The goat returns in familiar ragdoll fashion, wherein humans in goat skin get to become absolute menaces to society through Coffee Stain’s Goat Simulator 3. The goat hereby dubbed Fligor wakes up, is told of its destiny to be trained into the best goat ever, and the adventure begins…

SHAKE IT ALL ABOUT

The world is your oyster in this sandbox game. The goat is capable of wanton destruction, and headbutting innocents into the stratosphere, to say the least. The WASD and mouse remain your faithful tools of mass chaos. Don’t forget the “baa”.

As you traipse all over the battered corpses of pitiful mortals, complete the assortment of missions to obtain customization items or just morphing yourself into ungodly forms of goat. Or scarecrow, if you’re so inclined. It’s easy enough to find these missions labelled on the map, the size of which isn’t overly large. My four legs is enough to carry me to my destination, though that isn’t as Hardcore Gamer TM as hijacking a car to drive in style.

Additionally, there are Goat Towers that can be synchronized with to work as fast travel points. They also reveal areas on the map. The first Goat Tower introduces the Goat Castle, an ever expanding place for new explorable areas, unlocked as you get more rewards.

While the missions may be labelled, the requirements can range from blindingly obvious to vaguely arcane. I could only assume I’m just overlooking something, something loss in the madness, or lost in translation. Or maybe I just have boomer humour and don’t get what the Gen-Z kids are on when they ask me to save a “Steve” from drowning, who turned out to be a fish.

Minigames are also dotted about the map, but these are only accessible through multiplayer. Online didn’t seem to work for me, though fortunately, local co-op was an option. They can be great fun if you can find someone to bleat at, hopefully with triumph when you’ve successfully sabotaged them.

DIVA GOAT

Now that you’ve gotten all the bling, it’s time to bleat in style. There’s a dizzying array of attachments – and accompanying flavour text – for just about every inch of your goat being. There’s more to be bought from the in-game shop using “karma”, earned in-game. What’s better than to have heads turn to see how fashionable you are before you punt them into the atmosphere?

To best bring out the goat glamour, Goat Simulator 3 actually is quite a stunning-looking game. At Epic settings, the world is quite the wonderful place simply to clop around and admire it, before some quirk of the AI breaks the illusion of normalcy and you’re back into the midst of tearing apart the fabric of reality.

There were occasional bugs with regards to hitboxes, collision detection going out on a coffee break and I’m promptly given a taste of my own medicine, sailing off into the polygonal unknown.

HITTING THE HAY

Well, it’s Goat Simulator 3. It’s more of the wacky mayhem and fantasy of ruining everyone’s lives in cartoonishly evil fashion. The minigames make for fun additions if you’re able to get a plus one to test the strength of your friendship. Not the most ground-breaking changes from its previous iterations.

Keep baaing and carry on.

Game reviewed on PC. Review code provided by EpicSoft Asia.