Finally, after waiting three years, Slime Rancher 2 is out of early access. After completing Slime Rancher and adding it to my favourite video games list, I was excited about the announcement of a sequel in 2022. I never buy early access games, so I kept a close eye on when it was going to get a full release. I've been nervous about picking the game up out of a fear of disappointment. Watching someone play it in an unfinished state during the early access release made me scared for its development. Slime Rancher means a lot to me, mostly due to the context around me playing the first game. Here's hoping it lives up to the original.

The Slime Rancher series is a tycoon & exploration game that was there at the genesis of the “comfy” genre. You explore the world to get more slimes to ranch, which make you money to upgrade your abilities and your base. Upgrades to your jetpack and movement speed return, making exploring the world as fun as ever. Attempting to find the secrets and getting places you weren't intended to remain one of my favourite parts of the series.

That said, Slime Rancher 2 doesn't feel like a sequel in the traditional sense. Yeah, you've got a new world, a few new slimes, and old slimes with new mechanics. However, there isn't much new going on in the game. It feels like a “remix” of the first game. Everything feels the same, but some things are changed slightly. For example, you used to get crafting materials with stationary drills; now they're out in the world to pick up while you're exploring. Another example, a few slimes you would get normally are now tied to a new weather mechanic. It's fine, I don't hate it. I just wish this felt like Slime Rancher 2 and not Slime Rancher Again.

Unfortunately, that's where the positive things end for Slime Rancher 2. In September 2025, when the game came out of early access, they added the final major content update. The final section of the Grey Labyrinth was added, closing out the story of the game. I have so many things I want to say about the Grey Labyrinth, so I'm just going to jump into it.

The Grey Labyrinth is too big. The entire map is too big, but adding the Grey Labyrinth on top of the already excessively large map is painful. You spend too much time running back and forth between random locations to achieve something as simple as opening a door. Every time I would make progress through the labyrinth, I would run into more locked doors that needed a plort from a slime that was nowhere near the door. It took me 27 hours to beat the game, and it felt like all I was doing was backtracking through a massive map two times the size of the first game with the same amount of content. Additionally, it's a labyrinth, meaning, it's confusing to navigate. Even as I got towards the end of my playthrough, I still didn't understand how to effectively get to specific locations. There's also vertical levels of every section, making the map useless to use for navigation. Being forced to use the jetpack to get to locations I need to get to frequently isn't fun. The stop and start gameplay of having to traverse with the jetpack is mind-numbing. The jetpack is supposed to help you explore, find treasure, access hard to reach locations. It's not and was never meant to be your only means of getting to normal areas.

In the Grey Labyrinth, there's two unique plorts that can't be ranched; the Shadow plort and the Prisma plort. They're both poorly designed, much like the Grey Labyrinth itself. Shadow plorts require you to shoot things at Shadow Slimes, forcing them to drop some plorts. You use these to open doors, sell for money, deposit for upgrades, and unlock secrets of the area, often requiring between 10 and 50. The problem is that the Shadow Slimes are designed to jump straight off the nearest edge. The plorts and the items you shoot at the slimes also go flying all over the place. More time-wasting, a theme of this area. Prisma plorts are obtained by waiting for an unstable anomaly to happen, making all the slimes unstable. Once you feed them, they'll drop unstable plorts, which you then run to stabilization gates located around the map. Unstable areas happen at random, in random locations. They also may not happen around a gate, and you can't hold them in your inventory for too long, or they'll go flying out. Double time-wasting. You use these for all the same reasons as shadow plorts. The time-wasting, sitting around, and running around in circles is NOT FUN.

I saw a review that summed up Slime Rancher 2 perfectly. The game doesn't respect your time. The map is too big, there's too much running around, there's too much waiting around, and there's barely any of what made Slime Rancher fun. Something else I didn't touch on is the story. It feels so forced, and I just couldn't care less by the end of the game. Slime Rancher's story had a build up that didn't really hit until the end of the game. They try to do the same here, but it's a significantly worse version of the first game that I found myself trying to rush through it. There's nothing here that's an improvement. This is by far the worst sequel to a video game I've played to date.

So, is it worth completing?

All achievements were obtained on the hardest possible difficulty. (1.5x damage, tarr slimes enabled)

Most of the achievements follow the progression of the game, but if you were looking at the list while playing, you'll have gotten most of the extras. The post game consists of you farming money to complete the Slimepedia, which is an achievement. This happened to be the most enjoyable part of the game for me, ranch upkeep. However, to complete the Slimepedia, you need to get all the toys for slimes. You buy these from the shop, but only once per day. There's no duplicate protection, of course. Luckily, you can fast-forward time to cycle the shop.

Usually, I have an “achievements that stand out” section, but there isn't any. They're all standard achievements, and none of them require you to do anything special or interesting. Should you complete Slime Rancher 2? That's a question of, should you play Slime Rancher 2 at all.

Slime Rancher 2 could have been so much more. They added ways to decorate the massive ranch they gave you. There are more gadgets to play around with. But by the end of the game, I couldn't bring myself to want to play with any of those things. I feel like I had wasted so much time doing nothing that I wasn't able to justify playing more.

_{Published 16 March 2026 @ 11:06:57 PM UTC}

End of Game Information

Total Time Played: 40 hours, 25 minutes