Is Slime Rancher a cute game? Absolutely. The sound effects, the colorful environments, and the bouncy slimes are all very squee-worthy. Once you get past the visual adorableness, it almost turns into a first-person clicker-game. You find and hoover up slimes into the gun, shoot them back out into pens, feed the slimes by hoovering up fruits and veggies or chickens, and shooting those into pens, hoover up "plorts" (poop), and shoot those into the "market" to make money...so you can buy stuff that makes the farming more efficient...so you can make more money to buy more things to make farming more efficient...ad infinatum. That's it, in a nutshell. There's some exploration involved to find the uber-slime of a zone and open up the next area which contains more exotic slimes (read: harder to keep contained), but that just feeds the "need better stuff" purchasing treadmill. There's also some "find the hidden area" gameplay, but that shouldn't be confused with actual content. Definitely disappointing after all the hype this game received.
