Slime Rancher

A nice casual game

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.

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.

q4xaweq

Controller input (Xbox wireless controller via BT in my case) is broken on M1 macs.