The Solo Leveling anime is taking the world by storm with its incredible action sequences, superb animation, and compelling cast of characters led by the Weakest Hunter of All Mankind, Sung Jinwoo. Netmarble’s Solo Leveling: ARISE lives up to the expectations set by the anime and webtoon, giving players a new way to enjoy the series and witness Jinwoo’s rise to greatness. Despite some of the recent blunders in anime game adaptations, Solo Leveling: ARISE manages to become a brilliant outlier as extremely fun and engaging action game.
Solo Leveling: ARISE offers a great amount of complementary material for those watching the Solo Leveling anime right now. Like the anime, players begin the game with a wimpy Sung Jinwoo as he heads into the double dungeon that would lead to his demise. In ironic fashion, Jinwoo feels really strong due to the game’s simple-but-effective combat system, despite being relatively weak in the canon at this point. This is just the tip of the iceberg in Solo Leveling: ARISE, since Jinwoo can become exceptional in various classes.
Solo Leveling: ARISE Complements the Anime and Webtoon
The story mode of Solo Leveling: ARISE goes well into the events of the webtoon with more than a dozen chapters to progress through from Jinwoo’s perspective. Players also have the opportunity to unlock additional side chapters that focus on supporting characters, such as Lee Joohee and Song Chiyul. Playing the story and side chapters together on the timeline gives a really similar experience to watching the Solo Leveling anime, except certain cutscenes are depicted in webtoon-like fashion. Of course, many in-game cutscenes also play out, and they’re really eye catching.
After making certain progress in the story, Jinwoo heads to the Hunter’s Association headquarters for a rundown of the facilities and additional pieces of playable content that can be explored. This includes the farmable Gates activity, which lets players complete instanced challenges for rewards that aid overall character progression. The game follows a similar progression structure to the likes of Honkai Impact 3rd and Honkai: Star Rail, allowing players to enhance each hunter’s abilities and overall level greatly.
Solo Leveling: ARISE is a gacha game, indeed. Many of the hunters, including the powerful Choi Jong-In himself, may be acquired from draws that increase the chances of a SSR pull after several draws. Fortunately, players may acquire many hunters for free, including Yoo Jinho, by completing challenges and just progressing the story. The game is very rewarding with a plethora of story missions, free activities, and limited-time events to complete, so F2P players won’t have any trouble here.
Solo Leveling: ARISE’s Combat System Shines Through
Despite the limitations of mobile games, Solo Leveling: ARISE brings unique environments, vivid visuals, and a compelling combat system that makes me want to keep playing more and more. Jinwoo and the vast roster of hunters can form a team of up to four characters and go head first into dungeons, challenges, and missions, usually resulting in a boss battle at the end. Each character has flashy skills, Ultimates, and techniques that are faithful to the source material while still looking impressive for a mobile action game.
Weapon feel impactful and satisfying to use in Solo Leveling: ARISE, and each hunter brings their own benefits and flair to the table as well. Depending on the weapon and class in use, the attack patterns may change to bring a different combat experience for Jinwoo. The level of customization makes Solo Leveling: ARISE stand out, as Jinwoo is essentially an RPG character that players can tailor to their own desired playstyle. Customization for the other hunters is more limited, but they can still be upgraded and built up to take on powerful bosses and end-game challenges.
Solo Leveling: ARISE’s combat system becomes even more rich with the amount of weapons, abilities, and unlockables that are available from the story and side content. The game strikes a perfect balance between character-driven action and RPG elements, making the combat system feel very satisfying. What’s more, the overall gameplay experience evolves as Jinwoo becomes stronger, with some tactical elements coming into play once the “Arise” ability is unlocked.
A Promising Action Game Awaits
Solo Leveling: ARISE is very promising, and more polish and improvements can make the game shine even more. On PC, the game runs feels well optimized and the UI is properly scalable. However, controller support still needs some work. For example, using a cursor on a controller for dialogue and other menus feels awkward. Fortunately, this is the only problem I encountered, since controller inputs are spot on and responsive. The default configuration is clearly modeled after the Xbox Series X|S controller, too.
In general, Solo Leveling: ARISE is shaping up to be a positive force in the gacha market, offering a great single player experience that fans will likely enjoy alongside the webtoon and anime. Like other gacha games, the content roadmap and flow of free post-launch updates will still be important, but the base experience at launch looks to be very inviting for those wanting to dive deeper into the world of Solo Leveling.
Solo Leveling: ARISE will release in 2024 for Android, iOS, and PC via Windows.
Disclaimer: Netmarble sent over a preview build of Solo Leveling: ARISE to Final Weapon for coverage purposes.
