Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive Review

For as long as they’ve existed, when gacha (and live service in general) games die, they’re generally gone for good. Some allow for limited access to specific features, but most erase years of content and player investment. Recently, some gacha games have started to receive paid offline reworks, or companion games like Atelier Resleriana.

Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive is something a bit different from other recent gacha-to-offline games. While it ditches paid currencies and a reliance on gacha in favour of a one-time fee, it still carries over a lot of the pain points that come with the original title. From grindy upgrade systems to always online requirements, it’s not quite the game I had hoped it would be.

For those new to Solo Leveling, it details the story of Sung Jinwoo as he rises from the weakest of all hunters to a one man army. It follows a lot of the usual web novel tropes, from the protagonist being able to see status windows, to a breakneck pace that sees Jinwoo overpower seasoned hunters early on.

For me, Solo Leveling is essentially junk food. While the source material isn’t exactly top-tier, it’s elevated by solid art in the manhua adaption, which in turn allowed for some excellently animated fights in the anime. If you’re fine with style over substance and some paper-thin characters, you can do worse.

Naturally, the game-ified plot and power scaling nonsense makes the series a perfect fit for gaming. Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive’s story is an abridged version of the source material, giving you brief glimpses at key moments of Jinwoo’s early rise in power. You even get to play as him back when he had no real powers, which is a nice touch.

Combat is relatively fluid, with Arise Overdrive increasing Jinwoo’s pool of weapons greatly. While he canonically sticks to daggers, you have an arsenal of swords, hammers, and even ranged options to choose from. This all ties into greater skill and weapon trees, letting you spec Jinwoo into fighting styles that he wouldn’t normally go for.

You have access to basic combos and a dodge (it has charges, so no spamming here,) cooldown-based abilities, and character-specific moves (more on this later.) It’s very easy to pick up, and the aforementioned customisation allows for extra variety through buildcrafting. It’s fun just to hack away at groups of enemies, with bosses offering a decent challenge.

It’s a shame that this is all wrapped up in what is essentially typical gacha progression. Missions take place in linear levels, each split into small encounters. Exploration is nearly non-existent with plenty of invisible barriers to keep you on track, and you fight through waves of identical mobs. Some also feel a little contrived in how they try and justify being a level, adding in combat to stretch out scenes that would normally be quite short.

This is my main gripe with Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, and it extends to more than just linear stages. Almost everything from the gacha game has been carried over here, including its tedious way of handling gear progression. You’re expected to grind stages for random drops (including RNG statted gear,) all to slowly upgrade your power to take on harder content.

Rather than copying systems like this wholesale, Arise Overdrive would have been better off trying to do something different. Perhaps putting more detail into how it tells the story, or remove the focus on repetitive grinding in favour of longer missions (or perhaps even open areas.)

What makes this weird is that this version of the game does try to differentiate itself in some ways. The gacha allowed you to unlock characters, which also carries over here. Thankfully, it’s much faster to unlock new options here, as you can grind currency or even get characters outright via story progression. And unlike regular Arise, Arise Overdrive even allows for online co-op. With how much grinding is needed later on, it’s actually a pretty solid way to speed things up – when it works at least.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive didn’t get rid of the gacha’s always-online requirement. Even if you’re just going through the singleplayer story, you’re at the whims of the servers as to whether you can keep playing or not.

If either your connection or the servers die, you’re out of luck. It’s not like this even allows for solid online play, with Arise Overdrive having pretty laggy co-op even at the best of times. That’s not to mention technical problems on PC, such as stutters and lacklustre optimisation. While an offline mode is being worked on, it really should have been available at launch.