Goat Simulator – Reviewed

Goat Simulator Reviewed

By Nathaniel Liles

[divider] [dropcap]I[/dropcap] used to have goats. My dad raised them in the back yard for, like, three years before I moved away to college. They were crafty little bastards, always getting out of their enclosure. I decided to give Goat Simulator a try today to recapture that innocent magic and mystery. I mean, those goats were worthless assholes, but it was still a fun struggle, like having an arch nemesis.

Within the first minute of playing Goat Simulator, I was being dragged, by my tongue, behind a redneck’s sedan. Within the first five minutes, I walked through the halls of my very own Goat Castle to take my seat on a throne of skulls as Lord Goat. Within an hour, I had been to space and licked a moving car. I flew through the air with my very own Goat Jetpack. I made an offering to the Dark Lord, pleading for Sanctum 3. I slid my ragdolling Goat Body down a waterslide, off a ramp, then bounced off a trampoline in a pool before doing a quadruple 720 backflip as a very real human scream escaped my Goat Lips.

Goat Simulator was a joke. It was a silly YouTube video of the alpha build of a game that wasn’t even being developed and we laughed. We thought it was a damn good joke. We thought it would be even better to play it for ourselves, so the internet stood united, for the first time since the series of tubes was first connected, and we made this happen. On the bright side, I spent three hours playing Goat Simulator today. On the other hand, this happened because of us, what have we done? Jokes aside, Goat Simulator is the single most fantastic, genius novelty game that I’ve ever played. Goat Simulator is all the fun of a gumball machine sticky hand that becomes exponentially more as you discover every single weird, awesome thing that the world of Goat Simulator has to offer. The gameplay is simple, and is shockingly similar to the Tony Hawk series of skating games, only this time around your combos are made of goat destruction in addition to taking off sweet ramps and pulling 180 Melvins. You walk around, you headbutt things, kick things, lick things, fart constantly, uncontrollably, and visibly, you can go ragdoll, make Goat Corpses rain from the sky, sacrifice your followers to Satan to be imbued with the power to create a dimensional vortex of inescapable pain and torture. You know, Goat Things. Normal-ass Goat Things.

So we’ve established that Goat Simulator is unfiltered hilarity, sure, but it doesn’t slack off in other areas. Turning the graphical quality of Goat Simulator all the way up does not disappoint, and the music is… It’s just perfect, you have to hear it for yourself, but if a blind person heard the music with no context whatsoever, they would know exactly what it was written for. You can talk about music being the universal language, sure, but Goat Simulator is like an interactive artistic representation of the struggle of man. My only issue with the game was the shoddy and limited controller support. None of the tutorials or menus recognized that I was using a controller (although they worked most of the time) and movement and camera adjustment weren’t dependent on the angle of my analog stick (i.e. Even slightly tilting the joystick made Goat walk forward as if I had pressed a button, no slower).

Go play Goat Simulator as soon as humanly possible. It’ll be widely available on Steam on April 1^st and you won’t regret paying whatever it costs to play this fine example of pure, unfiltered fun. Steam Workshop is an incorporated feature, so expect the modding community to go nuts all over this game and provide us all with limitless and widely creative content in the form of maps, mods, and character mutations. If you want to learn a bit more about Goat Simulator, we have an interview with the creator right here at Cliqist, but in all honesty, it would just keep you out of the game longer. This game gets my official and heartfelt Willy-Slap of Approval and my highest numerical score of Math out of Numbers. Have a nice day, go play Goat Simulator.

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[follow id=”Cliqist” size=”large” count=”true” ] [author image=”http://cliqist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/nathaniel.jpg” ]Nathaniel is a video game journalist, enthusiast, and reviewer living in Indiana. His hobbies include playing video games. When he’s not playing video games, he likes to read, write, think about, and sing songs about video games. He’s also an indie musician and sound engineering student with one album out and one on the way, and you can listen to him at http://nathanielliles.bandcamp.com/. You can also visit B-TEN.com, where he writes about video game news and argue with things that aren’t actually real things.[/author]