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rep_resentI wrote this for Steam but because I played the game with family share I'm not allowed to post it to the Slime Rancher 2 page. So that idiocy aside, here's a review meant to be softer, briefer, and more to the point than my usual game review commentary.
Between the two Slime Rancher games, I've put in a little over 81 hours. I'm not done with Slime 2 but I did roll credits and I have to say, the total experience of Slime 2 is overall far more interesting to me. The sensation of movement, navigation tools, and visuals have all gotten huge upgrades and deliver a visually rich and mechanically competent experience. There are problems this franchise is prone towards, among them being grind and having to bust out a guide to find certain materials for upgrades or key items. To this game's immense disservice, you can entirely miss a whole biome because it is concealed.
Dense visual fidelity and the object-oriented gameplay which sees you hunting down dozens of individual resource nodes for 1 to 4 units of crafting materials really compete with each other. The environments can be noisy and busy enough that certain resources (particularly Jellystone) are next to impossible to find for protracted portions of gameplay. A more structured critique would also spend around 15 minutes of time talking about the immense damage to QOL that Suck and Spit only Vacuum Gun behavior causes. Simple version is that object filter modes (plorts only, slimes only, resources only) would have been greatly appreciated, and the excision of a 'press to fill' nozzle upgrade for managing collector and silo reserves and transfers is direly felt.
Interface and Experience of the game has a lot of accumulated damage thanks to grinding attrition that other games (including the first Slime Rancher) would work harder to limit the impact of. There are more UI decisions that make little sense, such as the ability to withdraw crafting ingredients from the Drone Cloud which have literally no application outside of the refinery. You can't sell off your spare units of say, Buzz Wax and Jellystone for a tidy profit, and it would have been handy to have options such as deployable bridges, stairways, and other scaffold-like structures to help streamline the rougher platforming-heavy portions of terrain. The game features 3 separate versions of the anti-Tarr water turrets, seemingly, for no discernable reason (the base model is more than sufficient for most applications).
Much of the unlocks in this game are decorations. There are oh-so-many decorations, and while I might be the kind of girl who can get lost in decorating, their resource cost in crafting ingredients means you will be grinding even worse than you already are. By the time the drones come around, new players will want to set up the automation NOT to manage their base -- but to gather crafting materials from the wild. This will save you many hours of running through the same four zones over and over again. Of course, simply being in the biome isn't enough, the drones have an awful looking radius indicator which genuinely hurts my eyes while you're selecting where to deploy them. I am very appreciative that the devices can be free-placed instead of stuck in oddly positioned pre-slotted deploy zones, but really: the current implementation of resource extraction is annoying.
Many games have this problem but do not have the solution in their history, Slime Rancher 2 however does. While frustrating because you had to constantly rebuild them, the old extractor system meant that by mid-game with a few teleporters, you could make the rounds to points on the map where extractors could be set up, gathering materials from your deployed set at the start of every day. Like the prior Slime Rancher, finishing the game's narrative and exploration mostly happens before you get all of the upgrades, and the fact that you need to dig through the rubbish rather aggressively hunting down all of the upgrade components really makes that exploration feel insidious, if you don't give up early and follow a guide, you will hurt yourself looking for that last treasure pod. I found Ranching to honestly not matter much for this game's actual flow, I kept running out of Hunter Plorts because how it segments your base between plots is actually bad.
There are non-selling points littered throughout this game's padding elements. Hugely annoying paths with pitfalls to instant death if you zone out pock-mark the world, especially your own freaking ranch as the transition paths between expansions are miserable. Also Some of the later ranch expansions are so UNERGONOMIC to use that they actually are not worth using if you do not HAVE to make use of them. It was bad enough in the first game, but now there's a ranch expansion that literally, you get two free jump pads with because without them it'd be at the top of every negative review for being annoying. The jetpack is not as pathetic as the first game at least, but where every step forward is visually stunning or increasingly narratively competent (let's not talk about the opening being the set up for a slasher movie), there are steps backward that make the first game work better.
A design pass on the combat, which is the focus of the game's Climax rather abruptly, would have been VERY important to actually build into the game. You've got the equivalent to the Mario Sunshine water backpack as a core gameplay loop -- use it! If you want to go this route of springing a Half Life 2 tier arena combat on the player, you either have to commit to letting me set up my 30 water cannon towers I built in anticipation of the climax (you are not allowed to set up anything in the climax room), or you need to actually freaking implement the neat variant enemies INTO the exploration loop. Less grind on resources, more meaningful obstacles to progression that require the player's development of skill, it would behoove the Slime Rancher team to really hit the books here and, if possible, totally rework the climax to make use of your ranching skills OR rework the rest of the game to make us actually fight the Tarr as a source of proper shooter game antagonist.
If you relish the opportunity to spend no less than 3 hours firing 1 unit of plort at a time slowly into the market by holding Mouse 1 for roughly 30% of your gameplay, this is the game for you. But if you are looking for a deeper husbandry/farming rancher simulator, you are in the wrong place. The first game is far more compelling in regards to homesteading mechanics being directly integrated with your progression, and it has Rush Mode which is actually kind of fun until you beat its milestone scores. Both games complete in about 30-40 hours. Make of that what you will, Slime Rancher 2's best moments are its exploration and puzzle-solving in the latter half of the game, and the narrative isn't so bad either (I mean it's bad but not for normal indie game bad reasons, more because of structure and a lack of curiosity about exploring the protagonist's personality). It's okay, and I can recommend it because most people won't experience my keenly honed sensitivities towards braindead game design like the item transfer system being 1 unit at a time by holding mouse 1 but don't hold it too long or you'll overdraft and spill items on the floor like a moron.
Between the two Slime Rancher games, I've put in a little over 81 hours. I'm not done with Slime 2 but I did roll credits and I have to say, the total experience of Slime 2 is overall far more interesting to me. The sensation of movement, navigation tools, and visuals have all gotten huge upgrades and deliver a visually rich and mechanically competent experience. There are problems this franchise is prone towards, among them being grind and having to bust out a guide to find certain materials for upgrades or key items. To this game's immense disservice, you can entirely miss a whole biome because it is concealed.
Dense visual fidelity and the object-oriented gameplay which sees you hunting down dozens of individual resource nodes for 1 to 4 units of crafting materials really compete with each other. The environments can be noisy and busy enough that certain resources (particularly Jellystone) are next to impossible to find for protracted portions of gameplay. A more structured critique would also spend around 15 minutes of time talking about the immense damage to QOL that Suck and Spit only Vacuum Gun behavior causes. Simple version is that object filter modes (plorts only, slimes only, resources only) would have been greatly appreciated, and the excision of a 'press to fill' nozzle upgrade for managing collector and silo reserves and transfers is direly felt.
Interface and Experience of the game has a lot of accumulated damage thanks to grinding attrition that other games (including the first Slime Rancher) would work harder to limit the impact of. There are more UI decisions that make little sense, such as the ability to withdraw crafting ingredients from the Drone Cloud which have literally no application outside of the refinery. You can't sell off your spare units of say, Buzz Wax and Jellystone for a tidy profit, and it would have been handy to have options such as deployable bridges, stairways, and other scaffold-like structures to help streamline the rougher platforming-heavy portions of terrain. The game features 3 separate versions of the anti-Tarr water turrets, seemingly, for no discernable reason (the base model is more than sufficient for most applications).
Much of the unlocks in this game are decorations. There are oh-so-many decorations, and while I might be the kind of girl who can get lost in decorating, their resource cost in crafting ingredients means you will be grinding even worse than you already are. By the time the drones come around, new players will want to set up the automation NOT to manage their base -- but to gather crafting materials from the wild. This will save you many hours of running through the same four zones over and over again. Of course, simply being in the biome isn't enough, the drones have an awful looking radius indicator which genuinely hurts my eyes while you're selecting where to deploy them. I am very appreciative that the devices can be free-placed instead of stuck in oddly positioned pre-slotted deploy zones, but really: the current implementation of resource extraction is annoying.
Many games have this problem but do not have the solution in their history, Slime Rancher 2 however does. While frustrating because you had to constantly rebuild them, the old extractor system meant that by mid-game with a few teleporters, you could make the rounds to points on the map where extractors could be set up, gathering materials from your deployed set at the start of every day. Like the prior Slime Rancher, finishing the game's narrative and exploration mostly happens before you get all of the upgrades, and the fact that you need to dig through the rubbish rather aggressively hunting down all of the upgrade components really makes that exploration feel insidious, if you don't give up early and follow a guide, you will hurt yourself looking for that last treasure pod. I found Ranching to honestly not matter much for this game's actual flow, I kept running out of Hunter Plorts because how it segments your base between plots is actually bad.
There are non-selling points littered throughout this game's padding elements. Hugely annoying paths with pitfalls to instant death if you zone out pock-mark the world, especially your own freaking ranch as the transition paths between expansions are miserable. Also Some of the later ranch expansions are so UNERGONOMIC to use that they actually are not worth using if you do not HAVE to make use of them. It was bad enough in the first game, but now there's a ranch expansion that literally, you get two free jump pads with because without them it'd be at the top of every negative review for being annoying. The jetpack is not as pathetic as the first game at least, but where every step forward is visually stunning or increasingly narratively competent (let's not talk about the opening being the set up for a slasher movie), there are steps backward that make the first game work better.
A design pass on the combat, which is the focus of the game's Climax rather abruptly, would have been VERY important to actually build into the game. You've got the equivalent to the Mario Sunshine water backpack as a core gameplay loop -- use it! If you want to go this route of springing a Half Life 2 tier arena combat on the player, you either have to commit to letting me set up my 30 water cannon towers I built in anticipation of the climax (you are not allowed to set up anything in the climax room), or you need to actually freaking implement the neat variant enemies INTO the exploration loop. Less grind on resources, more meaningful obstacles to progression that require the player's development of skill, it would behoove the Slime Rancher team to really hit the books here and, if possible, totally rework the climax to make use of your ranching skills OR rework the rest of the game to make us actually fight the Tarr as a source of proper shooter game antagonist.
If you relish the opportunity to spend no less than 3 hours firing 1 unit of plort at a time slowly into the market by holding Mouse 1 for roughly 30% of your gameplay, this is the game for you. But if you are looking for a deeper husbandry/farming rancher simulator, you are in the wrong place. The first game is far more compelling in regards to homesteading mechanics being directly integrated with your progression, and it has Rush Mode which is actually kind of fun until you beat its milestone scores. Both games complete in about 30-40 hours. Make of that what you will, Slime Rancher 2's best moments are its exploration and puzzle-solving in the latter half of the game, and the narrative isn't so bad either (I mean it's bad but not for normal indie game bad reasons, more because of structure and a lack of curiosity about exploring the protagonist's personality). It's okay, and I can recommend it because most people won't experience my keenly honed sensitivities towards braindead game design like the item transfer system being 1 unit at a time by holding mouse 1 but don't hold it too long or you'll overdraft and spill items on the floor like a moron.
