Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive Review: A Grind That Mistakes Volume for Depth

What it is

Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive is Netmarble Neo's premium, buy-once action RPG built on the webtoon and anime, originally released on PC in late November 2025 and now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S since 3 November. The Standard Edition is $39.99, the Deluxe Edition $44.99 with a Sung Jinwoo costume, a Cha Hae-In emote set and a handful of extras. The pitch is simple: the mobile gacha game's systems, rebuilt as a full-price console title where every hunter and every weapon is earned by playing.

How it plays

You are Sung Jinwoo, the weakest hunter alive, and the story retells his climb to the Shadow Monarch chapter by chapter as a motion comic between dungeons. Combat is where the console version makes its case: dodging, blocking, parrying, stance swaps between weapons, and the Shadow army that soaks damage while you set up a back attack to Break a boss. On a 4K TV with the DualSense ticking under each parry, the first few hours are properly exciting, and Netmarble's animators clearly love the source material. Four-player co-op raids against oversized commanders are the best thing in the game, especially once teams start coordinating Breaks.

Where it falls apart

The problem is not the first five hours, it is hours ten through thirty. Combos do not chain naturally, so fights become a cooldown rotation with a dodge in between. Story chapters are gated behind a quota of side missions, so you grind repetitive dungeons to be allowed to watch the next bit of plot you already know. Weapon progression is a Monster Hunter-style tree fed with boss parts, which sounds great until you realize the parts drop slowly enough that the game's mobile ancestry shows through every menu. And those menus: currencies, materials, hunter recruitment, enhancement tiers, all of it designed for a shop that no longer exists. Removing the gacha was the right call; keeping the gacha skeleton was not.

Console specifics

On PS5 I was mostly comfortable in the performance-oriented mode, but the non-comic cutscenes still skip frames and the audio occasionally desyncs, the same complaint PC players had a year ago. Load times are fine. There is no cross-play information worth repeating here, and matchmaking for raids filled quickly in the launch week, which it needs to, because solo raid attempts are a slog. German text is supported; Croatian is not, but this is not a game where you will miss nuance.

Price and region

Forty dollars for a game that never asks for another cent is honest. Forty dollars for a game you will grind through on autopilot is the actual question. In our region the Deluxe upsell is easy to ignore; the costume is cosmetic and the extras are not worth the five dollars.

Who it is for

Solo Leveling fans who want to play the arcs they know with friends and do not mind a grind. People who liked the look of the gacha version but refused the monetization. Not for anyone coming from Monster Hunter Wilds or Phantom Blade Zero expecting combat with real depth.

Verdict

Arise Overdrive is a fan service product that respects your wallet and wastes your time. The raids are fun, the spectacle is real, and the loop underneath is a mobile treadmill with the coin slot taped over.

Score: 6/10

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Playstation_Dualsense_controller.jpg