| Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Review Overview
What is Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE?
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is a four-player co-op action-RPG where players will join protagonist Sung Jinwoo on his journey from humble E-Rank hunter to the world’s strongest. With dynamic, adrenaline-pumping solo combat to four-player cooperative raids, watch as Jinwoo rises to become the Monarch of Shadows.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE features:
⚫︎ Up to four player co-op battles
⚫︎ Story-based progression that follows the original webtoon
⚫︎ Multiple collectible hunters hired with in-game currency
⚫︎ Multi-tiered character progression systems
⚫︎ Crafting system for gear
⚫︎ Shadow army for additional teambuilding depth
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 Xbox |
 PSN |
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| $39.99 | |||||
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Combat is Simple and Decently Challenging Extremely Pretty Character Models Punchy Sound Effects |
Very Repetitive Gameplay Grindy and Rather Unrewarding The Story is Too Heavily Trimmed Suffers from a Variety of Bugs and Issues |
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Story - 5/10
I don’t know how they managed it, but Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE manages to trim the original story down even further, shaving off context, nuance, and connective tissue all in the name of optimizing everything for co-op content. Worse, it carries over the mobile game’s biggest narrative issues such as jarring delivery and a complete lack of onboarding for newcomers to the series.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Gameplay - 6/10
There’s a surprisingly robust core of action RPG mechanics here. Combat is reasonably smooth, the difficulty curve is well-judged, despite the bullet-sponge bosses, and the sheer range of weapons, equipment, skills, and recruitable hunters gives you plenty of build freedom. Unfortunately, the game is also insanely repetitive to the point where you’ll have effectively experienced most of what it offers within half a day. On top of that, outside of picking a fight with whatever enemy is next on the menu, there’s very little else to meaningfully engage with.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Visuals - 9/10
True to Netmarble’s usual standards, the visuals are outstanding, the effects are spectacular, the stage designs are appropriately eerie, and the character models are... way above average. The cinematic cutscenes, though? Pure chef’s kiss. Sadly, this excellence is marred by some genuinely awful camerawork and story animations that range from awkward to outright bad.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Audio - 8/10
With a decent headset, the sound effects hit hard, and the voice acting is excellent, especially during story scenes where Sung Jinwoo’s growth and emotional tones come through clearly. The soundtrack itself, on the other hand, is fine on paper, but the lack of texture leaves many major moments feeling surprisingly flat and, especially during combat, audibly underwhelming.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Value for Money - 5/10
At its core, this is a $40 co-op action game that expects you to do some good old-fashioned "Solo Leveling" (get it?) before unlocking its full suite of systems. You can play the story as a bonus, but for a pay-to-own title whose main offerings are repetitive co-op missions and a handful of side modes and minigames, it simply doesn’t provide enough content to justify the price—or the hours—you’ll sink into its progression loop.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Overall Score - 66/100
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE feels like an adaptation that lost sight of everything that made the original compelling (in its own way, yes), focusing almost exclusively on replicating its power-fantasy action and sacrificing everything else. While the audiovisual presentation is great, the gameplay quickly devolves into an unrewarding checklist of tasks done purely to inflate your numbers with nothing meaningful offered in return.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Review: It Lost More Than the Gacha System
Another Year, Another Solo Leveling Game
Before we dive in, I know what a lot of you are already thinking: "Isn’t Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE just the mobile game with the gacha stripped out and had OVERDRIVE slapped at the end?"
To that, I say: let’s all pretend we’ve collectively come down with a case of retrograde amnesia and can only remember events from this year onward. It’s the easiest way to talk about this release on its own merits (or the lack thereof) without falling into the same predictable loop of comparisons. Not everyone played the mobile game anyway, too.
That out of the way, Solo Leveling is a series I followed for a good few years. I have a soft spot for the occasional power fantasy, and this one checked a lot of my boxes. Plus, Cha Hae-In is extremely cool.
Of course, it’s not like it checked every box. But I don’t think it’s surprising at all for the original comic to become as popular as it is now, especially considering that there are genuine and sometimes successful attempts at making the story more than just "overpowered MC stomps everything."
It’s also not surprising that Solo Leveling would get a game, especially by such a massive studio like Netmarble.
Solo Leveling: Arise? A mobile game? Never heard of it.
A Surprisingly Balanced Power Fantasy, Discounted
If you haven’t read a single page of Solo Leveling, I’d genuinely be surprised considering just how popular it is. That said, it’s basically just the tale of Sung Jinwoo, the Weakest Hunter of Mankind, and his journey from being the smallest of small fries to becoming the most powerful hunter in the world.
Long story short, he manages to do this by making full use of something called the "System," which assists him in combat and gives him quests and objectives that explosively boost his capabilities at the cost of getting penalized every time he fails them.
But while many people dismiss Solo Leveling as nothing more than a shameless power fantasy with no real substance, it actually carries a surprising amount of humanity, delivered through the protagonist’s interactions with other characters, its worldbuilding, and even the moments he shares with his Shadows (his servants).
Heck, there’s even romance in it, and it’s not as straightforward as you’d expect from a story like this unlike, say, Arifureta.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of those additional layers are completely, or at least mostly, lost in Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE, as the game focuses almost entirely on the elements that provide context for conflict. And while a few moments manage to slip through and get a bit of screentime, they’re almost never expanded on and are even more rarely followed up.
On top of that, the game’s story adaptation is written in a way that provides practically no help to anyone unfamiliar with the series. You’re simply thrown into the thick of things and expected to rely on some underlying, esoteric knowledge about LitRPGs (Literary Role-Playing Games) to orient yourself. As such, I’d strongly recommend reading the webtoon for the story and treating the game as something to play for its gameplay first and foremost.
Power Fantasy Gameplay Made Accessible
At its core, Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE is an action game loaded with RPG systems. You get everything from basic attacks, actives, passives, ultimates, weapon swapping, unique weapon effects, transformations, and even support skills, all layered with a satisfying spread of matching weapons to skills, characters to builds, and gear to specific stat spreads.
The RPG elements themselves feel like a mix of what you’d expect from a mobile title and features you’d normally only see on PC or console RPGs. Gear and weapons are standard fare; Genshin, Wuthering Waves, and even Netmarble’s own Seven Knights Re:Birth do the same. But mix-and-match skill tables, manual stat distribution, and conditional support triggers? Those are systems I’d sooner expect from something on a console or PC.
All of this gives you plenty of room to shape your "own" Sung Jinwoo. You can craft weapons, optimize gear, pick a squad of hunters to fight alongside you, assign skill loadouts that complement your equipment, and fine-tune his stats to suit your preferred playstyle. The amount of flexibility and player expression is genuinely impressive.
And what do you do with all that freedom? Well, you dive into dungeons and start punching faces. That’s basically it.
Combat itself is straightforward and party-focused. You dodge, chain basic attacks and skills, and even pull off some fun weapon-swap combos. But the real spice comes from triggering follow-ups from your party members.
Unfortunately, you can’t control them, which is fair since the controls sometimes isn't responsive in the first place. They only use their skills when their specific conditions are met, which range from anything like your HP dropping below a certain point to you activating an ultimate skill. And because these triggers can absolutely make or break a run, you’ll want to learn how each ally behaves so don’t make a magnificent faceplant at an inopportune time.
Its co-op features let you bring extra hands into each session in exchange for slightly tougher enemies. Of course, “tougher” is relative, as most bosses tend to immediately forget how to use their basic cognitive functions once they have more than one person to look at, so the occasional visual upgrade for some of them feels more like a flex than an actual threat.
Still, co-op doesn’t really change the core experience. If you already enjoy the gameplay, you’ll enjoy it even more with friends… which is already difficult to get in this economy. It's just that beyond getting distracted by things like dueling in the lobby, flexing your lineup of HR recruits, or holding full conversations using only emojis, everything else is pretty standard stuff; fun, but not exactly transformative to the experience.
The Audiovisuals Fit the Genre Well
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE’s visuals are quite impressive. The character models are richly detailed as long as you're not watching them in a cutscene, from the texture of their armor to even the folds in their clothing. The stages, meanwhile, give off the kind of feel you would expect them to have, ranging from depressing and messy caverns to the very futuristic lobby of the Hunters Association.
And while the presentation is already amazing, the real highlight lies in its visual effects; exactly where an action game needs to shine. The game delivers on that front as well in spades; animations are flashy in all the right ways, and the dynamic camera angles give real impact to every strike, especially when unleashing ultimate skills.
The audio, particularly the sound effects, are also very well-made. They’re punchy, which is exactly what you need for a great action game, and manifest like thunder if you have a half-decent pair of headphones. Meanwhile, the voice acting in this game is nothing to scoff at, either, as the talents behind each character are able to deliver the emotions of each scene very well, especially the ones behind Sun Jinwoo himself.
It’s not perfect, though. As far as criticisms go, you know how Plants vs. Zombies gradually, and sometimes almost imperceptibly, ramps up its music as a stage progresses? Kinda like in Jaws, but slower and you’re not being chased by a shark. It’s a huge part of why the game feels so dynamic, giving you that creeping rush even when the visuals are as simple as "even more zombies are coming." The same goes for great boss tracks like Pokémon Sword and Shield’s Gym Leader theme, where the crowd’s silence slowly giving way to roaring cheers when you Dynamax or reach the gym leader's last Pokémon delivers insane hype.
Well… you’re not getting any of that here.
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE’s music, while cool in isolation, lacks any real texture. Most of the time, the tune that plays at the start of a fight is the exact same thing you’ll be hearing after the final blow. There are a few exceptions, but they feel less like adaptive scoring and more like someone hit "Next" on a playlist.
Everything is a Massive Grind
Finally, we get to the elephant in the room: how you actually obtain new characters. And on this front… I have very mixed feelings. Instead of the usual RPG setup where party members naturally join as you progress through the story, Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE opts for a system I can only describe as "role-playing as an anxious hiring manager."
The system works like this: you pick a character from a lineup of "resumes" and jump into a negotiation phase. Your only real decision is how much upfront payment you’re willing to offer for a chance that they’ll agree to join you.
Your odds of success hinge on three factors: their rank, which sets the upper limit of how likely they are to accept; their current mood, which adds a bonus to your chances; and finally, the amount of cash you decide to throw towards their general direction, which ultimately determines your final success rate. Yes, there's no gacha involved, but in my opinion, what they replaced it with may not be as heartbreaking or as exorbitant, but it's just as frustrating and even more annoying, especially if you don't even play this game that often.
Anyway, as you’d expect, this whole system demands a lot of cash, especially if Lady Luck decides to sneer at you on the day you’re trying to recruit, oh I don’t know, best girl Cha Hae-In. Unless you have a stockpile of a certain item that lets you skip negotiations entirely, you’re going to be grinding coin. A lot of coin.
Money comes from everywhere, ranging from achievements, story stages, dispatch missions (basically sending hunters to clear dungeons without you), and so on. Unfortunately, no matter where you look, every readily available source pays out in pocket change. In the early game in particular, you’ll be rerunning stages dozens of times just to scrape together enough to make an offer that isn’t outright insulting to both the character and, frankly, yourself.
On the other hand, dungeons are rarely good for just one thing. More often than not, they’ll also hand you crafting materials, character-upgrade resources, equipment, and occasionally even basic cosmetic items. So at the very least, every time you risk your life, you’re walking away with more than just a handful of pocket change.
You know what else needs to be farmed? Sung Jinwoo’s experience. Shocking, I know, but you’ll need those levels to comfortably tackle higher-tier content anyway. The same goes for upgrade resources, crafting materials, and anything else the game expects you to shovel into its systems. Honestly, with how long each story chapter is, the chapters themselves might as well count as grind sessions.
But when you take a step back and look at the whole thing, the gameplay loop is basically this: play the story, grind for experience, grind for materials, upgrade your characters, and then head back to the story. That’s the entire Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE experience in a nutshell.
Every now and then, you’ll also check whether you’ve scraped together enough cash to bribe—sorry, "negotiate with" a new character, only to fail anyway. Because, let’s be honest, a 40% fail chance may as well be 100%. Sure, there’s harder late-game content, and you can toss a few tokens into the arcade for some minigames, but outside of that? The content is thin, and the entire loop ends up feeling even simpler than a lot of mobile titles.
The issue, I believe, is that Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE didn’t carry over the elements that made the series stand out from your typical power fantasy. It leaned almost entirely on translating the action into gameplay, while leaving the deeper worldbuilding, slice-of-life interactions, and any meaningful sense of team or guild management off to the side or skipping them entirely.
Combine that with a recruitment system that’s basically a lottery followed by a dice roll funded by freely farmable currency, and the story starts to feel more like semi-optional garnish required only for unlocking features rather than the spine holding the game together.
This is especially glaring when you realize just how important having multiple characters is for progressing through the game’s features. If your experience is effectively determined by RNG and repetition rather than narrative development, it becomes hard to take the story seriously.
For a title that originally relied on the protagonist’s struggles and relationships to elevate itself above the standard rabble, stripping those layers away cuts deeply into its appeal. And even if it does boil everything down to a pure power fantasy experience, it still undermines itself by making you feel less like a hero and more like a paranoid HR employee nervously trying to keep himself within Accounting’s hiring budget.
The disconnect isn’t just odd; it creates an insane sense of dissonance that really detracts from the experience, despite the game’s best efforts at giving you all the tools to slowly create your ideal, overpowered protagonist.
If the game had included more social features or allowed you to meaningfully interact with your party—be it allies responding to you on the field or even some team-based bonding events in the lobby that isn't just either talking to them out of nowhere or listening in on other people's conversations, it would have done wonders for giving the world actual personality.
Most importantly, it would make collecting them a genuinely rewarding task beyond their role as elements to inflate your damage numbers.
Sure, that might have made it closer to something like Persona, but… well, there’s a reason Persona is such a beloved RPG, right? Besides, Solo Leveling does not have to do much in order to assert its personality.
Issues, Bugs, and Lack of Quality of Life Features, Arise
Now, onto more lighthearted critiques: I’m genuinely convinced my copy of the game might be cursed. How else do you explain character assets randomly disappearing, getting a bazillion glaives (unless that's intentional?), subtitles occasionally refusing to show up, or, uhh, an extra head popping out of an NPC’s chest? It looked exactly like what I imagine Solo Leveling would be if Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett got their hands on it…They’re the writers of Alien, by the way. You know, the one with the chestbursters? Yeah.
Oh, and sometimes the audio freaks out and the characters’ voices echo or get distorted like mad… or maybe it really is just a quirk (curse) with our copy. It is, after all, a review copy and may not reflect the final quality of the release.
Some basic tutorials would also be nice, like maybe pointing out where the hiring manager is or where the World Map option even lives. And while we’re at it, could we get some incredibly simple QoL features? Like, oh I don’t know, being able to return to the mode select screen after accidentally clicking Story Mode instead of having to trek all the way back to the lobby?
Is Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Worth It?
Only if You’re a Series Fan
After recovering from amnesia, I can safely tell you, my fellow Cha Hae-In enjoyers, that Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE isn’t something you should dive into unless you’re truly committed to the series. If you only have a passing interest, or you’re completely new to Solo Leveling, I’d honestly recommend trying the mobile game, Solo Leveling: Arise, instead.
At least that one's free and… somehow (and I can't believe I'm saying this) its gacha system actually makes the whole experience less stressful. That's because since you can only grind so much currency per day, you're free to spend the rest of your time on whatever's left of the series' soul like gawking at your favorite characters, reading their profiles, or whatever, rather than feeling pressured to farm endlessly just to afford your next hero.
On the other hand, if what you want is simply a Solo Leveling game you can play with friends and you’re not burdened with the gacha-driven obsession that people like me routinely suffer from, then ARISE OVERDRIVE might actually be worth the plunge. It’s not the best entry point, yes, but as a co-op action title wrapped in the Solo Leveling trademark, it can still scratch the itch.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
Xbox |
PSN |
|||
| $39.99 | |||||
Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE FAQ
Is Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE free to play?
No, it costs $39.99.
Can you transfer saves between Solo Leveling: Arise and Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE?
No, the two games are separate.
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Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Product Information
 |
|
| Title | Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | November 25, 2025 |
| Developer | Netmarble Neo |
| Publisher | Netmarble |
| Supported Platforms | PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Action, RPG |
| Number of Players | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating | T |
| Official Website | Solo Leveling: ARISE OVERDRIVE Website |
ⓒ DUBU(REDICE STUDIO), Chugong, h-goon 2018 / D&C MEDIA ⓒ Netmarble Corp. & Netmarble Neo Inc. All Rights Reserved.
