Solo Leveling: Arise is an action RPG adaptation of a popular webnovel that tells the story of the weakest hunter and his quest to become the strongest. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth playing.
Solo Leveling: Arise Review Overview
What is Solo Leveling: Arise?
Solo Leveling: Arise follows the story of Sung Jinwoo, the world’s weakest hunter, in an action RPG adaptation. While he doesn’t suffer much of the discrimination that his title would otherwise suggest, he does suffer a bit of an inferiority complex about it. However, everything changed when he encountered the System in a way that was visible only to him. This allowed him to gain power beyond anybody’s imagination as long as he fulfilled certain requirements.
Solo Leveling: Arise features:
⚫︎ A simple action RPG combat system with auto-battle
⚫︎ An accurate adaptation of the popular Solo Leveling story.
⚫︎ Flashy visual effects
⚫︎ Amazing artworks and models for your favorite Solo Leveling characters
⚫︎ Lucrative rewards from clearing content
 Google Play |
Free |
 App Store |
|
 Dedicated Client |
|
 Steam |
Wishlist Only |
Solo Leveling: Arise Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Accessible Combat System Great Models And Visual Design Excellent Progress Rewards |
Game Quickly Becomes Repetitive Extremely Intrusive Monetization Heavily Limited Activities Story Assumes You’re Already A Fan |
Solo Leveling: Arise Overall Score - 72/100
Solo Leveling: Arise is a great game adaptation for the franchise. It’s visually beautiful, with excellent voice acting and very accessible gameplay. While you may have some issues with their aggressive marketing, there’s little doubt that the game itself is well-made with love for the source material.
Solo Leveling: Arise Story - 8/10
Following the plot of the widely-popular series faithfully, Solo Leveling: Arise’s story is an exciting one that features the quest of the weakest hunter to become the strongest. It’s almost every power fantasist’s dream, complete with all the intrigues and drama. However, its delivery is way too reckless, which makes it plain that it assumes that its audience has at least read the webnovel or webtoon.
Solo Leveling: Arise Gameplay - 6/10
While Solo Leveling: Arise has a pretty solid gameplay design, it doesn’t take long for it to overstay its welcome. It suffers heavily from eventual repetitiveness and fatigue due to several key design choices. But to sum it up, it’s excessively simple and reuses a lot of enemies and attack patterns. On the other hand, that simplicity allows it to become incredibly accessible for any kind of player.
Solo Leveling: Arise Visuals - 8/10
Combat-wise, Solo Leveling: Arise’s visual effects make it easy to get engaged with its action-packed gameplay. It also has some extremely pretty artworks and models that depict each character appropriately, albeit with some stiffness with the latter. And while the game uses both 3D animated models and 2D panels for its narrative, which can sometimes feel off depending on the scene, it’s a nice touch that gives the game an identity separate from its source materials.
Solo Leveling: Arise Audio - 7/10
Solo Leveling not only has very satisfying sound effects to accompany its visual flair, but its Korean voice acting is also quite good. In fact, the voice acting is practically necessary to fully enjoy the game’s narrative, as it breathes life into what would otherwise be characters on your screen. Unfortunately, it does have very mediocre background tracks and an almost lifeless main lobby.
Solo Leveling: Arise Value for Money - 7/10
With a slightly better SSR rate than other big gacha games nowadays and a comparable pity value, Solo Leveling: Arise is a decent game to invest in. However, do take note that their monthly subscriptions are essentially required if you want to really get into the game. It also aggressively pushes for you to purchase them, so be prepared to close a lot of prompts if you’re not interested.
Solo Leveling: Arise Review: A Visual Feast For The Fans, But Not Much Else
Solo Leveling was a series I spent a good couple of years following. As an unabashed enthusiast of overpowered protagonists, Sung Jinwoo’s development from becoming the weakest hunter in the series to the strongest always made me excited for more.
Of course, it’s not like I say the same things to those I know personally. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t like these things.
Anyway, a game about one of the most popular webtoons to exist was practically guaranteed. And even though we still don’t have a game for Noblesse (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Noblesse:Zero even though I just did), we eventually got Solo Leveling: Arise by Netmarble. As a fan of the Seven Knights series of games, you can be sure that I was hyped about it.
So, is Solo Leveling: Arise a good game? The answer is a definite yes. Almost everything about its audiovisuals and story is worthy of praise, and the gameplay itself is simple, but with a lot of depth. However, as the term "almost" implies, it does have a number of issues.
The first issue you’ll encounter is undoubtedly the relative difficulty of investing in equipment. This isn’t an issue for Sung Jinwoo and his fellow hunters since they use in-game exp and gold respectively, but for weapons, you’ll have to grind the Gates (which are limited in attempts each day) for exp materials or purchase them from the shop.
Another issue I have is with its combat. That is, despite its relatively slow pace, there’s not much technicality to it. In other words, it doesn’t have features such as parrying or counterattacking that slower action titles would usually promote. Meanwhile, there’s nothing much to do between attacks aside from waiting for the moment you can launch your next hit. Hence, you’re often left button-mashing at a pace that’s too fast for the game to respond to.
The game’s gacha system is also worth discussing. While it has a hard pity at 80, a 50-50 mechanic for featured banners, and a relatively generous 1.2% (we’re now at a point where a sub-2% SSR rate can be generous, man) pull rate for SSRs, for some reason Netmarble combined the character and weapon banners. In other words, you’re equally likely to pull for a weapon you might not need on a featured banner if you lose the 50-50. Why?
Overall, though, Solo Leveling: Arise is an audiovisual feast. Yes, the gameplay can be a bit wonky if you care for the specifics, but it’s designed well enough to be accessible to everybody. If you’re a fan of the series and would like to control your favorite hunters yourself, then this game is for you.
Pros of Solo Leveling: Arise
| Things Solo Leveling: Arise Got Right |
|---|
|
Accessible Combat System Great Models And Visual Design Excellent Progress Rewards |
Accessible Combat System
Despite the flashiness of the game’s visual effects, Solo Leveling: Arise’s gameplay can essentially be boiled down to a very specific goal; unload as much damage as you can before rotating out. Of course, there’s also the occasional need for healing, but for the most part, the goal is dealing with the enemy before it can deal with you.
Later on, you’ll gain access to even more difficult stages such as the Battlefield of Time. These modes need more thought to be put into making teams. However, the main goal remains mostly the same. With only the conditions changing depending on the mode, it’s only a matter of adjusting your mindset in approaching each battle to achieve victory.
This lends the game excellent accessibility, with practically anybody being able to pick this up and enjoy it for what it is.
Great Models And Visual Design
As expected from a game developed by Netmarble, Solo Leveling: Arise’s visuals are excellent. Each character’s model is made with great detail, allowing every piece of armor and wrinkled shirt to be vividly shown with the perfect amount of realism applied to fiction.
But as an action game, its visual effects are much more important to your experience. Fortunately, that’s also something the game can be proud of. Not only do the animations look satisfyingly flashy, but the dynamic camera angles lend a lot of weight to every attack, particularly their ultimate skills.
Of course, the artwork for each character is also excellent. I would argue that they’re even better than the webtoons… although it certainly does help that they could put more effort into less artwork than the latter has to deal with.
Excellent Progress Rewards
For new players looking to fill out their roster, Solo Leveling provides them with an incredible amount of free gacha pulls simply from clearing Main Story content. Specifically, the least it provides is four pulls from the standard banners minimum, which can easily reach five on stages with at least three battles, and even six for particularly long ones.
What makes it even better is that the side stories provide the same rewards, allowing you to veer off course and still earn a lot of pulls (and lose to RNG).
We haven’t even talked about the giveaways and new player events, which gives you even more stuff to work with.
Cons of Solo Leveling: Arise
| Things That Solo Leveling: Arise Can Improve |
|---|
|
Game Quickly Becomes Repetitive Extremely Intrusive Monetization Heavily Limited Activities Story Assumes You’re Already A Fan |
Game Quickly Becomes Repetitive
While it is true that Solo Leveling: Arise’s gameplay is very easy to pick up, it’s also true that it’s incredibly simple. It certainly doesn’t help that the vast majority of the enemies in this game are just clones and recolors of each other and do almost the same things each time.
What makes this issue even worse is the existence of a barely-acceptable AI autopilot feature. In other words, you’re not even required to play the game yourself roughly 80% of the time. This is especially true if you have a decently-invested team with good synergy, since even the painfully reckless AI can carry you through almost every stage.
Of course, this isn’t true for truly high-level dungeons, but those comprise an extremely small fraction of your daily tasks. And even if you opt to never use the Auto-battle feature, that doesn’t help address its barebones combat system that even an AI can make decent use of.
Your eventual role in this game is to just click on things and spend money every once in a while. It’ll become the regular slog of logging in, doing your dailies, checking events, and then logging out. Not even its wide variety of items and substantial build depth can save it from that.
Extremely Intrusive Monetization
Free-to-play games typically survive off of either the money they earn from running ads, or from the microtransactions in their in-game stores. The former is often despised due to their intrusiveness, with even basic functions being locked behind adwalls. Sometimes, buttons that play ads are even placed right next to essential icons such as menus in the hopes that you press it by mistake.
Fortunately, Solo Leveling: Arise is free from those types of ads (even the better kinds). It is sustained, for the most part, by the in-game microtransactions for currencies, skins, and other packs. However, what it does instead is arguably just as bad as the previously mentioned design.
Solo Leveling: Arise is plainly desperate to get their grubby hands on your money. An incredible amount of Quality of Life improvements are locked behind their subscriptions. Heck, even the risemara (reroll) banner is premium content; pure absurdity. But what really makes its monetization so meddling is the fact that it will take every opportunity to sell you stuff.
"You just cleared chapter 5. How about you buy some of our discounted packs?" "Looks like you’re mining for resources. How about subscribing to our premium membership to make it easier?" "Are you uninstalling the game? How about you buy one of the hunter’s skins to go?" While the last one is a joke, I really wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen. It won’t let you play in peace without throwing discounts at your face.
Heavily Limited Activities
It’s very important to limit the time you spend playing games each day (unless that’s literally your work). Everybody has to touch grass and talk to actual living people every so often, after all. Now, for most mobile games, your limit is roughly set by the stamina you gradually recover during the course of the day.
However, that isn’t a wall you can’t scale without trying. A decent mobile game would at least provide you with ways to experience more of it, even if the rewards aren’t that good. This could be anything from being able to fight roaming enemies in open world games, repeat trials to get higher scores, etc. So, what does Solo Leveling have?
Nothing, actually. Sure, you can spam certain stages, but you’ll gain nothing off them. There’s effectively a hard limit in what you can do with the game that’ll compensate you for the time, even for the most dedicated player. Artifact dungeons? Three or so attempts a day. Gates? A dozen. Mining? About a dozen as well. Heck, the game’s lack of a stamina system doesn’t even save you from being gated by level requirements on Story stages.
But, what’s even worse is that farming artifacts is also a test of your luck. You’ll basically have to get past multiple layers of RNG just to get a good piece of artifact with the stats that you need. And do you know how you can increase your daily attempts to run certain stages? You guessed it. Premium subscription.
Story Assumes You’re Already A Fan
While Solo Leveling: Arise’s story mode is an accurate adaptation of the original source material, and even having the occasional bonus content, most of it is delivered quickly and recklessly. Hence, it can get quite difficult to understand or even know what happens in the interim between story cutscenes.
If anything, the game simply takes parts of the original material that would fit the action RPG genre. Fillers, even rather important ones, are mostly stripped from the story. For players who are completely new to the series, it would be easy to assume that Solo Leveling is just the protagonist’s story of gaining power, completely missing the scenes that show his depth of character.
On the other hand, it does present the major events of the story in a format that’s both immersive and faithful to the original, so it’s not all bad. So, if you’re a newcomer to the franchise, just supplement your experience with the campaign with the manhwa.
Is Solo Leveling: Arise Worth It?
It’s Worth The Try, At Least
There’s a reason why Solo Leveling is such a popular webnovel and webtoon. It has a legitimately engaging story with an abundance of intrigue and character development. However, since the literary works and animation already only appeal to a certain demographic, the game is even more restricted to those it can attract. This is mainly due to its auto-battle RPG design limiting the amount of mechanics it can use to differentiate itself from the competition as well as the limited accessibility of action RPGs and gacha games in general.
Furthermore, its excessively intrusive monetization scheme will surely push many players away from playing it in the long term.
| Google Play |
Free |
| App Store |
|
| Dedicated Client |
|
| Steam |
Wishlist Only |
Solo Leveling: Arise FAQ
Does Solo Leveling: Arise have additional stories?
Solo Leveling: Arise has some side stories and events unique to it.
Will Solo Leveling: Arise be used for the live action adaptation?
The live action adaptation for the Solo Leveling franchise is a spin-off and was announced before the full release of the mobile game, so it likely won’t be considered for content.
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Solo Leveling: Arise Product Information
 |
|
| Title | SOLO LEVELING: ARISE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 8, 2024 |
| Developer | Netmarble Neo |
| Publisher | Netmarble |
| Supported Platforms | PC, Mobile |
| Genre | Action, RPG |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | Solo Leveling: Arise Website |
