Bought and installed right away on my old (as in over ten by now and it wasn't even the latest tech when I bought it back then) desktop computer and it runs beautifully. I love the graphics and this game has so many great features and such breadth and depth as to be astounding. There are also several mods available that improve some of its drawbacks. That's the good part. Now for the not-so-good. Being a girl in rl I decided to play a girl for a change. The bachelor pool of guys is mostly terrible. It also seems like they all use the same animation when you're talking to them. Still, I was willing to see where things went. But then I got to the game killer. I do not like to have to battle my way through a video game to progress. That kind of thing has never in my forty years of video game-playing life been fun for me. For some reason I did not realize this was so heavily involved when I bought "My Time at Portia". I found a mod that deals with having to waste precious time on fighting the little monsters around town but there are still all the other battles and that pretty much makes this game unplayable for me.
I didn't know exactly what to expect when I bought Slime Rancher. My kids had explained a little bit to me and said I'd like it. And I do. It's the first game in a long while I've started playing and didn't feel like I had already done it to death in previous games over the last twenty years so for that alone it deserves considerable points. I play casually, very casually, and sometimes just get lost in raising chickens, throwing food at slimes, and farming gordos for ornaments. Pros: Unique, original game play--doesn't feel like yet another HM game. Exploration with loot boxes and goodies to discover including plans for tech that enhances gameplay. It's a large world expanded with many unlockable areas. It's open-ended. The devs have a forum and people there do answer questions and try to be helpful. Cons: Lack of a mini map--huge need for that. I find the overall map very useful but the game needs both. A few aspects of the game require fairly good reflexes which I no longer have. Also, if it hadn't been for some YT walk-throughs I never would have found a few things. There are also a few features that would be extremely useful but would be too focused to post in a review. Oh, and the aforementioned lack of DLC for download here. That is so far a disappointment--maybe with a little prompting the devs would remedy the situation. P.S. I suppose when you're trying to sell off hundreds of plorts you've been hoarding waiting for a good price it does get a little grindy.
I played this on my laptop (Dell Latitude CORE i7) which is beefy for business, but wasn't built for gaming. I would not do it again. It has its pros and cons and sometimes a feature is both. This is definitely a different type of game. The graphics are simple, cute and kind of charming yet make it feel unfinished. There is farming, cooking, exploring, fighting pirate ghosts, and some linear questing. You'll feed yourself and your crew. Crew stew results in raising their happiness and you'll be rewarded accordingly but those same rewards cause the game to lag more. (I am a big fan of the crew stew aspect.) The end goal is to lift the curse that won't allow you to leave the island. Discovering recipes requires a tedious mini-game which also caused lag and the more recipes discovered the slower the cooking process got. Every item you interact with flashes. This isn't so bad when it's dark and otherwise you'd miss a chest. It's horrible when you're trying to get your farming done and off to the side the cooking pan and recipe book are constantly flashing. It's not well balanced. I started farming the way the game appeared to intend which resulted in a huge food surplus. Ultimately there are four huge fields but all that is needed is maybe one plant for each crop type. The crops have good visual cues as to their status but that also causes massive lag. After a while you most likely will never need to sleep. To me this is a perk (I rather enjoyed it after all). There are a lot of things to collect but a good portion of them do nothing but sit in your inventory yet trying to find enough needed items can be difficult at best. The pirate ghosts are almost too easy. I found myself fighting my computer that didn't want to handle it more than the actual battle. Lastly, I see very little in the way of replay value here.
Overall I've enjoyed this prehistoric colony builder. It isn't every day a person can go mammoth hunting, after all. I love the graphics and especially the hunting aspect. Tech discovery adds a nice depth to the gameplay. I also appreciate being able to move at my own pace and not be rushed. The inclusion of a pause button that allows looking around was a good move. There are a few things that could be improved though, and those fall mainly in the AI. If left to their own devices things go fairly willy-nilly in a real hurry. Starting maps are very limited and I don't see where this would have a lot of replay-ability because even trying to change up the research doesn't have any long-term effect.
I thought I had thoroughly researched this game before making my purchase but somehow I missed one detail: the lack of a pause button, the likes of which allows a person to stop the game and pan around and actually plan their build, or stop and collect one's thoughts about how to respond to a calamity. After I discovered it wasn't there I found a post by a dev saying they preferred no pause button as it increased tension. I am old, my brain is tired and slow and I play games for creativity and relaxation--tense situations aren't relaxing. I am truly bummed that I wasted my money on this.
And so far I've made it to Part 2. I loved building the train. I love collecting the puzzle pieces. I got a kick out of shooting down balloons for collecting the pieces of the picture, and I enjoy putting the puzzle pieces of the world back together. Problem? I hate block puzzles and every time I get one I'm facing down something I just flat-out don't want to be bothered with doing.
Here are my thoughts: Pros: Simple yet mostly beautiful graphics. - Music is mostly enjoyable so it's almost always a pleasure to have on. - Engaging exploration that makes me want to keep going. - The various identifiable plant types and parts in the oddest places is a hoot. - Humorous moments, I found myself laughing out loud several times throughout. Cons: Same graphics so beautifully simple at times are often thrown off by large, in-your-face photos. - Some of the cards flat-out did not complete for no reason I can think of. - Such lovely and engaging play throughout most of the levels (I love the little town) then we get down into the root system and it just keeps going on and on and on....and on to the point where I'm almost wanting to gnaw off my arm to make an escape. I actually had to stop playing midway through that round because my wrist hurts so bad from all the clicking.
So here you are, you start out (depending on) with one or two of these little guys and you mainly have a single mission, which is to keep them alive until you either breed enough more or capture others to keep your tribe going. Along the way you're attempting to breed for various skills and genetics, trying to manipulate mutant genes by choosing what you want to happen. There are other oddities in the genetics too, like just out of the blue one will be born with something I've never seen before, nor shows up in their genes and certainly isn't available in the mutations. In keeping them alive they have to eat (this is where skills are helpful) and there's a variety of food sources, and certain of them can be easier to obtain using a little strategy. You'll encounter hazards and potential illnesses that can shorten their lifespan (don't leave one sitting under a coconut tree because dropping coconuts will potentially daze them and take a day from their life), or your poor females get bred by a rogue male (which, from what I've seen always have the Derp nose), or they might get parasites, etc., etc. On the surface all that stuff sounds pretty interesting, doesn't it? And it is, but here's the rub. Your animals are like game pieces. Each one can make exactly three moves per turn on their game board which is made up of hexagon-shaped spaces. You will spend the majority of your time clearing out grass because you can't move through it well, and the other largest part collecting food (basically you end up needing dedicated food gatherers and pity anyone who gets two starters with high fishing skill but no other skill because they will likely starve to death). Ultimately it's not a bad game but it does get extremely repetitive in fairly short order.
I had played a Tropico game years ago and I was excited to try this one. I'm thinking I should have read the reviews, because what I loved about the old one was that if I wanted to just build my town I could do that in Sandbox Mode. I can't do the same thing here, at all. No, instead if I want to start in the Colonial era I will eventually end up having to get invaded, and despite playing at an easy difficulty level it doesn't matter how many troops I have, the AI has more, and every stinkin' time the AI WILL run my units around in the worst way possible (like, oh yeah, let's wipe out all of our infantry by trying to kill the invading tanks, so there's no one left to defend the palace--that'll show those guys!) And despite my opting to pay off the Axis so they wouldn't invade, they took my money and still invaded! I just spent hours building a nicely laid-out town to have it all go up in ruins, so I'm a little ticked off about that.
Buy it for the first bits of obsessive playing but don't be surprised when it turns into a major grind-fest. I'd say this is just about on par with every other Harvest Moon game. At first it's fascinating, running around and discovering all the new things, meeting all the people, never enough time to do everything so you do a little bit at a time. Then you eventually work yourself up until you have your farm animals and your greenhouse, and you're working toward completing your collections, then you realize you're almost three years in and you've missed half the recipes because you don't remember to watch TV (and there is no other way to get them and they cycle every other year) as well as missed several other guide-dang-its, and you still need to kill at least 300 of a particular monster to collect a thing, and it's almost time for the third fair and you're seriously thinking about pulling the same stuff from storage for your grange display that won you first place the year before (or possibly not even going to the fair at all because they'll all say the exact same dialogue over again anyway), and every morning you're following the same pattern taking care of the milking, the egg gathering, and the sheering, the endless petting of the animals and trying to get their happiness up for the best quality products which will never happen anyway because every stinkin' time it rains they take a happiness hit from being in the barn all day, and suddenly you're bored to tears. P.S. Real milk cows stand nicely in a stanchion to be milked, chickens lay eggs in nest boxes, rabbits give birth, and NONE of them need petted!
