Solo Leveling: ARISE Overdrive – A Shiny, Hollow Shell
I’ve been sitting on this review for a while, because I wanted to be fair. I like Solo Leveling. The manhwa had its hooks in me back when it was still coming out weekly, and the anime reminded me why the power fantasy works when it’s done with style. Netmarble’s ARISE Overdrive promised a premium, buy-to-play PC experience that would let me live out Jinwoo’s rise from E-Rank nobody to the Monarch of Shadows without the usual mobile gacha nonsense. But after fifty-odd hours, I’m writing this with a heavy sigh and a cold cup of coffee. This is not the game we were sold, and it’s not the game the franchise deserves.
The combat is where the game shines brightest, and I’ll give credit where it’s due. The animations are fluid, the dodge and parry mechanics feel responsive, and there’s a real sense of speed and impact when you chain skills together. It’s flashy, it’s fast, and for the first few hours it genuinely feels like you’re the badass hunter everyone fears. There’s a decent variety of weapon types and skill trees—you can build Jinwoo as a duelist, assassin, elementalist, or ruler, and each has its own rhythm. The hunter roster, while small, offers enough variety to keep things interesting. If you’re just here for the dopamine hit of slashing through goblins and wolves while the screen explodes with particle effects, you’ll have a good time. For a while.
But that shine wears off fast. The story is a cliff-notes version of the manhwa, cutting corners and skipping entire arcs. It stops dead before Jeju Island—arguably the most iconic part of the series—and the “new chapters” they’ve added since launch amount to little more than a handful of missions. The writing is lazy; characters stand around in static poses, lip-sync is laughable, and Jinwoo repeats the same voice lines (“Pretty good!”) until you want to mute the game. The world-building is nonexistent. You’ll see three identical NPCs standing in a row, and the hub area is two floors of useless shops. If this game were sold as “Generic Dungeon Crawler,” it would be forgotten in a week. It only has value because of the Solo Leveling name.
And that’s where the real betrayal lies. This game was marketed as a complete, premium experience with no paywalls. No gacha. No real-money DLC that gates content. That’s what I paid $40 for. But Netmarble waited until the 2-week refund window expired and then dropped a paid DLC that locks iconic S-rank hunters and premium weapons behind a real-money “Special Pack.” The Jeju Island update, which should have been a major milestone, feels deliberately stripped: you get the bare-bones map and story for free, but the actual rewards and characters are locked away. It’s a bait-and-switch pure and simple. I’ve seen this before from mobile-first studios, but it’s disgusting in a retail PC game. You don’t sell a game as complete and then start carving out content for separate purchase. Back in my day, a game shipped complete. This feels like being pickpocketed in a dark alley.
The technical state is another sore spot. Performance is wildly inconsistent—one moment you’re at 120 fps, the next you’re stuttering down to 20 for no apparent reason. The menu UI has a noticeable input delay; pressing a button can take two or three seconds to register. I’ve had to restart the game because my character got stuck in the lobby, and multiplayer co-op is a buggy mess. If you’re not the host, your abilities might not work correctly—ultimates won’t make you invulnerable, and staggering bosses is hit or miss. The netcode is amateur hour. And for all the visual polish, the game uses generative AI for its 2D art. Major portions of the loading screens, promotional images, and even some in-game panels are clearly AI-generated. For a $40 game, that’s pathetic. It’s lazy. It’s the kind of corner-cutting that tells you the developers didn’t care.
The grind is the core of the post-story experience, and it’s not fun. Enemy health and defense scales to absurd levels, so even with decent gear you’re doing chip damage. Most weapons are worthless beyond a handful of meta builds. The crafting system is convoluted, the loot drops are stingy and often nonsensical (fighting a wolf gives you fangs, but never fur or claws), and the shadow extraction mechanic is fiddly to the point of frustration. The game essentially forces you into a repetitive loop of “enter dungeon → kill sponge enemies → return to hub → repeat” with very little variation. There’s no exploration, no meaningful side content, no sense of discovery. It’s a shallow treadmill with a shiny coat of paint.
What’s worse, the developer has gone silent. There are no roadmaps, no Q&As, no community discussions. Updates are rare and underwhelming—after six months of silence, they dropped one new story chapter and a paid DLC. Major bugs reported months ago remain unfixed. The Discord community is helpful, but that’s because the developers won’t help you. The mobile version of the same game has more content and gets regular updates, because it’s still generating money through microtransactions. The PC version feels abandoned, or at least maintained by a skeleton crew that doesn’t know or care what the playerbase wants.
I wanted to recommend this game. I really did. There’s a kernel of a good action RPG in here—the combat is genuinely satisfying, and when everything clicks, you feel powerful. But that feeling is fleeting, and the rest of the experience is a mess of broken promises, predatory monetization, and half-finished content. Even as a fan of Solo Leveling, I can’t justify spending $40 on this. If you find it on a deep sale for $15 or $20 and you’re a die-hard fan who can overlook the flaws, you might get some enjoyment out of it. For everyone else: just read the manhwa again. It’s cheaper, it’s complete, and it doesn’t make you feel like you’re being held hostage by a mobile game in a PC skin.
Score: 4/10