Nothing captures the essence of “power fantasy” like video games. You’re the player, and everything revolves around you. Leveling up is a ritual, the world coming to a halt around you as you celebrate and distribute your new stat points. It’s a rush, a sign of progress, a moment of reprieve, an explosion of power, all of the above and more all at once. It’s no surprise a whole storytelling genre grew from that sensation, and Solo Leveling is perhaps the most popular of its kind. What if a video game-like level up system was applied to a person outside of a game? The sky’s the limit. Now, what if that story turned back around and became a video game itself? It’s a little weird, but that’s Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive. I am pretty much The Guy Arise Overdrive is part Monster Hunter, part mid-tier mobile action-RPG, and part gachaslop, minus the gacha. It’s also a breezy adaptation of the webtoon, itself an adaptation of an online novel series. In a world in which Hunters use powers they’re born with to explore interdimensional portals called Dungeons, Sung Jin-woo joins parties as an infamously bottom-ranked Hunter to try and eke out a living. After being supermurdered by evil statues, Jin-woo is granted a second chance by a mysterious power, becoming a “Player.” Now able to conjure a video game-like menu only he can see, Jin-woo earns stat points and bonus abilities that let him grow in power despite his low initial ranking. Things get stranger from there as the true nature of this ability is revealed, but the basic gist is Video Game Powers! Last year, Solo Leveling: Arise was released for mobile platforms. As a free-to-play action-RPG, Arise had simple action, big-budget visuals, and a bunch of items, crafting, and power-gating that eventually fed into a premium transaction system. Overdrive is a relaunch that overhauls the combat, expands other gameplay aspects, and removes the microtransactiony parts to make everything obtainable by gameplay. It still feels like a mobile gacha game in practice though, with convoluted menus, poorly explained resource vacuums, and a newly complicated way to recruit supporting characters. It doesn’t constantly push you to spend extra money to engage in anything though, which is a plus. You just have to grind! So much grinding! Only I can level up and those other guys can too To facilitate the grinding, this game about one guy who can level up (Solo Leveling’s unlocalized title roughly translates to Only I Level Up) is somehow a cooperative multiplayer game. You can party up with other Jin-woos to tackle big ol’ bosses, taking their parts to do things like develop weapons in progression trees that closely resemble Monster Hunter. Your time is split between playing free missions alone or with other players, and going through the story mode that uses a motion comic version of the webtoon to re-tell the source material’s story chapter by chapter. You can’t just play the story, though; unlocking chapters requires going through a minimum amount of side content. You’ll need to level up and upgrade your stuff to hang anyway, so it’s kind of a grinding ecosystem pushing you around. A bunch of multiplayer cooperation with groups of The Same Guy is weird, but to Arise Overdrive’s credit, there are a lot of customization options. You can choose different classes for your version of Jiin-woo, and further customize him from there with a series of skill trees and manual stat allocation. Lots of cosmetic unlockables are strewn throughout the game as well, giving you a chance to make your guy look slightly different than other peoples’ guys. It works for what it is, which is an exploitative IP-driven money pit with the dangerous parts sanded off to make it look more like a real video game. And it almost plays like a real video game, too! But not quite. At least, not in a way that’s actually satisfying beyond the primitive pleasures of mashing buttons and watching numbers go up. Once a mobage always a mobage Arise Overdrive pretends to be an action-RPG, with dodging, blocking, parrying, weapon-slash-stance-swapping, lots of special moves, and other goodies. But it’s mostly window-dressing, and combat is largely about getting behind enemies (for a simple back attack bonus) and mashing your buttons while cycling through cooldowns. Moves don’t really flow together well or cancel properly, so you just kind of toss each thing out as it’s available in whatever order works out. Monsters have certain stun and “Break” states, but aside from moving away from the occasional AoE or seeking out a generous parry window for an extra button or two, you really don’t have to think much about what you’re doing. The animations are cool and flashy, with a lot of work put into translating the webtoon’s elaborately drawn lines of motion into actual motion. But aside from being flashy, combat is extremely shallow and not terribly rewarding to engage with. Speaking of flash, while Arise Overdrive is a decent-looking game, it has some pretty big problems with optimization. I’m far from a PC power gamer, but I’m not trying to run games above 1080p anyway, and it took a lot of tinkering to make this game run smoothly. Regardless of where I got the active game parts going, any cutscenes that weren’t motion comics were abysmal, with tons of frame-skipping and weird audio issues no matter how low I cranked the settings. A look at the game’s Steam discussions showed similar issues on hardware much stronger than mine, showing that things are off in terms of performance. Some cutscenes had work in progress notes on them during my review period, suggesting that some pieces of Arise Overdrive are coming in hot. You might want to try the demo before taking the plunge! Solo Leveling is a fun story, as much as a power fantasy distilled down to its simplest elements can be, but turning something inspired by video games back into a video game inherently washes away some of that novelty. As a video game, Solo Leveling’s biggest hook is just a normal fact of life, the ability of leveling up and assigning points to stats as common as taking a lunch break. The Monster Hunter-like grouping and grinding is an attempt to make more of the story’s world in this gameplay context, but it can’t escape the homogeneity of mobile game trends it ends up leaning on to power the whole endeavor. As such, Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive looks impressive, but its muscles are largely just for show. Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive is now available for PC. A code was provided by the publisher for this review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146974/solo-leveling-arise-overdrive-review-score
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