Today we are looking at the happiest game on the planet! Slime Rancher; where you are a person named Beatrix LeBeau who is send off to a place called ‘Far Far Range’. You are sent here because the other rangers need your help. They need food and other resources, and you will provide them with just that.
The premise of the game is to collect and ranch slimes. You can build little pens for them and afterwards give them food so you can collect their “plorts”.
Just like our economy depends on oil, the economy in Slime Rancher depends on plorts. You can sell the plorts for money so you can buy upgrades to your pen, silos or other stuff you will surely need after a while. There are also places that are shut off by portals whom you will need a key for to open.
A person on Steam described this game perfectly in the comments. “this game did what 8 years of antidepressants failed to do.” As soon as I start up this game I feel happy. You hear nice fun music, the game is really colorful and you see slimes in the background just jumping around being happy. Also the sounds the slimes make are just as cute as they look. I can hear that music is of big importance in this game. It really accompanies the game well.
When you start the actual gameplay you can follow a little tutorial telling you the basics of how your vacpack works and that kind of stuff.
You can suck up many things with the device you got in your hand which I mentioned earlier. Called the vacpack. You can suck up slimes, plorts and food. When for the first time, you see a slime eat a hen-hen (which is a slime rancher breed of chicken) whole, alive and all, it is a bit weird. But heck how can you even be mad at such cuties! Once you found the slime of your desire you can suck him up and put him in a pen. There are various breeds of slimes. All with specific characteristics and higher or lower plort values. Some slimes even require specific pen upgrades. If you want to, you can crossbreed slimes. But don’t go too far with breading! Because if you do, your slimes will change into tarr slimes. They will attack you and eat your slimes. So yes there are some dangers in Slime Rancher. Also, don’t forget to feed your slimes because otherwise they will become feral. Which is just as bad as tarr slimes.
It is also nice how smart the slimes are. They will search the limits of their pen. They will try to escape by standing on each other, and of course when you plant your crops next to a slime pen they will eat all of your crops and livestock. Although that is not really a problem because you just have to put them back and pick up the plorts. But the larger slimes (when you crossbreed slimes they get bigger) can be a real pain. You will need better and bigger pens to contain them.
Another thing in the game now is slime science. You can add gadgets to your vacpack by doing “science stuff”. This lengthens the playtime. Because in this stage, the game has no story so you just try to get all the upgrades.
Even when I really adore this game I can still see some room for improvement. For instance once you got the hang of the game you can make a lot of money really fast. For instance, once you know what kind of plorts bring up the most money, you can crossbreed slimes and just make big money. And also the replay value isn’t that good. I followed this game a long time already and it already made big improvements. This game is still in early development and I know it is still going to improve. For this stage of development I think 20 dollars is a bit high in price. But I think later on in development it will surely be worth it. I do hope the story element of the game is going to be good and more prominent. Maybe even multiplayer? We will see in the future, but for now I already love this game! I really recommend it.
