I like the idea of /v/ reviewing games and pointing out all the bullshit in them. So excuse me while I shit out a TL;DR.
>slime rancher
I played it because farming games an autistic collecting of things are my jam, so I figured I could pretend everything except farming smiles or whatever doesn't exist. You get that to some extent, but don't get excited because the game is very shallow. There's no puzzles or thoughtful gameplay or anything, just exploring and collecting slimes/plants along the way.
The game doesn't exactly have any story that you have to sit through, it's mostly in useless emails and pointless text prompts scattered around the world, I only got glimpses at them while trying to figure out if they have anything useful (they don't) and best I can figure some slut has been literally everywhere in the game before you and left notes for you talking about their lesbian romance or something.
You'd expect a game that was in early access to have a shitty half baked ending, but this game baked the greatest shit ending of them all: a literal honest to god dead end with nothing in it except a final text note from that faggot saying they're in love. No special slimes, no special item, nothing.
The character model is the worst character design in all of videogame history, which is doubly retarded because that model doesn't exist anywhere outside the title screen and the home screen where you can read emails. Maybe you can see it in multiplayer or something.
Getting slimes consists of (does not vary per slime type):
1. find new slime
2. suck up as many as you want to have
3. throw them into a cage in your ranch
Farming slimes consists of:
1. periodically move food from a plant you planted into the cage
2. suck up resources from the cage's collector
Planting aforementioned plant consists of:
1. find the food you want
2. suck up one of the items
3. throw it into the farm plot in your ranch
Resources have exactly 2 uses besides selling:
1. feeding one (1) to a slime will instantly turn it into a larger crossbreed between those 2 slime types. It will have both slime's favorite food (which makes feeding them trivial), they'll give both resources when fed, and have both slimes' special properties (e.g. exploding slimes explode randomly).
2. there's some lategame building mechanic where you can spend resources to build teleporters and stuff around the world. Except you have to build 3 different types of drills first and plant them around in order to get special resources that are used exclusively for building those things. It's not interesting by the way, you place the drill, wait 10 minutes, then collect ~3-5 resources and repeat until you get all the shit you want, and it breaks after 1 or 3 cycles depending on drill type. You can't automate it. Oh and you can only place 6 at a time globally.
In lategame because you can also build drones that can move items around… except you can only place 2 of them per area, which equates to feed + collect every time. Not that there's anything else useful to do.
If you REALLY like farming/collecting themes, are willing to put your expectations and standards to the bottom of the ocean, can pretend to be blind every time you go through a menu, aren't easily tempted to read text "just in case", aren't too autistic to leave 2 minigames unfinished, and don't mind that 80% of your brain functions will be resting while playing, you can get an alright simplistic slime collection game out of it. It's kinda fun to find a new slime and try to think of which kind of crossbreed to make out of it, but that's basically the extent of it. The concept has a huge amount of untapped potential, but you'd have to tear down the walls and ceilings of this game to truly fix it.
If you want to give it a try no matter what, here's some tips to ease your pain:
- don't bother reading any dialogue at all, except when you get to a special ranch area with a new quest screen, it explains the minigame. The slime lore tells you if the slime is dangerous, but only quantum/dervish slimes can cause problems.
- the first minigame has 2 plant upgrades; extending the despawn time of fallen food and getting extra harvest. The first one is okay. Didn't play the second minigame enough to reach any rewards. Both also give more farm space but it's NOT worth the grind.
- farming chickens is a waste of your time. If you get a meat eating slime then create a crossbreed with fruit or vegetable diet. There's a guy who wants them for quests though.
- quests as far as I can tell don't give any special rewards nor get more profitable later, except there's some asian looking woman who gives you a second minigame if you complete quests for her.
- the floating medals have no use, you can put them on slimes for decoration but that's it.
- the locked pods have a new teleporter color at best.
- don't expect anything much more interesting than collecting a new slime/plant type.