Recent reviews by Zettai Ryōiki Enjoyer

Usually with games like this the core gameplay loop comes from establishing tedious tasks and then giving the player option to get rid of this tedium later in the game. Unfortunately with Slime Rancher, much of this tedium is never resolved, way too late in the tech tree or the tedium required to get rid of other tedium is way too high.

I won't go into spoilers, but at the point where I am right now the most egregious example is your Vacpack, the tool that you use for the entirety of the game:

• You have four slots, that's it. You can never upgrade the amount of slots, and two slots can never have the same resource. What that means is that you run into situations where you have to transport large amounts of items from one spot to another, but the maximum a single slot can hold is 50 units. So instead of being able to use ALL four slots for one resource (to a max of 200 in that case) you are stuck at 50. You also CONSTANTLY run out of slots while exploring because you can pick up a max of four different items, and 50 of each. I simply do not understand why this limitation is in the game. Hell, make it a very expensive upgrade for all I care because yes, it IS a very strong tool to have another slot, but not being able to upgrade it at all is kind of dumb.
  
  
• The Vacpack has a fixed speed at which it can throw or suck up items. This is no big deal for low amounts of items, but for bigger amounts it is incredibly annoying. You'll just be standing there for minutes to move large amounts of items. Again, there is no upgrade. The devs probably intended this as a deterrent for just farming massive amounts of low tier items, but I find it simply annoying. I'm naturally gravitating towards higher tier items anyways.

Again, this is the ONE tool you use for the entirety of the game, which is why these limitations are very, very annoying.
There are countless other examples, like the crazy amount of backtracking required but this is my main gripe.

For a game called "Slime Rancher" there is also remarkably not much "ranching" in there. You pretty much catch the Slime, build a fence and press some buttons to satisfy the demands of that slime and voila, you just mostly solved the entire game. There are *some* exceptions, but due to the built in Wiki that basically tells you *exactly* what to do, this is also trivialized. Feeding the slime is trivial, keeping them happy is trivial, not dying to them is trivial and keeping them separated so you don't get the big bad "Tarr" Slime is also trivial. I haven't had a single instance on my Ranch where I got a Tarr by accident. If you you use two brain cells and don't skip on tedious refilling of the auto-feeder tasks etc. this simply will never happen. And even if you do, unless you skipped the water gun upgrade (which you can get from the beginning) the problem is solved by pressing left mouse button twice, unless your entire ranch has been run over.

TL;DR
The game looks cute (but dated at this point, which is to be expected), sound design is okay, it runs well and doesn't crash or bug out much. But for me, all these things are secondary to the gameplay: and that is unfortunately a too tedious, grindy and too easy. Some might like this, but I don't. I'd prefer if the game demanded a bit more of me and wasted less of my time.

Fun game so far. If you liked FTL you will probably like this too.

A little feedback for the devs:

- Sound design could use some more oomph, it's a bit hollow right now.
- Computers inside rooms with ship systems are too hard too see and I've often sent people in there for them to stand around because I didn't click the exact tile. I don't know how to solve this, maybe with a default behavior to man the station if it isn't when clicking on the room?
- Interface needs work. It's pretty, but too gray / brown. Decoration is a little hard to distinguish from the actual information. Maybe the lights need a green-ish hue instead of the brown in brown? Items / character descriptions need icons instead of text. Stats need to be visible at a glance instead of reading over the same text again and again. But please don't remove helpful descriptions for icons (display when hovering maybe).
- I don't like the old german font you're using for some interface elements. I know what you're going for but I don't think that font fits very well. Should look a LITTLE more sci-fi-ish maybe but retain the old german vibes?

Yet another "I would love to have a meh option". Whether the game will ultimately be great is wholly dependant by how much and how the gameplay sandbox will be expanded in the full game and how much it will cost. In addition to that, the demo has some problems that I immediately noticed. I hope the developer will fix at least some of these for full release. I do think that some of the design decisions are too baked into the game at this point, though.

+ Movement feels great and the sense of speed is there.
+ Soundtrack is good, albeit a little generic.
+ The game is very pretty, crisp as hell and the colors pop like crazy. Game will look crazy good on an OLED display.

- Worldgen can suck at times. Shards that you're supposed to pick up just lead you into an obstacle that will damage and / or kill you
- If you're not in the "rhythm" of the shards you will miss like half of them and fixing that "rhythm" feels awful because you have to slow down. It's hard to explain but play the demo and you will know what I mean.
- I don't know why this game needed a roguelike framework. You're supposed to vibe with the music and the speed and then you're just ... stopped every 30 seconds to chose the next level? If the levels were longer this would be less of an issue but the it is it just ruins the flow unfortunately.
- The items feel like an afterthought and mostly don't change much. I hope this changes in the full game.

The game didn't click for me in the slightest. It's one of the rare games that made me actively angry while playing because I found the game design SO bad. It feels borderline amateurish in the first couple of hours I've played at times. Not seeing things to interact with because my camera wasn't in the perfect position, things not being properly being communicated or other shenanigans like that. Guns feel like peashooters. Everything is on rails but not really. Characters are increadibly incompetent from the very first second.

Not for me AT ALL.

I'll recommend this with an asterisk.

The atmosphere is top notch thanks to Szymanski's style, worldbuilding and the excellent soundtrack. However, the gameplay is just too simple. Basically if you've played the demo you've seen 95% of what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay. There is a tiny bit towards the last quarter of the game but I won't spoil that here. It's not enough. For the entire ~2.5h of runtime I waited for something to shake up the core gameplay, but it unfortunately just never came.

The rest is just more story, levels and worldbuilding. Due to this the game has basically no replay value.

tl;dr: buy if you don't expect top notch gameplay or replay value but a dense and unique atmosphere.

The game mechanics don't really mesh too well into each other and the game is hella janky at times. You can almost completely ignore the survival aspect, the base building and quite a bit of other stuff as it is pretty useless overall.

That said, it's still a lot of fun for a playthrough with a friend or two and the game can be quite atmospheric and scary at times. I wouldn't recommend playing it alone though.

The idea behind the game is great, and it definitely CAN be fun... if you get used to worst interface and controls you have ever seen. It's almost incredible how bad it is. Every single thing about it is unintuitive. The menus are unfathomably ugly and horribly designed on top of that. It's like the developers actively TRIED to ignore every UI design convention that has been established in the last 40 years. It could be used as an example on how NOT to design a UI. The community is in denial about how bad it is and huffing pure copium. Getting used to this UI is like getting used to a fowl smelling infection between your toes. Sure, you CAN get used to it, but it's not worth it and just better to get rid of it.

It is just THAT bad. If there was a similiar game on the market with even slightly better UI / UX everybody would just run away. I have never given a game a bad review due to UI / UX but the state this games UI is in is simply inexcusable. I can't even say much more about the rest of the game since I will not torture myself any longer with this abomination of an interface.

EDIT: see the comments under this review for examples of community copium.

Game surely is for SOMEONE, but that someone is definitely not me. Too much going on, too fast and especially way too hard. Difficulty is more like a brick wall than a curve. If you enjoy pouring 10h into a game just to have basic competence then go ahead, otherwise avoid.

I don't know man, I just can't get into it. I've tried playing this game 3-4 times over the years. Every time I bounce off shortly before or after getting the seamoth. Everything is just so tedious. The inventory is too small. You just have to swim around and hope you find the right stuff.

The game is pretty and atmospheric as hell, but I just found it to be incredibly tedious and boring.

The original release was good, and the enhanced edition is (mostly) even better. If you didn't like the original, you won't like this one either though. It's a very well made survival-ish openworld-ish shooter with incredible environments and attention to detail.

The raytracing truly is gorgeous, though there is some graphical issues here and there that the team seems to have overlooked. These weren't there in the original. A lot of the jank in and outside of the cutscenes from the original release is also still there. Artyom being mute is still awkward as hell, considering he's talking in the loading screens and the dialogue writing is truly terrible.