[Mobile] Solo Leveling Arise review – far from a Genshin killer

[Aronus]

Solo Leveling Arise is fun in bursts but also filled with too much gacha-based padding and too many frustrations to rival the genre's best.

 

While Sung Jinwoo has a detailed attribute system that lets you build him up, investing in areas like strength and agility as you go, the hunters’ leveling is much more reminiscent of your average gacha game. In order to upgrade them, you not only have to unlock them via draw cards, which are all based on RNG, but you also have to get duplicates of the same item to limit-break them.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the rolls weren’t so terrible. Whether you’re hoping to pull an SSR-ranked weapon or character, the majority of selections have a drop rate of around 1.2%. For example, it took me about eight hours to pull a third support character. So unless you’re investing heavily in microtransactions, you should expect to grind for the weapons and characters you so desperately desire. I also found that it eventually becomes impossible to progress through the main story without repeatedly grinding out a lot of the same content.

Solo Leveling Arise review: screenshot of a hectic boss fight.

This issue rears its head around chapter six, where Dungeon Breaks and Hard mode are first introduced. The former sees you fighting the same reskinned minions and bosses from familiar, lifeless, and repetitive stages, cycling through only six or so backdrops, ranging from slight variations of caves to cityscapes.

The most frustrating part is that the difficulty scale isn’t necessarily based on challenging, skill-based encounters but on the fact that I was working against the clock. Every single stage has a terribly tight time limit. If you don’t finish off the boss by the time the clock hits zero – after you’ve already likely defeated three rooms worth of additional enemies on the way – then the entire level is a wash. While this is certainly a speedrunner’s dream and also fits in with the urgency of the narrative, the roughly three-minute maximum time limit is brutal, especially when you progress to harder enemies such as Igris.

 

Solo Leveling Arise review – far from a Genshin killer