levels make you play as non-Sung Jinwoo characters, which does not really fit the solo leveling aesthetic but does mix up the gameplay in a good way. Lastly, each level ends with a combat rating that tells you how well you did combat-wise within that level. All of this makes for some fun gameplay interactions.
Unfortunately, the combat is really dragged down by the level design issues mentioned above, making it feel repetitive and even un-fun at times. Luckily, combat is slightly better than the level design is bad. If not for that, I probably would not have been able to make it through to the end of this game.
Overall, this dichotomy between good combat and bad level design puts this game into a decently average spot for me– not good and not bad. If more content does get released, I may revisit this world, but until then, I am completely over this game. In terms of recommending this game, I cannot recommend this game to anyone other than people who are already fans of the Solo Leveling manhwa and/or anime. Even then, it is extremely repetitive and grindy so it takes a certain type of player to get into this game. If you do not fall into these categories, you should not even think about buying this $40 game.
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Matt
New video game, movie, or TV show? Matt probably has it on his radar, and he might even be in the middle of reviewing it. This digital entertainment enjoying dude is a Content Writer during work hours, then plays games, watches movies, binges shows, and writes about all of it in his free time.