Solo Leveling: ARISE Review

Whether you're a newcomer to the world of Solo Leveling or a diehard fan of the manhwa and webtoon series, you're in for a thrilling ride in the third-person action adaptation, Solo Leveling:ARISE. You'll find yourself stepping into the shoes of the protagonist, Sung Jinwoo, as he embarks on a journey from being the lowest-ranked hunter to becoming an unrivalled hero. As you tread the path of Sung, you will experience first-hand the sense of development and growth that the character goes through.

In Solo Leveling: ARISE, the storytelling approach is a blend of cinematic animation, visual-novel style narration, and manhwa-like illustrations, creating an immersive gaming experience. Added to this are the Gates — a series of daily trials that are crucial for character upgrades, though you can buy more keys to have more goes. These are your main resource for levelling up both Sung and the other characters you’ll obtain. They've also thrown in an auto-fight feature in the Gates, a welcome addition for those trying to balance their gaming time with other tasks, and if you’re finding them too challenging, you can always look for easier ones.

You can have a party of up to four, depending on the mission, so you will usually rely on the gacha system to get new party members. They’re very, very rare, though, so you’ll wind up with more weapons than characters easily; at least the gacha tickets are easy enough to come by, even without buying them through in-app purchases, so you can keep trying. You may be thinking that I was given some premium currency or gacha tickets to write this review… well I was told to expect something, but at time of writing, they hadn’t shown up. In fact, the microtransactions had also seemingly not been implemented, so I can’t comment on the value for money that they may or may not be.

Somewhat annoyingly, the version that I got to play earlier this year only went up to Chapter 7, and after days of grinding in this version I’m still only in Chapter 8! So I’ve been waiting all this time to find out what this “Arise” mechanic that publisher Netmarble has mentioned multiple times in marketing material is about, and I still don’t know because it opens up in Chapter 9!

I’ll admit to being impressed with how much side content is available in Solo Leveling. There are extra side stories to give players more information on side and minor characters, the aforementioned Gates, Encore Missions, Battlefield of Trials, and more modes which unlock after certain chapters. These give extra challenges, and more reasons to keep playing every day due to keys resetting. There is also an Event, which at the time I was playing for review was Rock, Paper, Scissor, and I assume it changes frequently. You had a certain number of each, as did the opponent, and you’d have to win to get prizes. It was certainly novel!

However, the game did have some hitches. Navigating through the game menus can feel slow as the game seems to need to think about things just a bit too long at times. I also experienced a couple of crashes meaning I had to restart the game, log back in, find out if my progress had been saved (it had)... There also isn’t a lot of variation in gameplay, with each mission and mode basically being a different difficulty of the same things that had come before it.

Despite these minor setbacks, Solo Leveling: ARISE brings a compelling narrative (which will be familiar to fans), solid gameplay mechanics, and lots to do to the table. The underdog tale of Sung Jinwoo is sure to keep you hooked if you’ve been wanting more. Hopefully they don’t screw it up by altering things post-launch and adding lots of microtransactions.