A Solo Leveling Arise review has to start with what you brought to it, because that’s what’s actually being reviewed. If you came in cold, no manhwa, no anime, just someone who heard the game had good combat, your experience is a different conversation. I came in as someone who’d finished the manhwa and watched the first season of the Netflix anime. I came in with formed opinions about these characters. That’s the context that matters for everything that follows.
What the Source Material Built
The manhwa is the thing. The anime is a decent translation of it, Season 1 captures enough of the arc that non-readers can track what’s happening, and the production quality is solid. But if you’ve read the manhwa, the anime is interesting mainly for what it does with the material visually. Watching Igris and Beru move is where the anime earns its place for me. Those two characters have such a specific presence in the panels, Igris’s silent knight loyalty, Beru’s barely contained ferocity and seeing them animated, seeing how they carry themselves in motion, is one of those rare moments where an adaptation actually adds something instead of just restating it. I already knew these characters inside and out from the manhwa. Watching them move made them feel real in a different way. That’s the standard the anime set for what this IP feels like when it’s handled right.
The game had to follow that. It didn’t.
What the Netmarble Launcher Actually Is
I played Arise through the Netmarble launcher on PC, which is how a lot of people who want a desktop experience find it before they know about ARISE OVERDRIVE on Steam. The launcher isn’t a PC port in any meaningful sense. It takes the mobile game and runs it in a desktop window. The resolution scales up. The display is larger. The underlying game is exactly the same product, the same UI built for thumbs, the same control layout designed for touchscreen, the same pacing decisions made for a phone session. You get a bigger window into a mobile game. That’s not the same thing as a PC game.
The controls in this context are a symptom, not the diagnosis. Yes, the input mapping on the Netmarble launcher feels translated rather than native. Yes, keyboard and mouse interaction with a UI that was designed around tapping feels like wearing gloves. But the controls aren’t what killed the immersion for me. What killed it was the realization that the game’s trying to tell a rich, dense story inside a format that structurally can’t hold it.
The Context Problem
This is the actual issue with Arise, and it applies regardless of platform. Solo Leveling’s story isn’t a simple one. Sung Jin-Woo’s arc works because of accumulated weight, the E-Rank humiliation, the double dungeon, the slow revelation of what the System actually is, the way the shadow army grows to reflect his internal state as much as his power level. Igris appears and means something because of everything that came before the moment he appears. Beru’s entire arc earns his position in the shadow army through a full story beat that lands because of context you’ve been building for volumes. These aren’t moments you can abbreviate.
A console or PC game already makes hard cuts to manage this kind of source material. Cutscenes compress timelines. Character introductions skip beats that existed in the original. You accept this because the medium has the runtime and the input fidelity to compensate with gameplay depth. A mobile game compounds every one of those problems. The cuts are harder. The runtime expectations are shorter. The format pulls toward quick pick-up sessions, which means every moment that requires you to remember chapters of context to feel its weight is fighting the format it’s sitting inside.
Arise wants you to feel something when Igris shows up. The game can’t build the ground that feeling requires. Not in a mobile format, not in a session structure designed around playing between things. When Igris appears in the manhwa, it lands. When he appears in the anime, it lands differently but it still lands. In Arise on the Netmarble launcher, he’s a character in a cutscene inside a mobile game on a big monitor. The gap between what that moment should feel like and what it actually feels like on screen is the clearest measurement of why the format failed the IP.
What the Game Is Good For
Arise isn’t without merit when you adjust your expectations correctly. As a quick pick-up game something you open for twenty minutes on your phone because you’ve got a dungeon run queued and you want to see the skill animations go off, it works. The combat has visual flash. The hunter collection system gives you something to progress toward. The aesthetic faithfulness to the manhwa means the moment-to-moment visual experience is genuinely good. If you’re not trying to get immersion from it, if you’re treating it as a bite-sized action game in a universe you like, the game sits comfortably in that space.
The problem is that Arise doesn’t position itself as a bite-sized game. It positions itself as a full RPG experience in the Solo Leveling universe, complete with story cinematics, character arcs, and the expectation that you’ll follow Jin-Woo’s journey in a way that carries emotional weight. That framing sets up a promise the format can’t keep. The game can deliver a session. It can’t deliver an experience. For people who came to it through the manhwa, that gap is obvious and it doesn’t close with more play time.
The Honest Position
If you finished the manhwa and watched the anime and want to know if Arise is the game that does the IP justice, it isn’t. It gets the look right and gets the context wrong. The moments that matter in Solo Leveling matter because of everything built around them, and mobile game sessions are the wrong container for that kind of weight. Play it if you want to spend time in the world and you’re fine keeping your expectations at the level of a good-looking distraction. Don’t play it expecting to feel anything close to what Igris and Beru made you feel in the panels or on screen. That bar’s set too high for what the format can deliver.
