Slime Rancher (2017)

Lets keep this simple. This game looks good, simple and clean. The only thing that will tank your FPS is not collecting the plorts off the ground.

The gun, teleports, keys, farms, etc. are all fun, simple mechanics that add so much to the game.

The slimes are cute and derpy and really make the game what it is. There are infinite possibilities in which slimes you farm because you can combine them and farm 2 types of plorts from 1 coral.

Veggies and chickens are cool.

Map is large, there's so much to explore and unlock. So much lore to find as well.

There's so much customization to be had. You can customize your slimes, your ranch, your corals, your base, almost everything.

Graphics are beautiful.

Haven't played this game in 2-3 years so that's why this is so simple, but this game is a must.

Can't wait to see what Monomi Park has in store for us in Slime Rancher 2!

Combine the joys of making numbers endlessly go up with the fun of exploring a pretty, slime-filled world.

There are a ton of types of slimes for you to collect, bring home, and shove in a pen to feed and sell their poops (sorry, 'plorts') for a big ol' profit. Managing your ranch is a pretty relaxed affair, for the most part, with each type of slime having different needs and dangers to it (there are some that explode, some who only thrive in darkness, and some whose plorts are an irresistible temptation that causes other slime types to try and escape -- just to name a few!) which you have to balance as you set up your ranch. You can also combine two slimes, to get the benefits, risks -- and plorts! -- of both types. Mostly this is not a difficult thing to balance, but if you do mess up, things can snowball quickly, and you might find your ranch overrun by hybrids you don't want -- or worse, dangerous Tarr slimes who will try to take a chomp out of you! But so long as you keep things slow and steady, it isn't hard or complicated to avoid mismanaging your ranch, so I find this to be a pretty calming game to play, overall.

Exploration is mostly enjoyable, featuring gorgeous vistas of different biomes, full of 'feral' slimes whom you can bring home and/or be threatened by. The controls are serviceable enough, with upgrades such as a jetpack making things easier to traverse. The areas can be pretty maze-like and confusing, though, and I've more than once found myself lost with no convenient way to return home. Thankfully, you can build teleporters later, but in the early game it might be frustrating to end up somewhere dangerous and far from home.

There is some story in the game, told through e-mails and journals you can find throughout the world, and while it adds some interest and is a nice touch, it's not strictly speaking necessary. I do enjoy it, though, and I'm glad it's there.

Overall, Slime Rancher is a great game if you need something that's deep enough to take your mind off things, but low-pressure enough to not add more stress to your life.

One of my top favorite games I played in 2020! Slime Rancher is essentially Pure Joy: The Video Game. While most gamers were relying on Animal Crossing for a daily fix of chill gaming to get through quarantine, I was playing this instead.

Slime Rancher is a 1st-person "farming sim" sort of game, but instead of farming you're mainly finding adorable slimes (think Dragon Quest, but even cuter), vacuuming them up, bringing them to a shielded pen on your ranch, feeding them, vacuuming up their crystal "plorts," and then selling the plorts. That's the cycle, and as you might guess it's a "gotta spend money to make money" game where the more you earn, the more you'll be able to spend, and then you'll be earning even more. The game can get very addicting that way.

Having the game in 1st-person gives it a different feel compared to many other games of this sort. (Definitely feels more "down-to-earth," you could say!) There's more of an emphasis on exploration, and there's even a sort of action-combat element to it all: when you run into dangerous "toxic" slimes, you'll need to shoot some water at them. To spice up the gameplay further, you can also take on requests from other ranchers. These requests eventually lead to extra modes of sorts, each of which I found quite fun. One is a kind of survival mode while you gather rare berries, another is a timed search for hidden "glitch" slimes in a VR world, and another (my favorite) has you chasing a herd of quick slimes and shooting them with electric bursts to collect rare plorts from them.

Slime Rancher is a sweet and endearing game, overflowing with charm and positivity. I strongly recommend reading all the flavor text in this game, because a lot of it is genuinely funny! Or at least, it usually put a smile on my face. And again, I can't emphasize enough how cute the slimes themselves are. There are loads of different types to find, and half the fun is creating giant slimes by combining two types together. So each time you discover a new slime type, you're really unlocking a whole bunch of new combinations to try out. A wonderful game that will appeal especially to those wanting to experiment a bit in a "farming sim" sandbox.

Also, the derpy chickens are the best! Can never get enough of those chickens. (And neither can the meat-eating slimes, hue hue.)

Game Summary You've moved to a faraway planet to ranch slimes. Collect and maintain slims to gain money and resources to improve your farm and further explore the world.

Review Portion I expected a charming farming experience with fun exploration. Upon starting, you get some letters from other pioneers and people back home, sparking hope that these relationships will blossom over the course of the game. They don't. The game feels empty. It feels like a 3D clicker game. You don't develop relationships with the characters, you just occasionally send them supplies in exchange for a reward. Your relationship from home is the only thing built upon by one-sided letters. The world is fun-looking, but ultimately empty. There's no reason to go back to most areas once you have the slimes you need corralled on your farm. Simply gather slimes, throw them in a pen, and harvest food to feed them for money. Repeat until you can go to a new area and plunder it. I haven't been this disappointed in a game in quite some time.

Summary

A very fun looking game that becomes tedious almost immediately. Even if this sounds appealing to you, avoid on PS4. It runs very poorly, with frequent frame rate drops so bad the game slows down.

Personal Score : 5/10

"Objective" Score : 6.5/10, 4.5/10 if you're playing on PS4. This shouldn't be sold in stores in it's current state, let alone have a second Deluxe Edition release.

Slime Rancher is a waste of time. It's not just a terrible game (if you can even call it that), it deliberately wastes your time. Like 'F2P' mobile games it has timers and daily quests. You have to do a bunch of tedious stuff to unlock the ability to do more tedious stuff. There's no actual pay-off. You gather resources not to build something concrete or to fight an enemy or to do anything really. It's just a loop. You gather slimes to gather resources to gather slimes.

There is a lab that allows you to build neat-looking things like robots and teleporters, but getting to the point where you can actually make those takes god knows how long. I played this for 6 hours and wasn't even able to build a basic pump yet. Yes, again, you gather resources to gather resources.

Everything takes way too much time with virtually nothing to show for it. The game also loves to not tell you stuff. How do you get keys? How do you open treasure pods? Yeah, "read the wiki". It's just awful. And the worst thing is that they could've made this half-decent but they opted to waste your time and effort instead.

I have to admit, one of the hardest, but most accomplished, things I have done in gaming is completing the achievement list in Modern Warfare (COD4) to 100%, including the infamous Mile High Club. This was quite possibly the single most stress filled moment I have ever had while playing video games. In fact, I can't really remember a time where video games and stress didn't go hand in hand, because it seems to me that the medium has taken it upon itself to be extremely hard to the point of being stressful, and thus, not being fun. Stress doesn't equal fun. Because of playing the COD Modern Warfare games, and all the Halo titles on the hardest difficulty as well, there was a point where I didn't want to play FPS's anymore, because they simply were emotionally exhausting. They drained me of any feeling other than anger. It just wasn't healthy and it stopped being fun ages ago.

I'm telling you this to give context to this review. Around early 2014, I just sort of...stopped playing video games. This came after having played for as long as I could remember, so this was not a hobby I did casually, it was a hobby that took up a majority of my free time. But, for whatever reason, burnout or otherwise, I simply stopped playing games. Around 2016 I started again, and while it was nice to work through a backlog at first, including the new Wolfenstein and some other older titles I'd missed like Catherine, it was also just...the same old thing. Skyrim still ran rather poorly with ridiculous physics making the player enraged that they could scale a mountain with bunny hops but couldn't adequately shield themselves from a dragon at times. Wolfenstein was fantastic and all, but in the end, it was just another shooter. A great shooter, at that, but a shooter nonetheless, and soon I found myself in the same predicament as before. Stress. Stress over things being overly challenging for the sake of being challenging and stress at simply not enjoying things anymore. Was this just part of my depression? Or was there really a problem in the gaming world?

Then, I started playing Steam Games, and after a while, I eventually found my way to a little game called Stardew Valley. While it's lovely and relatively stressfree, it lead me to a game called Slime Rancher, and that's where this becomes a review. Slime Rancher got me to start thinking about this new genre of games that I've come to call the Wholesome Games. They're games that are basically stressfree and just overall plain adorable. No worries, no cares, just...wholesome. Games that don't really pit the player against anything, no real villains or trials and tribulations, just...living life. I don't think it's any coincidence that both these games are about farming, but that's a whole other issue in and of itself. Slime Rancher is a blessing of a game, in all honesty. As a young woman sent to a far away planet, your only job is to run a ranch and fill it with slimes, taking care of them however you see fit, and to make things even nicer, the game has a "Casual" mode, which allows no real enemies or threats to spawn. It really is that simple. Sure, there's varying aspects to it; unlocking other parts of the Far Range and the Slime Doors and all that, but all that stuff is secondary to the main concept: having a relaxing time and wrangling slime.

I think games like Stardew Valley and Slime Rancher need to exist. I think they fill a niche market right now, but I think that niche market could easily become a huge market, especially seeing how successful they both have been, to the point of ending up on the current gen consoles and not just PC. Life is becoming so much more stressful every single day, the last thing I want is for my main hobby to be stressful as well, and I think that's why I love games like Slime Rancher. Because I know that, no matter how awful my day may have been or how shitty I feel that particular day, I can log onto my ranch at the end of everything and just enjoy being with my slimes. It's quaint and peaceful and overall wholesome and I love it. I love that this wholesomeness exists, and that I get to partake in it. For just a few hours I don't have to worry or be upset or be angry or stress. I just get to breath. In a medium being suffocated by gritty, hardcore FPS titles and over extended RPG's and games that somehow last 128 hours when they really should only be lasting about 45 at the most, lookin' at you Assassins Creed, games like Stardew Valley and Slime Rancher are a miracle. A safe haven from all the ridiculousness that gaming has wrought upon itself in the last 10 years.

Don't get me wrong, I still love playing other games. I love Don't Starve for that exact stress factor I'm talking about hating. I love having to think on my feet and stuff, but sometimes I just want to NOT worry, and that's why Slime Rancher is a godsend.

The aesthetic is just downright adorable, to the point of being almost nauseatingly cute, and the music is minecraft level peaceful. The gameplay is simple as can be and the only end goal is being the best dang Slime Rancher you can be. No saving anybody, no conquering anything, no taking down some ridiculous regime. No. Just ranchin' slimes. That's all it's about, man. I've talked ad nauseam in other reviews about the need for simplicity and my personal love for it, but this isn't that. Slime Rancher is simple, yes, but it isn't simple in the way that, say, Cosmochoria is simple. Cosmochoria is a game we've all played before, in one way or another, so that by picking it up we basically know what to do in the first 5 minutes. While Slime Rancher is relaxing, it isn't hand holdingly dumbed down. There's still plenty I have to discover and learn on my own, and that's exciting! For the first time in a long time in video games, I actually look FORWARD to discovering how to do things and unlocking new stuff. That says a lot.

Slime Rancher has done what I considered impossible. They've turned relaxation into a game genre. This is casual gaming at its finest, and its peak, at its most perfect. While there were games like this before it, Minecraft or, even further back, Animal Crossing, there's nothing really like Slime Rancher. Slime Rancher has taken it to the extreme, and it works because of it. Now I can actually relax and unwind instead of staying stressed out and clenched up. I don't play games to be angry, I play games to be happy. Slime Rancher makes me happy.

Maybe it can make you happy too.