Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition Review (Switch / Switch eShop)
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Hearing the title of Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition, you might be forgiven for imagining a sleepy, snoozy farm sim that bears a striking resemblance to Stardew Valley with some Slimes from Dragon Quest and a first-person perspective. If that’s you, well, you’re only half right, or maybe a quarter right. Slime Rancher is a complicated game to anchor in a single box; it’s part Stardew, part Subnautica, and when you meet the few enemies out there, part DOOM Eternal. Okay we could be slightly Go overboard with that last one as all the shots are made to feed things or slightly dunk them in water, but we fall short.
You play as Beatrix, a new Slime rancher who has to take advantage of this new calling by selling nondescript consumable ‘Plorts’ that each and every Slime produces every time they are fed. Pretty simple in theory, but there are wrinkles on wrinkles to deal with that make things a lot more interesting than such a simplified explanation suggests.
For starters, all the Slimes you will use to make that cheese they are in the nature of the world, and what a world it is. At first your explorations make it seem a bit small, but as you go along you will soon realize that the entire landscape is simply massive, and the game map doesn’t do it justice. We are not talking Morrowind-Large level here, but prepare to have your expectations shattered.
The Slimes that you will come across as you explore the expanses of land on offer come in a veritable rainbow of variety; You’ve got your standard Swamp Pink Slimes, Feline Tabby Slimes, Radioactive Rad Slimes, and lovable, docile Puddle Slimes, to name just a few. Each different Slime has a different diet and favorite food within that diet; Tabby Slimes are carnivores forced to the wrath of local chickens that sprout from holes in the ground like Tolkien-style dwarfs, Phosphor Slimes need juicy fruits, and Rock Slimes need vegetables to fill their digestive systems.
As we suggested above, every time a Slime eats something from its diet, it produces a unique Plort relevant to its type. Best not to think about what they could actually be, especially when we talk about Largo Slimes at one point, but these Plorts are meant to be collected and sold on the Plort Market, and the price of each type of Plort is subject to fluctuations. similar to the stock market. We can’t say for sure, but we swear that the more kind of Plort we sold, the less it was worth the next day. It may seem insignificant, but this brings a smart new layer of strategy whereby accumulating Plorts for a day when prices are good is more than good strategy, it is a way to the top.
You can also increase your Plort production by letting a Slime eat another type of Slime’s Plort (we told you so). This produces a Largo, which is essentially a larger hybrid of two types of Slime, and produces Plorts from both types of origin at the same time, expanding its dietary potential. This is fantastic news, of course, but it comes with a great risk: If a Largo eats another Plort of a third type, their entire genetic makeup collapses, turning the hapless creature into a Tarr Slime.
Tarr Slimes will eat just about anything, including other Slimes and, more worryingly, you. A single Tarr Slime can decimate an entire population, so the moment you catch the slightest glimpse of one of these rainbow tyrants, you’d better spray it with a small amount of water. That’s right, the greatest threat to your empire has the same weakness as the aliens of Signs.
Tarr Slimes are irritating in the world, but absolutely catastrophic on your ranch, which we have barely mentioned so far. Your ranch is your home and the ideal place to house Slimes to better farm them for their valuable droppings, as well as grow food to feed them and storage silos to store all kinds of wonderful things. You can even automate multiple parts, which is a nice touch, although we’d be lying if we said we wouldn’t appreciate more variety of styles. You can expand to neighboring areas to grow your slippery monopoly on the landscape, but a bit more customization would have been welcome.
Despite this, the main game loop exists almost entirely outside of your ranch. Yes, you’ll need it to make lots of cash to expand even further and buy that jetpack you’ve always wanted, but the game is pretty flexible in the way you go about it. As you explore, you will find towering cliffs and platforms that seem purely aesthetic at first, but as you play more and more, you will realize that these are not limits, they are opportunities.
Slime Rancher is absolutely dirty with non-linear possibilities, to the point where Slime Keys that would otherwise be needed to open doors can become completely unnecessary via some smart platforms. The game knows this too, and only tries to stop you in very specific circumstances, which is greatly appreciated.
The only downside to this is the eventual backtracking involved; As you acquire newer and more exotic Slimes, you’ll have to hand-carry them to your ranch, which we can’t deny is a bit of a hassle. It unlocks a few shortcuts here and there, but a lot of times the game expects you to do a ton of hooves, which got a bit tedious for us, even with the outrageous speeds Beatrix can hit while running.
Despite this, when we actually played the game, it was difficult for us to put it down. That incremental amount of progress you make every few minutes, the thrill of discovering a new Slime, the surprise of finding a new hidden area somewhere you thought you had explored to death, is a smooth, cumulative thrill.
But so many games were released (sic) to the Switch can come with a multitude of limitations or compromises. Pleasantly, Slime Rancher doesn’t seem to be showing any major degradation at all. Its graphics have been scaled down for sure, but it works quite well, achieving crisp, clear resolution in flatbed mode, and fluctuating between 30 and 60 fps most of the time, depending on what is being displayed. Usually we’d prefer a fixed, stable frame rate over a variable, but Slime Rancher manages to keep its head above 30 most of the time as long as you’re not on The Moss Blanket, so we think it was. the right decision. .
Flexible play is great too. It’s not as sharp as the trailer, but the performance is on par and the game controls still feel great even with the little joysticks on the Joy-Con. Technical aspects aside, it just seems good. The colors are bright, everything is very easy to analyze and it is difficult not to feel animated by the pleasant nature of everything.
Conclution
Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition is a title that doesn’t do the game justice. This is not a simplified Nokia N-Gage version of a great game, this is the real deal and it is flashing marvelous. Growing Slimes, exploring the world, getting frustrated by the price of Crystal Plorts that never goes up, it’s a dense and wonderful experience. Having to travel so much on foot prevents you from achieving extreme greatness, but it’s not enough to keep us from giving you a cordial recommendation.
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