‘Goat Simulator’ Review (PC)
What can you say about a game that was released on April 1st? Simple really, it was designed to be a joke. Goat Simulator has something of a cult following now, it was made for fun and released as is including bugs and gamers are pretty much told to just go for it.
The game itself has no story other than you are a goat and you have to create as much chaos as possible. Set in a little sandbox world there are plenty of people to headbutt, cars to blow up and a huge crane to jump off. Why should you do this? Simple answer would probably be why not. Fact is you bought the game and you are playing it, now see what crazy antics you can get up to.
The controls are simple, you can jump, can lick, flip and headbutt things, oh and “baa”. When licking something they tend to stick to your tongue which means you can do things such as dragging people around the world with you and creating some more chaos. You’ll also find that there are challenges take part in, which tend to be discovered as you are destroying things. These include the Michael Bay, which I won’t tell you how to get but I’m sure you can guess what it will include.
In terms of graphics Goat Simulator doesn’t look to bad. It’s not stunning but the use of NVIDIA’s PhysX and Apex does keep things looking good, and when a lot of the game is based on destruction and physics there is a certain amount of realism in how the world reacts to your rampage. One thing you’ll notice though is that a lot of things tend to get stuck in walls, even you sometimes and this is just one of the many bugs in the game. While true that with a lot of games this would be looked at negatively as something that should have been fixed, the fact is this is not a big release game that was designed to be perfect this was a game that was never really meant to be released.
To create some longevity in play there are special items that can be collected and as mentioned before there are challenges that constantly appear on-screen to push you into making progress in the game. As well as the challenges you’ll also find the obligatory Steam achievements for people who are interested in that kind of thing, so even if your interest in the game may start to lessen sometimes if you want to complete the game 100% there is plenty to work on.
Goat Simulator is a game that is not designed to be examined in the way some other games are. It was just put together as something of a joke really and yes it’s broken, but underneath it all there is charm there. I’d recommend it for people who know exactly what they are going into. You are going to be a Goat Simulator, if you don’t like it…it’s not like you wasted that much money on it really. Sometimes it’s fun to just play something stupid, in a way this is the beauty of indie games.
There is a niche for all kinds of odd games that have no point, and are just silly and Goat Simulator has found its own little corner to cause chaos in. Either enjoy it or don’t, it’s not like it was designed to change the world of gaming, and to me that is part of its charm.
