Recent reviews by Ixirayne

A far cry from what ARK used to be, when did it turn into microtransaction hell for things that SHOULD be included in the game? Not to mention just a reskin of a shadowmane with a gimmick, it makes me afraid to see this type of behavior and I wonder if we are just cash grabbing on our way out???

I'll preface this by saying, play the game and be your own judge, but here's how I feel about the game..

If you compare this one to it's predecessor it's a bit of a minor disappointment, or in the very least not what you expect, on it's own if you don't compare it - it's nice, it's good. Now it's in EA so I'm not being as picky as I normally would be but here's some thing's I've found issues with.. so far.

There's not much of anything to spend your money on, if you're a slime rancher veteran and went and grabbed a bunch of slime crosses with their favorite foods, you'll have so much money, with not much to spend it on. Which brings me around to my second issue, the technology.. After playing the first game for hundreds of hours between steam and the switch, I've been spoiled that if you work through the game and get to the later stages, you can have drones for the different parts of your ranch, now on here there isn't drones yet, which I guess is fair considering they'll be adding more things to the game and added features, but what that does mean though is if you've bought all the ranch expansions and have slimes to feed you won't have time to explore unless you throw out your slimes like I have. I feel like for the amount of stuff or lack there of in the game, I went too hard on collecting slimes and now I have very little to show for it. My biggest complaint though, has nothing to do with either of those, it's the BLARINGLY bright graphics, that could use some toning down. Some parts of the map are so bright you can barely see where you are going, and I'm not sold exactly on the new graphics for the UI, ETC. It doesn't show you what time it is either unless you escape out to the menu.
I love Slime Rancher, if you liked the first you will probably like this one, once you get past a few feelings you have about it. I can't wait for when they update this one and bring in more features.

As someone who is a veteran of the survival/crafting genre, here are some things I like and dislike about the game. I am only 10+ hours in and have killed the second boss. It has similar mechanics to most the well known survival/crafting games such as ARK, 7 Days to Die, Rust, Subnautica, Life is Feudal, ETC, but the game play still feels interesting.
Here are some things I like:
The combat system is fun, especially when you get new weapons as the time goes on and has features such as dodge and block.
The crafting sytem is not convoluted, it's simple to figure out for the most part.
The exploration and random gen maps are for the most part pretty good, you have some steep hills here and there but it's got a solid foundation.
I like the cooking recipes. I like the way food works in this game with building your stamina so you're more productive along with house decorations giving comfort which increases the duration of your rested buff..
This game is still very early EA, but here are some things I don't like, based off of games I like that have these features:
Some of the crafting recipes can be difficult to find because you wouldn't think about crafting an item to unlock a recipe, or picking up certain items because you don't need them. (be sure to pick up everything at least once)
Water, it's there, it could have more functionality but you don't have to drink it or anything. If you're clever, you can build a mote with it.
You are absolutely forced to build a workbench any time you want to build just about anything and you have to put it down to build a roof over it, to then be able to craft items on it, but I would suggest to the devs to allow crafting of floor, wall, roof, without the work bench because I'd like to be able to put it on the floor. That said you can put down items and then reclaim them with the hammer, but it's just an extra step. Honestly the workbench required for everything around your base mechanic could use some looking at, for range and for things that don't make sense to have to use near a work bench including the land formatting tool.
Sometimes progression feels slow because early on you might have a hard time finding dungeons based on your world seed and that brings me to the next thing I don't particularly agree with: dungeons do not respawn loot. You have to find a new one. They will respawn mushrooms, that is it. My suggestion here would be to give the dungeons a respawn time of ~1-2 weeks. I know they want to force exploration because the world is large and vast, but for those just starting out without a big boat, this is really hard to do on some seeds and adding a respawn timer to these dungeons would help people get a better start into the game.
My next suggestion isn't something I particularly dislike but this game has a buff feature you get for killing bosses, and for the sake of progression, I'd like them to rethink the order of which you get these buffs as the order in which you get them could be better. I know it's based off of how strong you see the buffs, but as for what makes sense for what stage of the game you're in, they could be better.
The story is fine, you have dreams when you go to sleep sometimes which I thought was a nice touch, and you even need ventilation for your house so you don't smoke yourself out with your hearth.
I recommend this game to people who enjoy the genre, it might be harder if you're new to the genre, but it's also not too complicated to just pick up and learn. You can play with up to 10 people on your own home server, and I'd recommend it to play with others. It's pretty fun!

I love this game, but my biggest problem with it is that I've played since alpha and the final release feels much more buggy and less stable than the alpha builds. I lost 4 hours of work last night when my large rocket fell over upon me getting into it and instead of launching proceeded to spin into a random void in the galaxy which somehow corrupted my character and forced me to make a new one, would not load the character. The trade station has a habit of going offline and not working. The smallest amount of lag on multiplayer means you might trip and inch and die in a tunnel somewhere. We didn't have these issues in early access so I don't know why we have them at launch.