Goat Simulator was announced to much cynicism, disbelief and hilarity. Simulators are a widely popular game-type, everything from buses to trucks to forklifts, but never before has something so bizarre graced our PCs. So April Fools Day (causing yet more cynicism), Goat Simulator was released, putting an end to our goaty dreams.
Before the release, the developer described it as a “skating game but instead of a skateboard you’re a goat and instead of tricks you wreck stuff.” This describes the gameplay well. Free roam but within a fairly restricted area with only a huge score being the goal by linking combos and causing destruction. Another feature that the developer spoke of was the amount of bugs. They have been left in to create me hilarity, which it does.
From time to time your head will get stuck in a wall you walked nowhere near, your legs may descend into the floor and from time to time you’ll get catapulted us of the gameworld when hit by a truck. In other games this would infuriate us, but in Goat Simulator it is a moment to simply laugh at. To see your goat fling through the air at ten thousand miles an hour is funnier than you’d think.
“Weee!!!” indeed, Goat, “Weee!!!” indeed.
Outside of the accidental, Goat Simulator has packed a lot into a very small gameworld, and it does this by creating other dimensions. We have the actual world – road, houses, car, people, sacrificial area – and then we have other worlds – the lair of the Goat Queen/King, the air and, of course, space. These other dimensions are always full of hilarity but not always full of variety. In space we are simply left abandoned by aliens and in the lair we are simply crowned and thrown back down to Earth. While these provide more fantastically funny moments, they’re one time moments, and I think this is where Goat Simulator falls down.
Sure there’s lots to do and you’re free to do as you please, but how many times can one be crowned a King or gain Demonic Powers? Perhaps that last one is a bad example, but still it becomes stagnant. If you hit one person you’ve hit them all, and getting knocked down by a car becomes less funny the seventeenth time, but more sad.
That being said, on first playthrough there’s tons to do and surprise you with, and of course you can always return just to absolutely destroy rooms or play Flappy Goat, but whether that’s enough to keep it from gathering dust in your games library remains to be seen. The Steam Workshop does provide a solution to this. People have already created Ostriches and Giraffes as playable characters and altered your original goat to things like Telegoat.
Goat Simulator is one of the funniest games I’ve played in my entire life.It is genuinely stomach-hurting. But one does wonder if I’ll ever return to it after I’ve achieved everything there is to achieve, and I’ve almost already done that. 7/10
Prepare to be Bloggled! 