Gaming on a Budget: Goat Simulator

So I figured I would start with one of the PS Plus games of the month for my first Gaming on a Budget column.  I mean, what’s cheaper than free!  Well, technically you pay for the service, but whatever.  

Anyway, I always get excited to see which games will be available for download when the end of the month draws near.  Will it be a big time, A-list title?  An obscure hidden gem?  Who knows.  I have to say that for the most part, Sony does a good job.  Hell, in January we got the first three Uncharted games!  Those were all A-list titles and are important parts of Sony’s catalog.  Personally, I don’t love them, but they are good, solid, 8.5/10 games and if you haven’t played them, the price is right.  But everyone already knows about Uncharted, so I am going to focus on the OTHER game this month.

 

Which is...Goat Simulator?  I remember hearing about it when it was launched, but I thought it was something out of an Onion article and not an actual game.  Yet here it is, available for the low price of $0 on my PS4 for January 2020.  Checking out some reviews, it seems to be pretty divisive, some love it and others hate it.  It also doesn’t appear to be a simulator at all, despite the title and cover (It has the same font and style of an old school “flight simulator” game).  So what’s the deal?

The best way I can describe this mess is a combination of Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but without skating or car theft.  You explore a city open world style, causing as much or as little havoc as you want.  You are given a list of tasks you can complete for points, everything from doing backflips to hijacking techno concerts.  It makes little sense, but it isn’t supposed to.  Controls and physics are similar to THPS.  Its almost as if they just took out the skateboard, you can even manual by pressing up and down.  The goat jumps with X and can be rotated with the d-pad.  Square licks, R2 headbuts, L1 bleats and circle activates rag doll physics.  Its all relatively responsive and quite simple.

Here’s the problem though.  There is little, if any, substance here.  The game is fun for about 30 minutes before the whole shock of it wears thin.  The first time a car explodes after you headbutt it, its laugh out loud funny.  The 20th time you do it, its just meh.  There are a lot of objectives, but none of them are particularly interesting and most of them are just doing the same thing in different locations.  Its not just a one playthrough kind of game, I would definitely boot it up for multiple quick sessions, but I couldn’t see playing this for hours on end.

So, here’s the point in the review where I get out the flame shield, because I am going to talk about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the game that Goat Simulator felt most like to me.  I find almost all of the THPS games to be highly overrated.  Tony Hawk’s Underground is great, but outside of that, every single game in the franchise is a shallow, button mash-fest that was a product of the uber-obnoxious skater fad in the 90s.  That said, they were fun in short bursts and Goat simulator kind of carries that mantle.  If anything I like it better, as there’s much more to do and you aren’t bound to your perpetually moving board.

And that’s where the GTA elements come in.  You really do have free reign of the city, there’s no timer, its difficult to die and you can work through missions as you choose.  Do no get me wrong, this isn’t GTA, but the influence is certainly there.  Honestly, I think I could see this as something I would give to a younger gamer I didn’t feel was “ready” for the extreme violence and overt sex of GTA.  It’s rated T, there are some “suggestive themes” that I wouldn’t recommend really young gamers be exposed to, but its nothing that 10-year old boys don’t joke about on the school bus.  

This was probably the hardest game I have ever had to rate, I struggled a little bit with what score to give it.  On one hand, the gameplay is monotonous, most of the humor really isn’t my thing and there were points where I felt my brain cells dying.  On the other hand, the game was really fun in short playing sessions, there is a decent amount to do and when it was clever, it was really clever.  The graphics are okay and the sound is decent, not much to say there.  I hated the fact that it seemed like a vehicle for DLC, but there was plenty of content available from the start.  

I figured the easiest thing to do was compare it to THPS, since that was the game I was reminded the most of.  There were certainly elements of GTA mixed in, but that had more to do with how the game was structured vs. how it was played.  I would say Goat Simulator was certainly worse than THUG, but better than anything else in the series, so for this...

5.5/10

I will close each Gaming on a Budget by answering two questions:

Was it worth it at the price point?  I would say so.  It was free through PS Plus, but that service is $12 per month for 2 games making the price technically $2.50.  That’s more than fair for a quick diversion.  However, it normally retails for $9.99 and I don’t think I would pay that for it.

Would I pay $60 for it:  Absolutely not.  In no universe would this be worth a full price purchase.  There isn’t nearly enough here.

Play this if:

You are into goat yoga

You are the type of gamer who plays GTA without touching the missions

You are looking for something to play in short increments

Avoid if:

You can’t take the humor

You are looking for a game with more depth.