The fantasy farm-life sim filled with wiggly squidgy slime creatures is back. In Slime Rancher 2, players join Beatrix LeBeau on her latest adventure on the mysterious Rainbow Island. But can this ambitious sequel recapture the magic of the innovative original game?
One can’t review Slime Rancher 2 without giving an honourable mention to the key characters of the game: the slimes. These cheeky balls of goop are brimming with squishy, adorable charm. There’s a vast assortment of slimes to discover, from your common-or-garden Pink Slimes and rabbit-style Cotton Slimes to the more elusive Golden Slimes and Lucky Slimes. Plus, after consuming each other’s poops – I’m sorry, I mean “plorts” – the slimes mutate into a combo creature called a Largo Slime which contains both Slime’s features and produces double the plorts. Somehow these bulbous creatures manage to be even more endearing than the normal slimes. Particularly when you slurp them onto the end of your vacpack and their charming little smile fills your screen!
Like with all collectible cuties, you’ll wanna catch ‘em all. But to do this, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time exploring. An awful lot of time! If you’re a fan of exploration in games, the intrigue of what you can discover when you’re away from the ranch will keep you going for some time, with an extensive array of resources to unearth, strange slime foodstuffs to obtain, new locations on Rainbow Island to uncover and more. That said, some of the map unlocks are particularly tricky to find and you’ll end up getting very turned around and a bit bewildered as to where you are and where you’re going. Thankfully with the charming cartoon visuals exploding with vivid colours, all this exploration remains a joy to undertake.
And after a long meander across Rainbow Island, it’s always heart-warming to return to the happy, smiling faces of your ranch slimes bouncing around in their corrals. The farming aspect of the game can be good fun, but also rather time consuming. The more slimes you farm, the more long-winded the farming becomes. Running back and forth collecting and distributing food for them to eat, gathering the resultant plorts 30 or 40 at a time, and dispensing them in the plort market or refinery gets monotonous very quickly. The corral upgrades, once you can afford them, keep the process moving, but somehow seem to add yet more to-ing and fro-ing.
This time sink isn’t helped much by the utilities, warp tech and vacpack upgrades. I don’t mean the upgrades themselves, but rather the grind to unlock them. They take a tonne of resources to unlock – that’s more getting lost on Rainbow Island, then – and don’t often supply you with a helpful solution to cross these ranching or exploration barriers.
Between the laborious farming tasks and getting obscenely discombobulated on Rainbow Island, there’s very little time to actually advance the narrative of the game. In fact, it took me a while to work out that there even was a narrative! After 16 hours of gameplay I still hadn’t managed to find the “Grey Labyrinth” location to progress the storyline to any satisfying degree. There are so many technologies and utilities to obtain before you can get anywhere, which in turn all involve you having to spend ages collecting a mass of different resources, that after a while, it all starts to feel a bit too much like hard work. There are so many barriers to narrative progression that one wonders why it was included at all.
