Slime Rancher 2 gives the feel of a sequel to an established game where things are just bigger and better, but under the hood really seems to change the protagonists and the player’s reasons for hunting those slimes. I felt comfortable with the game, but yet always seemed distant from the gameplay loop. Kind of like coming home from college after a year or two away. Everything is very similar and comfortable enough to slide back into. However, there are just enough small changes to the core of the everyday that make you feel like you don’t really fit anymore. Slime Rancher 2 is on the surface more of the same just slightly askew at times.
The main character again is Beatrix LeBeau. She has once again been called to the Far Far Range to maintain and set up her once bustling slime ranch due to some unusual occurrences at Rainbow Island. There seems to be an odd almost alien energy now vibing at Rainbow Island. Not only is there a new feeling to the island, but there are new slimes roaming around. Due to the new slimes and this weird vibe, Beatrix starts doing what she does best and sets up the corrals and maintains the conservatory. Diving into researching upgrades for the conservatory farm and collecting those oh so precious plorts. However, on top of maintaining a farm and collecting slimes to feed and “harvest” their plots for gold coins, Beatrix is also drawn to explore mor of Rainbow Island and the Grey Labyrinth to try and decipher what in the world is going on with this island and the adjoining masses that these slimes call home.
Just like in the first game, the player is given a Vacpack to use to suck up all sorts of things in the world to take back to the Conservatory to use. The Conservatory is your home base area. Here you have corals where you hold your slimes, a decorations store, a daily store, and the plort bank. Along with these there is an underground area very similar to the first game that houses your research stores. Just like in the first game, you go out collecting things like food, slimes, water, and resources to bring home. Slimes are obviously to put into the corrals while food is used to feed the slimes and to plant, so you have a way to farm food for your slimes. There are multiple areas within your Conservatory, each of which have a few plots that you can use to build corrals for slimes, silos for storage of food and resources, pens for chickens, and fields for farming food. Resources like water and brine, among other new items, are used in your research store to combine and upgrade your Vacpack, Jetpack, and other movement upgrades. As with the original, you have the ability to upgrade your characters inventory to boost the number of Vacpack slots to 6, with the ability to hold 100 items each. But unlike the original game, I found myself needing to head home more often to unload items while exploring or to make a choice on what items I needed to keep and what I could get rid of. Here I felt the inventory system should have been upgraded just a little more as I always felt like I was leaving important items out in the wild because I had something I found was more important. For some this prioritization of items is fun and challenging. For me it made me not want to explore farther out because if I did I would have to spend multiple in game days to just do resource laps in tedium to keep my farm and slimes happy.
Also making a comeback from the first game is the hybrid mechanic of feeding one slime another slime’s plort to make a hybrid slime that has characteristics of both slimes. Yes, just like the many reviews said about the first game, ”Wait you are feeding the slime poo to other slimes!” Yes, that is still the case. Get over it, that is the world of Slime Rancher. This system runs identical to the first. Give a plot from one slime to another and it turns into a hybrid of both slimes and takes on traits of both. For example, if you feed a phospor plort to a cat slime you get a pink cat slime. This slime will now eat any fruits, which the Phospor Slime likes, and meats, which the Feline Slime likes. This slime will also give you a plort of each type when they are fed. Something I did enjoy with Slime Rancher 2 was the addition of new slimes, 20 I think, and new hybrids which is what I believed dragged me along to play more of this game than I probably would have without it. This is the core game mechanic that I was looking forward to and the developers delivered here. The slimes were cute, and the hybrids were even cuter! I enjoyed the distinct behaviors of each slime with some coming out at night and others being more aggressive and such. I do want to note that I turned off the Tar and aggressive nature of feral slimes. Why? Because I don’t want to deal with stress in my cozy games. For those that didn’t play the original game, the Tar slimes are when a hybrid slime eats another different plort. It then turns into a Tar slime that attacks slimes and the player. You must shoot it with water from your gun or suck them up and throw them off into the water. The feral slimes are aggressive slimes that will attack slimes and the player. Both annoying and unnecessary for me in a cozy game.
With this next iteration of the game, I was consistently feeling a sense of being lost. I was always getting lost out in the “world” and found myself using the map so much. The map would help a little, but this game really used verticality to jam more things into each island, the map could only help me navigate through the X and Y planes because the map is a flat top-down guide. If there was a place I wanted to reach in a cave, there was no way I would know it was in a long winding cave until I got to the spot on the map and realized, or it must be above or below me. So now I had to travel sometimes across the island to find the one path off to the side that I missed which took me underground into winding caves to find that spot I was looking for. As in the original, there are large slimes that you must feed large amounts of their favorite food to. Once you satiate these slimes, they move out of your way and allow you access to new areas or tech or resources. The best thing Slime Rancher 2 does to the map is add these locations as little images of a large slime blob after to find them. Great…except because many of these are high up the mountains, or underground in caves, I found myself spending many minutes just to re-find where in tarnation that large slime was. One particularly annoying time I spent almost 30 minutes just running around the map slime icon, aimlessly looking for the darned path to get to it just to realize that needed to take a different path to the left near the beginning of the area which took me down into a cave area that ended up being underneath the area I was bouncing around 30 min ago. After feeding this large slime I promptly ran past this tub of goo and found a new area that I was no longer willing to explore because I had just spent 30 minutes running around irritated. I then saved, closed the game, and went to my computer to play a cozy game. I was so irritated because I felt like I had actually wasted my time by playing the game. Not only did I physically get lost, but I always seemed to be in a funk of “what is the next upgrade I need to do, and what the crap do I need to get for it?” So many times, I had to return to the underground science machine or the menus database to see what I needed for an upgrade only to find that I hadn’t found the item yet in the world so it would just be three question marks. This must just be the way I like to play games now, but hiding the name and pictures of resource materials until I come across it is the bane of my existence in video games. This mechanic pushes the player to explore the world and search all the nooks and crannies, but as I mentioned before, the exploration in this iteration of the game is more irritating than it is intriguing.
Another point of contention I have with Slime Rancher 2 is it really assumes you have played the first one. Now I know that you shouldn’t really start in the middle of a game series, but there is very little explanation of game mechanics and currencies at the beginning of the game. If I were new to the game entirely, I feel like I would be doing stuff without really knowing what I am doing or even why. The game really felt like I was just expected to know what to do and the path to get there. The problem with this is that Slime Rancher 2 deviates from the core gameplay loop of the first one by putting more focus on upgrading the players’ devices to a point where the game felt so much more of a grind. It was heavy enough for me that I couldn’t complete enough of the game to get the drone automation that was in the first along with the teleporters that would have helped with traversal of the world.
Overall, I did enjoy my time in Slime Rancher 2, but if I had a choice between the original and the second one, I would choose the first one every time. The original felt warm and cozy. I could jump in and tend to my fields or my slimes. I could choose to go out in the world and explore or find materials. I never felt like I had to scrounge around the world like a hungry squirrel to get a small nugget of something to bring back and find out that I now must do it 20 more times. Slime Rancher 2 rewards those that explore and grind which is great, except it comes at the price of alienating those that want to farm and just chill. I feel a multiplayer aspect of the game could help alleviate this issue by having one person searching for materials and resources while the other maintains the Conservatory. This is however assuming one likes exploring and the other likes farming. If you liked the first game as it was, this might not be the upgrade you are looking for.
A PlayStation 5 code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
