Slime Rancher Review
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Title: Slime Rancher
Platform: PC Playstation 4 Xbox One Switch
Reviewed on: PC
Publisher: Monomi Games
Developer: Monomi Games
Release: Aug 1, 2017 Switch Oct 28, 2022
Genre: First-Person, Sandbox
Playtime: 20 Hours
Slime Rancher… looks cute, bright colors, squishy slimes and chickens. But is there something darker lurking beneath the surface? A sinister force lying in wait to attack when you least expect…? No, there isn’t, but there is a lot of fun things about this game, stick around and let me tell you about it.
In Slime Rancher you play as Beatrix LeBeau, a woman who wants to start a new life on the Far, Far Range, a thousand light years from earth. There she starts up a simple ranch to make some money and enjoy a simple life. The ranch consists of different areas full of plots to hold various utilities, those being corals for slimes, coops for chickens, or a silo to store goods and so much more.
At the start of a new game there will be three game modes to choose from. Adventure mode giving the base game experience, explore and build your ranch at your own pace, casual mode, just like adventure but a little less dangerous, and rush mode, but more on that later.
The ranch starts small and can’t be expanded until the money starts rolling in. In order to do that slimes must be caught and fed so they drop ‘plorts’. A byproduct of a happy slime with many uses depending on the plort time. Every slime produces their own respective plort. But slimes aren’t going to just bounce into the corrals setup, they need to be caught first.
Beatrix’s main ranching tool is the vacpack. A gun attached to a backpack, used to suck this in, or shoot them out. It comes with four slots that can hold up to twenty of a single item, that being slimes, plorts, or otherwise. So deciding what to carry and what to throw away is an ever present choice needing to be made.
After capturing some slimes and food it’s time to start setting up the ranch. A plot turned into a corral for slimes, and another used to grow fruit. Everything that a plot can be used for can be upgraded for some extra cash to make it more useful in its respected use. Silos can get more storage and gardens can grow crops much faster. But first the slimes need fed and plorts collected.
With plorts in the bag it’s time to head to the plort market, there plorts are shot into a receiver in exchange for money. The market will have all the plorts posted and the price for each plort, rising and falling at midnight every day. The amount of plorts deposited can decrease the value of that plort for a while, so the market can be manipulated in a sense.
That’s the gist of Slime Rancher, at a very basic level, but there is so much more to this game. Plenty of places to unlock, with money or solving a puzzle, each with new places to explore offering new discoveries around every corner, and slimes aren’t as simple as they first appear. If a basic slime eats the plort of another slime they transform into a largo, a big slime capable of outputting two different plorts at once. There are over 150 possible combinations to make with the various slimes in the game, so finding a favorite could be a lengthy search, but totally worth it.
But the game isn’t all squishy slimes and rainbows, there are threats to watch out for. Some slimes just hurt being close, they don’t intentionally hurt, they might just be pokey. There are a few spots throughout the land full of feral slimes, so hungry they try to take a bite out of anything that moves. The biggest threat are Tars, big oily slimes that eat all the slime in their vicinity and harm anyone near.
There is kind of a story in Slime Rancher, built around letters received and notes left by the previous ranch owner scattered everywhere. It took me about fourteen hours to finish the story and unlock everything on the ranch, but the game didn’t end there. To completely finish the game involves a lot of money and automation around the ranch. But it’s a lot of fun playing with different slimes and manipulating the market for the most out of plorts.
So, after a few hours of gameplay and a good understanding of the land and what it has to offer, it’s time to try out Rush Mode. Rush mode is a timed game where the goal is to make as much money as possible. Finding the best routes to take and slimes to grab could take some time, but trying to beat an old score creates a lot of replayability.
My girls loved all the different slimes we could make and were behind me almost the entire gameplay. The story was decent, the game play was great, I liked some of the music, but it got very repetitive as time went on. All in all, I’m going to have to toss this up onto my top shelf.