Ever get that feeling of déjà vu?
After spending three years in Early Access, Slime Rancher 2 has finally released its 1.0 update, catching up on features with the previous game and wrapping up the pre-release content promised by Monomi Park. We once again get to step into Beatrix LeBeau’s shoes, now exploring a whole new island filled with mysteries to uncover and slimes to gush over.
For the uninitiated, Slime Rancher is a farming sim where you explore ancient lands while capturing the titular bouncy creatures with your trusty vacuum gun. The main goal is to populate your conservatory with rambunctious slimes, keeping them happy and well-fed, lest they break out and escape (or even worse, eat all of your chickens).
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox, PlayStation
Slime Rancher 2 maintains most of the previous game’s structure, letting you explore the world at your own pace while picking and choosing what slimes you’ll bring back to the conservatory. There are very few roadblocks early on, and even then you can jetpack your way around most things with ease, making for a pretty low-stakes farming/exploration loop.
Perhaps Slimer Rancher 2 follows its predecessor’s blueprint a little too closely, almost serving as a soft remake of the previous game. The sequel greatly delivers on technical and graphical improvements, as it’s clear that the developers at Monomi Park have become quite proficient at working with the Unity engine, but it feels stagnant as a follow-up to such a unique title, evolving very little in its systems and mechanics.
Something that does move forward in this sequel is the game’s plot, especially pertaining to the interactions we get with the side cast. The series always treated its story as somewhat optional, but it’s fun to see characters returning and keeping their development from the previous game. Mochi, our self-proclaimed rival, is one of the game’s highlights, who now feels much more fleshed out than her SR1 counterpart.
It’s nice that the story is there for those who care, but it is unfortunately delivered through static visual novel-style conversations and logs scattered throughout the map, both lacking in voice acting. As mentioned before, this is a gameplay-first series developed by a small studio, so it’s probably a little much to expect voice acting, but it sure would have made the conversations a lot more engaging.
Going back to gameplay, it’s worth highlighting that Slime Rancher 2 ups the need for grinding by quite a bit, something that might have been done to keep players busy during this longer Early Access period. Most commodities are quite expensive, ranging from extra inventory slots to portable two-way teleporters, making the early game quite slow. The amount of grinding needed to unlock blueprints in the Grey Labyrinth is especially rough, since they can only be collected from slimes that you can’t bring back to your ranch, making it a tedious endgame farm.
Slime Rancher 2’s automation mechanics also feel like an audible “ugh, fine” from the developers, only arriving at the very end of Early Access through extremely expensive drones that can only be configured to interact with one resource at a time and don’t cover your whole ranch. Now, I don’t necessarily want the game to turn into Palworld or Satisfactory, but if the game is going to flirt with these systems, then a little more commitment would be appreciated. Monomi Park did not provide a post-release roadmap as of writing this, but I truly hope that better automation is added at some point in the future, as it feels like the game’s biggest missed opportunity at the moment.
Overall, Slime Rancher 2 offers few significant additions to the formula established by the previous game, ending up like a more polished version of its predecessor. The new maps make up for some of those shortcomings, with Rainbow Island being much more interesting to explore than the previous game’s Far, Far Range, and the Grey Labyrinth focusing more on puzzles and platforming, but whether those justify a sequel or not depends on how much you enjoyed the previous entry.
This is an entirely fine sequel for those who want a cute and casual creature collector, as it provides enough busy work to keep you entertained for a minimum 25 hours or so. The exploration and graphics are some of the new game’s highlights, also bringing in new slime species and a higher focus on gadgets. If you liked playing the previous game, then Slime Rancher 2 is more of it, for better or for worse.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.