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Ruminate on this: Goat Simulator reviewed

Some will play Goat Simulator and see a really bad, really buggy and really limited game starring a goat that’s fun for five minutes, after which it becomes a pointless waste of time. Others will play the game and laugh at its silliness – you are, after all, playing as a goat with the aim of destroying as many things as possible while throwing yourself around the level, and it’s a laugh a minute if you’re into that sort of thing.

And that’s exactly what the developers were going for. Goat Simulator was never going to be anything but silly – it started off as a joke for one of Coffee Stain Studios’ internal “game jams”, and only ended up as a full commercial release once footage of it hit the internet and the internet lost its mind. So they polished it up as much as they could while leaving in any bugs that made the game funny, and released it – quite appropriately – on April 1, 2014.

At first glance, Goat Simulator is as daft as it sounds. All you do is run around a fairly small level breaking stuff, getting run over by cars and throwing yourself off very high things like cranes and buildings, just for laughs. The idea is so dumb, in fact, that Coffee Stain Studios called it “The world’s dumbest game”, and encouraged people not to buy it until it went on sale for $2 (it’s currently $9.99 on Steam).

Just a goat
Goat vs. the world.

But the more you poke around, the more you’ll realise that Goat Simulator is far more than just a joke. Somehow, it manages to provide commentary on the gaming industry in between headbutts: it’s a poke in the eye for sandbox gaming in general, it prods at the bugs that are left in professional-grade AAA games despite years of development and huge teams, and it openly mocks the way so many games take themselves way, way too seriously. It’s a clever commentary on many aspects of gaming culture, if you’re willing to stretch your brain that far.

Even if you’re not, Goat Simulator is a lot of fun. At least for a while.

The game controls like an old-school skating game, but instead of being a teenager on a skateboard pulling tricks, you’re a goat that must break stuff. Much of GS’s world can be smashed with a headbutt or a kick, and you can also lick things – which then stick to your tongue – which you can chuck around the place with hilarious results. My favourite thing to do is lick an axe, drag it around and then swing it around my head into people, knocking them around like tenpins.

Destruction
Smashing.

The more you break, the higher you’ll push a multiplier that means even more points for your score, which can be posted to online leaderboards to see who’s best at goating.

There are a bunch of challenges to complete as well. They involve reaching a certain score, performing backflips and forward-flips, jumping to a certain height and other rather silly things that will keep you busy for a while. When you’re bored of that, you can always apply a few ‘mutators’ to your goat, like giving it a jetpack that shoots it off in unexpected directions, plus there are others to discover in the world itself.

Jetpack
Jetpacks looked so much more controllable on The Jetsons.

There is no real AI to speak of, however, and the game’s props are rather static: the people in the game react very basically to being headbutted/set on fire by explosions/knocked over by debris and are more set dressing than something to really play with, and the odd car or truck that speeds through the level are on a set path and absolutely nothing you place in the way – yourself or even the largest pile of debris – can shake them from their course.

a truck
Guess where this is headed.

But if you look closely at the level, you’ll see that Coffee Stain didn’t just stop with the obvious: there are other things to do that you won’t specifically be tasked with, but which are totally doable (and even have their own achievements). These include licking that low-flying hang-glider you can see from the ground which you must figure out how to do, dragging a human onto a handy treadmill with your tongue to send them flying and being pushed to new heights by jumping onto massive fans. There are also secret areas to be found, along with a few Easter eggs put there just because the developers could.

As you might imagine, the silly physics, your sticky tongue and the fact that you are a goat make it hard not to laugh at Goat Simulator, something few games in recent memory have managed. So yes, Goat Simulator has limited appeal, and likely won’t be a game you’ll play every day for a month, but it will make you laugh a whole lot, and that alone is worth the ten dollars.

Goat Simulator is a PC-only game that you can buy from Steam for $9.99. Or wait for the next discount.

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