Monomi Park’s Slime Rancher is a first-person foray into the heady world of resource pillaging. There’s also a hefty dose of battery farming, but with a very (like disgustingly) island of Doctor Moreau twist.
The main character, Beatrix LeBeau, travels lightyears away from earth to the Far Far Range. Here, she plans to build her fortune and explore the planet. To achieve this she sets about collecting and breeding its gelatinous inhabitants.
Luckily, there are many different kinds.
Slime Rancher Review
The name of the game is to suck up slimes with your trusty Vac Gun and deposit them into your ranch. Doing so will let you feed them up using farm-grown or wild produce. After the slimes have been fed you can sell their plorts — poop– and explore the expanse of the range.
Seriously. The slimes take dumps and its worth money.
The rarer the slime the more of the land’s dominant currency — newbucks — it sells for on the ranch exchange system. The more common the slime, the cheaper its plorts sell for. There’s a whole market based around the shits that some cute slimes do!
The more newbucks you have the better your equipment and ranch set up will be so hunting down various rare slimes and cultivating them will be your key to riches
The first thing you’re able to do is to wander around freely on the basic ranch itself. A fairly simple set up consisting of eight pre-designated areas in which to build various structures and amenities.
These structures include all sorts of things such as the coral in order to hold your slimes exactly where you want them and farming land for making sure the slimes have enough food. There is even an incinerator because what far reach lonely farm doesn’t need one of those to get rid of the evide…..slime…waste…yeah…
You actually get an achievement for committing a heinous act using this. I’ll leave it for you to discover but the achievement flavour text had me cackling.
Slime Poop Anyone?
As you explore the Far Far Range, there are many things to encounter and wonders to observe. Slimes poop (remember plorts) money but slimes also eat other slimes plorts and take on the properties of each other.
Having crazy hybrid slimes is very possible but also very very hard to control. Once they eat two different kinds of plorts however they turn into the ravenous Tar slimes that cannibalize everything in their path until there is nothing left to eat.
I tested this theory myself mixing some boom slimes (exploding ones) and some crystal slimes who produce a damaging crystal that hurts the player. This turned out to be very lucrative in plorts but impossible to manage with an area of effect damage hitting me whenever I went near their pens.
Thus, the time came to introduce a foreign plort into the mix and a Tar was born and wiped out my entire ranch. This game really has it all in the way of cute atrocities, I love it.
He Slimed Me
Controls are very easy to manage for anyone familiar with an FPS title with minimal interface and the visuals while simple are fairly satisfying to look at.
I lost hours in this game wandering around exploring what the Far Far range had to offer. I did find a lack of an endgame or meaningful quests to complete.
There is a small repeatable quest system phoned into your ranch communicator but they are largely ignorable and offer no real tangible benefit apart from a few extra newbucks unfortunately.
Once I built all the areas of my ranch and upgraded my character’s gear to be able to explore better there wasn’t much left to do. That being said this game is very carthaic in the sense you can sit back and throw slimes around for ages and still be fairly content with the time you have spent.
It’s a real pick up and put down game if you’re keen to unwind and would be great to keep the kids occupied for a few hours of fairly harmless fun.
I can see myself having this one installed on my PS4 for quite a while.
Slime Rancher was reviewed on PS4 using a digital code provided by the publisher.
PowerUp! Reviews
Game Title: Slime Rancher
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Adorable slime friends - 7.4/107.4/10
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Hours of Chill Fun - 7.6/107.6/10
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Easy to learn, hard to master - 7/107/10
