Welcome to the Far, Far Range
Slime Rancher is a charming, first-person, sandbox experience. Play as Beatrix LeBeau: a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life a thousand light years away from Earth on the ‘Far, Far Range.’
Each day will present new challenges and risky opportunities as you...
Slime Rancher is a charming, first-person, sandbox experience. Play as Beatrix LeBeau: a plucky, young rancher who sets out for a life a thousand light years away from Earth on the ‘Far, Far Range.’
Each day will present new challenges and risky opportunities as you attempt to amass a great fortune in the business of slime ranching. Collect colorful slimes, grow crops, harvest resources, and explore the untamed wilds through the mastery of your all-purpose vacpack.
Stake Your Claim
The renowned rancher, Hobson Twillgers, has passed his ranch on to you. Get it back up and running, discover the secrets hidden on this mysterious planet, and dominate the Plort Market.
Grow crops and raise chickadoos to feed your collection of hungry slimes.
Complete daily requests from other ranchers to get bonus rewards.
Earn money to upgrade your vacpack, build more corrals, or expand your ranch.
Use Slime Science to find rare resources, craft decorations, and create gadgets that will help you on your adventures.
Explore a sprawling world loaded with lots of secrets and hidden treasures.
Slimetastic Features:
Choose from 3 game modes: Adventure, Casual, and Rush
Get creative and combine slimes into more than 150 hybrid slimes
Take advantage of our full controller support if you think keyboards should be used to play music instead of games
Not worth writing an in-depth review so here's a summary:
POSITIVES:
- Good learning curve.
- Decent graphics for this price.
- Cutesy art style that doesn't go overboard.
NEGATIVES:
- Difficulty... there isn't any to speak of. You're never in any danger of dying unless you're clumsy enough to fall into the sea and even then there's hardly any penalty for it. In terms of the actual farming/ranching it's more of a grind than anything even remotely challenging.
- Traversing the open world is very frustrating, it feels like it's made up of multiple linear levels stitched together. You have the means to traverse the map like you would in most open world games but you will usually be met with an invisible wall forcing you to take pre-determined paths instead. It's very easy to get lost in as you have nothing to help you find your way around apart from an extremely vague map.
- Resource gathering very tedious, the game encourages you to travel far for better resources but when you get there your inventory will most likely be full already as you can only carry 4 items at once.
- It features many interesting mechanics but none of them seem to really serve a purpose. It has a day/night cycle and you can sleep to skip the night time but there's absolutely no reason to do this as you'll never become exhausted. It also has a market system but given the size of your inventory and the lack of any practical way to store items there's really no raeson not to sell what you have immediately.
Honestly though, the biggest deal breaker for me had I known about it would be the fact that the Steam version received free exclusive DLC despite costing less than the GOG version, so technically the GOG version is incomplete. The GOG version also doesn't come with a demo despite the fact that the Steam version does. If there's one thing I can't stand it's when developers show platform bias.
based on 20 hours of play
TL DR : Slime rancher is a decent game from a technical point of view. It has a cute and efficient artistic direction, no bug, a great OST, decent texture and visual effects, and is even user friendly. But it fails at being a game! The gameplay is far below its competitors, even free browser games has more depth and less artificially restrained.
A bit more in depth:
The early access has cleared the game from bugs and improved its usability.
I do appreciate the OST even if sometimes it can be too much inspired from other ranching games.
The artistic direction is cute with great animations. The visual effects are correct; they sometimes have a tendency to be cheap.
But what would make such a game a good one? I would say a great diversity of animals and food to grow, nonlinear exploration with a good level design, a good background of story telling (which should be in accordance with the exploration steps), tasks becoming less and less repetitive thanks to technologies learned and stuff gathered during exploration, but also game mechanics renewed.
Here you have the exact contrary
The game has 15 different slimes but you will only raise 5-6 of them. Because you will need more and more money so you will focus on the last discovered ones since the prices of the previous ones will drop. Because the number of spot to grow food and raise Slimes is extremely restricted; unfortunately no further mechanics will change that. Because you literally runs for miles in your own ranch since the game artificially increases the distances between your corals and fields; the technology you unlock will only help you run quicker up to a ridiculous speed (at the end you feel like you are a bot from a Tool Assisted Speedrun) which removes all the fun.
The exploration becomes more and more linear and more and more tedious. During the first 5 hours I did enjoy exploring, finding chest, the big Slime etc but then you find out that you can’t open chests (even after 20hours I can only unlock 1/4 -1/3 of the chests) and the notes are badly translated (Fr) and pointless so you lose your appetite for exploring every corners. You also tastes at the emptiness of the world where only one area has interrupters for doors… which are totally useless except for one or two. No enigmas, no puzzles, very very few surprises… And I don’t call placing a Plort (gem) into a badly hidden statue an enigma; that’s the level zero of gameplay.
The French translations is very bad. But at least you stop being tempted to read all the pointless pseudo psycholo - philosophical stuff, very far from being new nor interesting.
All the ranching tasks are very repetitive and literally requires you to go back to your ranch, because you can lose your fields and rare seed you previously found during your exploration (since the wild crops are not boosted like yours, you have to wait a lot or to be at the right time and the right moment to get the rare “seeds”). Even the technology won’t help you here, since it would require conveyor belt and automated harvester. You can stock a bit but you will be mainly in "lean" production, since you will need money….
… and since the farming and ranching progression doesn’t scale at all with exploration part. Exploring is easy while making money on your ranch is slow compared to the huuuge amount of money needed to unlock the technology (the 7Zee Rewards Club, plus the Lab).
After 20h I have explored all the world, seen everything useful (slimes, food and the story) and every inch of this world. I can now try to build mega expensive machines to help me for my ranch; actual useful stuff such as teleporter (!) and a market link, so you don’t have to runs miles for basic things.
Stardew Valley cost less that Slime rancher but has a well-balanced gameplay where the player is rarely frustrated.
Here the game is frustrating the player with artificial limitations such as the imposed spaced locations of your corals and crops, the basic technology unlocked after an unknown amount of time, no renewal of the gameplay mechanics nor even a slight enhancement after 20h of play, a jetpack with bad collision on the obstacles and a restricted (again!) maximum height per jump (so you need to jump on a slightly higher surface to again jump on a bit higher one etc to finally get to your final destination you could have reach in one jump with real physical laws), a bad storytelling and the whole thing for a quite high price. Updates to add contents is announced but it seems that it will add new areas and Slimes but not solves all these issues.
The developers were probably right in putting all their efforts in the cuteness, since they advertised more easily their game and sold 700 000 copies on Steam. I hopefully did not brought it while it was in early access, I would have been seriously pissed-off to see what the game is after such a long period in testing.
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