The player attempts to protect their ship from a rain of enormous drops of slime by deflecting them into canisters, while fending off attacks by an alien flying saucer.

The player is in control of a ship floating in the Sargasso Sea, which is now filled with a slime created by the evil alien Plexarian Invincibles.

[3] At the start of each level, a number of these wedges are already in place forming diagonal barriers, although there is always a hole in the middle that is left unprotected.

[5] The resulting delay meant Broderbund's Choplifter reached the market first, and Fort Apocalypse was often considered a me-too effort.

Antic said "Slime is a fiendishly clever, delightfully disgusting game that's guaranteed to give you green dreams for weeks after you get it", but complained about the controls, saying they became difficult to use at higher levels and suggested using a trackball might be a solution.

Their main complaint was the overly sensitive controls, calling them "unwieldy and terribly jumpy", and to a lesser degree, the sound effects that the reviewer thought were "probably the worst ever heard on any computer game".