Bleat that: Goat for game

Goat Simulator is unapologetically funny and provides rip-roaring gameplay to keep you hooked to it

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Goat Simulator is a joke. It is a small, broken game riddled with bugs and glitches. Lead developer Armin Ibrisagic of Coffee Stain Studios describes the game as "an old school skating game, except instead of being a skater, you are a goat; and instead of doing tricks, you wreck stuff."

Goat Simulator delivers a few hours of rip-roaring gameplay. The abundant glitches make the game this year's funniest release so far.

To put it simple, in Goat Simulator, the player can be a goat. But this is no idle, grass-munching, innocently bleating farm goat. In the simulator, the goat is a hybrid of a superhero and a punk skater. You can perform a backflip, blast a gas station just by headbutting into one or climb a ladder up a lofty crane, all the while carrying a car in your mouth - the choice is yours.

GOAT SIMULATOR

Developer:  Coffee Stain Studios
Engine:  Unreal Engine 3
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Genre: Simulation video game

The gameplay is smooth and reminded me of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Underground series, where the player earns points for doing tricks, wreaking havoc and chaining them all together in one sweet combo. So, you can throw a car off a rooftop as you launch yourself off a giant fan, timing it meticulously to headbutt the car mid-air, orchestrating a spectacular explosion and winning points for it. There is no limit to the things this goat can do.

The best part of the gameplay is the goat's tongue tricks and how it licks things. Now, this is no casual licking. Once you lick an object, it sticks to your tongue until the player decides to drop it. This means you can lick and carry anything anywhere. This feature adds to hours of fun experiments and fooling around.

Bugs in the game make the goat's neck stick out in awkward positions or gyrate in an unstoppable frenzy. This might sound aggravating to a serious gamer. But take this from a fellow game addict, it looks simply hilarious.

The game uses Nvidia PhysX and the Unreal 3 engine to make its small suburban city map look stunning on high-performance machines. The map is riddled with easter eggs, one more uproarious than the other. The player can collect golden goats scattered throughout the city, which will unlock various goat modes. Once you have collected them, you have the option to play as a giraffe-goat or as a goat with an inbuilt jetpack.

Spoiler alert. There are aliens in the game as well.

After receiving over a thousand views and demands for the game's release on Youtube, it was released deliberately on April Fool's Day, along with the glitches and after removing bugs that could have caused it to crash.

Goat Simulator is available via Steam on Windows PC platform. Coffee Stain Studios is developing ports for Mac OS X and Linux. A new map, new goat models and an update allowing a local four-user multiplayer mode via splitscreen is also in the pipeline, with an expected release next month.

In the midst of all the gargantuan games with matured storylines, complex gameplays and larger-than-life graphics, Goat Simulator makes its mark. It is unapologetically funny, ridiculously small and provides just the right entertainment at a party or during a casual break.