Stake Your Claim
Edited on: September 28, 2025
Posted on: January 20, 2021
dnovraD
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 77
A great game, too many embellishments.
Summary: If I were making this game, I'd trim 60% of it out. Slime Rancher is an exploration game in the guise of a ranching game. The ranching is simply a means to accelerate the exploration. If the ranching really mattered, there'd be some kind of performance metric of which to aim for. To put it simply, the exploration is absolutely fatally flawed. Until far too late into the game for anyone to care, there's no semblance of a fast return/travel system. Your best bet is to luck upon one of several hidden teleporters and hope it's actually active. In order to reach a level of equipment that could be considered competent, you have to do an inordinate amount of grinding. And to do what? Go around a vast map you can't even utilize? Speaking of the map, opening it at any time is an exercise in trying to explain to a game developer how overdesign is a thing that exists; the level of detail in the landscape & map is such that as to be simply overcomplicated. There's no way to pare it back to basic formations or even use it. There's just no minimap. (Which would have made all this encouraged exploration great.) There's a Radar Button, but this doesn't actually tell you the range to things. A lot of the game breaks down like this. While careful detail was etched into many systems that never needed them, most of the critical systems are left threadbare or an exercise to the player's imagination. The core loop is purely extrinsic. There's no skills, no experience, no learning to do things better, just raw grind. Without even the cheek to lampoon it in a clever way while avoiding the pitfalls of its own design. Unfortunately, this is from the school of "WOW! ISN'T THIS BAD" school of ironic eyerolling game design; "Just because you can point out bad design, doesn't mean you should put it in your game to laugh at it." The charm here fails to cover for the mechanical flaws of the game. I couldn't keep myself engaged in spite of the colorful cloy; just as all the sugar in the world won't save a spinach pie.
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