As the decades have rolled on, AAA gaming has gotten a little po-faced. A little artsy and pretentious. Rare is the time when you’ll see a decent budget thrown at something rooted in lunacy. Amateurs looking for those kinds of thrills will pick up Saints Row. But if you truly yearn to take “la Vida Loca” by the horns – to enjoy udder insanity – you’re better off trip-trapping over to Goat Simulator 3 instead.
I’m something of an expert when it comes to today’s subject matter. For starters, I grew up on a hobby farm with a sizable flock of angora goats – I’ve seen what those quirky little weirdos get up to for fun. Secondly, my two sons absolutely adore playing the original Goat Simulator in split-screen – I’ve seen what those quirky little weirdos get up to for fun, too.
If you’ve never played a game in this series (and I should probably mention there are only two, because comedy reasons) the concept couldn’t be simpler. As a quadruped with a ridiculously long and adhesive tongue, you’re let loose in a sandbox overflowing with gaming references, memes and deliberately average production values.
Goat Simulator 3 Review
Your job: lick and tear until it is done.
What is ‘it’, exactly? Nothing sensible or sane. This low-poly environment, populated by lackwit AI is certainly sprinkled with collectables and a five-hour campaign. However, it’s also designed to be a freeform sandbox of emergent fun that’s frequently engine-bending stuff. You’ll often need to use the player respawn function because you’ve ragdolled yourself into some inescapable predicament. Often while cackling your head off.
Mind you, it may also be because you’ve skidded off one of the many seaside cliffs and can’t get back up fast enough. Or at all…even with the newly included triple jump (ala Super Mario 64). When it comes to the impressive mountaineers they’re trying to emulate, sadly the avatars in Goat Simulator aren’t competent hillbillies.
Beyond the odd bit of annoying topography, the new island of San Angora is a mecca for madness. At first impressions, it’s obvious that the visuals have been beefed (chevonned?) up considerably over the last title. You’d be mad to expect graphics better than a first-gen PS4 title, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the upgrade. The effort has been put in.
That said, it’s clear that maintaining a stable frame rate in a four-player split was quite a bit lower on the to-do list. It’s perfectly bearable, though it can get annoying when the fur is flying during clout-determining adversarial contests. Also when you’re all hooning about in cars.
Don’t ask why goats can drive in this sequel.
Just accept it.
Same advice for when you discover tow trucks can uproot buildings and drag them along like parade day floats.
If you are keen on some multiplayer hijinks, there are seven new mini-games in which to butt heads with online or local mates. Firstly, there’s King of the Hill – stay inside a castle to gain crowns, because most crowns wins. That’s followed by Floor is Lava – hold some high ground as rising magma picks you off one by one. Plus there’s the last survivor antics of Car Derby – rear-end the ride of another player to make their bomb go off.
Things get slightly more creative with Prop Hunt – a hide-and-seek affair where the seeker has to headbutt random objects to see if that’s the particular form adopted by the hiding players. The risk-reward for the inanimate object: they actually have to risk exposing themselves by sliding about to accrue points.
Speaking of transforming into weird things, there’s Prop Golf – physically pelt your oddly shaped self into a distant flag before anybody else. It’s What The Golf stuff that is the current pick of the litter in my living room.
Last but not least, we have Headsplat, where you get points for claiming/reclaiming chunks of the world by headbutting your team colour onto it. And we can round things out with Hoofball, a sportsball thing that’s as uninspired as it is surprisingly hilarious anyway.
The coolest feature of the aforementioned modes is the versatility of blending them in at a moment’s notice. In two seconds, any player can flick open a menu, pick a mini-game archetype and put it to player vote. If everybody is in, everybody spawns into the inciting player’s chosen battlefield (virtually anywhere in the sandbox). No load times. No faffing about.
As impressive as the above is, the structured bits of content are really only nice ‘to-haves’. The most fun I had with my little goat kids (and during my solo sessions) came from going way, way off script with Goat Simulator 3’s customisation suite and WTF physics systems.
You can play dress-ups with over 300 cosmetic items, some of which offer complete physiological changes. Why be a goat when you can be Jeebus, rocking gold platform clogs with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and the ability to inexplicably summon Kraken tentacles? Or perhaps you’d be more comfortable flopping about as a land-shark (hammerhead, specifically) decked out with a parking cone hat, devil horns and Icarus wings.
In time you can morph yourself into fish, a pig, a giraffe, rhinos and more. Also, while I’ve spent days with this, I’m still finding/earning cosmetic items that come with surprising mechanical switch-ups. A big hit in my household are the VR goggles that effectively turn Goat Simulator 3 into gaming’s most outlandish first-person shooter.
Is it all good fun in this sequel? Sadly, not. My posse and I ran afoul of a bug that would lock one or all of us into our menu screens. A title reset was the only way to solve it, and the frequency of it was maybe twice every 2-hour session.
The many other bugs we encountered? Well, they were within the boundaries of accepted and expected tomfoolery. That being said, if janky systems and rough visuals make you unreasonably angry—like a redneck hearing jazz on a jukebox—this was never going to be your game.
If you are a sport, Goat Simulator 3 represents hours of irreverent fun. Its particular brand of (relatively kid-friendly) wackiness is amusing when consumed on one’s lonesome, especially if you’re up to date on your memes and game references.
With the right band of miscreants, however, it’s a mindless laugh riot. Though it will probably wear thin before you reach double-digit hours.
This sequel raises the baa, but I just wish the silliness was a bit more stable. Also, the gaming landscape has changed considerably since the 2014 original burst onto the scene. Goat Simulator 3 feels too expensive when you can look over the fence and see greener fields full of lower-priced, idiocy-providing indie alternatives.
Goat Simulator 3 was reviewed on Xbox Series X using digital codes provided by the publisher.
