Slime Rancher 2 Reviews

After loving the first game so much, I decided to finally get into Slime Rancher 2 and..I AM OVERJOYED I DID! I so cannot wait for the next content update after upgrading, exploring and collecting all the slimes, all sorts of food & gadgets/decorations so far! Current goal is getting to 1 million Newbucks just for the fun of it! Edit: THANK YOU SLIME RANCHER 2 and I got my million Newbucks! See you in the next update! <3

Slime Rancher 2 is what I would best describe as a incomplete slime rancher 1.5. It takes the core concepts and systems of Slime rancher one and moves it to a newer engine. While the systems that were copied were novel with slime rancher 1, I feel that they need improvements to work in this game. To top of the systems copied from slime rancher 1, There are lots of design decisions that I feel detract from this game. As of the time of writing, I cannot recommend slime rancher 2. The game does not improve upon the original in any meaningful way. Any improvement was nullified by the lack of polish and tuning to have the game actually be enjoyable. pros: -Vastly improved gadget system placement. You can place gadgets freeform anywhere and there are now decoratives integrated into the system as well. -A much larger world map -A vastly improved but also lacking resource gathering system for usage building gadgets. Cons: -The map is tedious to the point of annoying to navigate. Perhaps later upgrades will make it better but it is painful to navigate the map. There is tons of parkour and obstacles that even the T1 jetpack doesn’t make much better to navigate. To top off the annoying navigation, you have to make repeated trips through the same areas constantly. For one early upgrade I had done 4-5 trips through the first zone all the way out to the end of the second zone which was a 10 minute trip. -The Upgrades system was misscaled relative to what I was expecting from what should be a chill game. All upgrades required moving forward into later zones and bringing back the slimes and other items. This while sensible was problematic as the amount of work for the upgrades felt bad when the upgrades felt worthless. It felt like the game was rushing me get the upgrades to counteract bad scaling or annoying design decisions. -The slime ranch is way too big for the amount of “plots” they have in them. It easily feels 8x larger than the ranch in slime rancher 1 but it has the same amount of plots. I was wasting an absurd amount of time running between these plots and my market link. While it gave space for decorating I think this scale of ranch was designed to waste player time. -The plots system felt dated and exacerbated other issues in the game. I am shocked that they didn’t enable you to place plots with the gadget system. The plots limit the scale of your operations, but felt really bad when they were limiting progression in the game. It felt wasteful to use plots for farms and silos and I was constantly running out of plots to process the slimes I got from exploring. -The usage of loading screens to navigate main island areas is a regression from the first game. Instead of land bridges with no loading screens you are forced to navigate to a singular location and wait for the loading screen. This is from a gen 4 nvme SSD and it was roughly 4-5 seconds per. -The island areas didn’t reset every single load and reload which made slime spawning well overtuned. If you hadn’t reloaded the whole game recently you can easily overload the world with slimes spawning. These slimes make finding resources or even navigating annoying and it also makes rare slimes not rare. There is no challenge of finding the niche location they spawn as they spawn more than you ever will need the first time you go to an area.

This game doesn't feel like it has any sense of direction, in slime rancher 1, you had slime keys which you obtained from popping gordos and that gave the player a sense of what to do. Pop gordo, explore new area, simple. In this game every gordo I've encountered had been useless. It just led to a cave with nothing in them. Maybe thats just me though. Speaking of areas lets talk about that, Rainbow fields is nice, its large and a great starting area. But ember valley and starlight strand look like recolors of rainbow fields. In slime rancher 1, we had many different locations like the dry reef and the moss blanket which felt like entirely different locations. Here I can't tell the difference between any of the 3 I listed off. Another dislike about the game is the resource gathering aspect. I like the fact you can do it but why remove the drills / pumps / apiaries for it. The pumps were convenient and didn't feel like a grind. With resource gathering, you already have a limited amount of unique items you are able to hold which limits the resources you can hold to 6 max. I like the science aspect of the game and how you have to upgrade different aspects of your character but this grind just isn't it. Of course i'll still play it and maybe i'll delete this review when they change aspects of the game but for now this feels like a downgrade from slime rancher 1. Honestly stick to that game if you are going to play slime rancher.

Definitely not worth it, i love the first game but I have nothing positive to say about this one. The lag is crazy and makes it unplayable. I have a decent pc and have the lowest graphic settings, yet is still lags so much. I reinstalled the game, kept reopening it, nothing helps. Another thing, unlike in the first game, here almsot nothing is intuitive. I dont know where to go, what is interactive and what isn't, i dont have a clue about anything. RN it's dogshit, i'd wait until they finish it and only then consider purchasing

No Drones = No Life This game's been stuck in early access for almost 3 years now (ie: 36 months). That's TWICE longer than the expected time of 18 months given by the developers (see the section describing game's early access -> what the developers have to say). The current game is interesting and playable, with a lot of improvements especially the ability to place gizmos/gadgets anywhere. BUT it's incomplete, and without drones you have to keep going back to the farm regularly and refilling, harvesting, etc. ie: No Drones = No Life Some slimes are too rare and based on weather I once saw a dervish slime but couldn't get it because my item compartments were full. I. Never. Saw. It. Again. (I think it generates only in tornado weather but that weather didn't generate again) So anyways while this game has a lot of promise, I dont recommend buying it till it's completed. Stick to Slime Rancher 1 till then.

“Slime Rancher 2 will remain in Early Access for at least 18 months, potentially longer. We have a lot of content planned for version 1.0 and beyond and are a no-crunch studio, so we will give development the time it needs to produce the high-quality experience you expect from us.” so that was a f*cking lie. Last major update 7+ months ago, game released almost 3 years ago. I bought it on sale a long time ago but decided to hold off and wait for full release but at this point It may never happen. IF the game ever finishes I will revisit and change my review if it deserves to be. Just play the original.

Its really disappointing they removed the Drones and Drills in Sr2. Having to search the map for recourses wouldn't be so bad if we had a scanner hud to display nearby recourse for us instead of a flag that only vaguely points in the direction of something without telling height or distance. Spending hours trying to gather a small amount of recourses only to loose them all because I fell in the water is enough to make me rage quit. And not being able to automate my observatory in any meaningful way is frustrating to say the least. Half the content in Sr2 is just copy pasted from the first game. This feels like an expansion DLC more than it does a fully fledged game. But hey, atleast we got a boatload of decoration items! Right?

I have played for a decent amount of time and although this game can get quite repetitive I just find peace in organizing my slimes and funny creatures in my lil garden base. Definitely recommend, especially since more content is coming in ! <3

Update your game! EA for just about 3 YEARS, only way it could get worse is if it just gets completely abandoned. All the positive reviews have yet to realize that it has also been half a year since they even bothered doing a Major Update. Seeing special promotion sales makes it seem like they are squeezing out every drop of revenue they can with this game, but hopefully I (and others) are wrong and they are still planning on finishing sometime this year. My time on this game is because I played twice, after quitting the first time and restarting. The game has came a long way from when I originally got it 3 years ago, and now there is the giant labyrinth (which I fully explored as well). It is just sad not having any achievements to aim towards, nor a clear objective in mind whilst progressing towards the late-game story (which honestly only really feels like the beginning of whatever story is being told in this game.) UPDATE: They added TBD achievements right after this post (allegedly), which are obviously not real achievements. Not sure if I should feel edged or what.

Imma say it this version of slime rancher is mid, I loved the first slime rancher because I get to be a rancher, in slime rancher 2 I get to be a scientist...I don't hate the concept but I definitely don't agree with it especially when the name of the game is "slime rancher" I don't hate the scientist aspect, the game is still great. But I prefer ranching over research and that's it. Great game otherwise just not for me.