I was hunched over my desk in the wee hours of the morning here in Australia with an extra-strong coffee, waiting for the Nintendo Direct. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much but there were some great surprises, and the one game I was really excited for was the much-beloved cult sequel, Goat Simulator 3. My mates and I laughed at the game trailer and I knew I just had to cover it. What’s It Like? Eat some grass, prepare for mayhem, and get ready to hoof it from the cops as we review Goat Simulator 3 for Nintendo Switch.
Goat Simulator 3 had me hooked initially with the opening parody of Skyrim with “Hey, you, you’re finally awake” and introduces a narrative about how you’re the goat from the first game (don’t bother looking for the second game it doesn’t exist) called Pilgor, and the farmer really wanted to keep you because you’re now famous. After some hilarious exposition and 4th wall breaking, you are unleashed upon the world of San Angora to kick, lick, headbutt, and destroy pretty much anything you like.
The game’s progression system is tied to quests and “instincts” which are mini-challenges you can do to earn points to unlock a magical door in your goat tower. Quests involve things like building your own car, training ballerinas which unleashed a tornado into the world, and even nuking a town. Instincts are smaller challenges that can be completed anywhere like headbutting 5 people or driving a firetruck. To me, these challenges almost play out like finding gaps in the Tony Hawk games, and it can be quite fun to unlock and find new challenges. Speaking of unlocks, there are plenty of outfits and items to find, as well as a lot of pop culture references to make you laugh with its humour and groan-inducing puns. You can customise Pilgor in all manner of items, abilities, and cosmetics, and it’s rather humorous to see a goat in a tutu with a blowtorch running away from the police while blowing up everything it can.
The laughs fade rather quickly however because, to put it bluntly, Goat Simulator 3 is an absolutely terrible port on the Nintendo Switch, with an egregious list of problems I wouldn’t even know where to start. To start, and probably the biggest issue is that assets simply take forever to load in. There were countless times when I got stuck on nothing, and then a few seconds later a pole or stairs would load in. This happens to anything roughly 15 meters or so from Pilgor, so pop-in is horrendous. Even when synching with Goat Towers (which admittedly is a hilarious take on Assassins Creeds Eagle Eye points) assets pop in, or simply don’t load. Another example of this is attending a concert where the crowd took 15 or so seconds to load in, as well as the band performing. It makes the game seem like it has almost no optimisation or polish at all.
Other bugs include hyperactive ragdoll physics, cars flipping out of control, key cutscenes missing assets, and broken animations. One such cutscene is where you nuke a town. The bomb hurtles toward Earth where there is already a crater because the tree didn’t load in, and then when you detonate the bomb, the animation didn’t load properly so I just had a brown screen for a bit before some of the mushroom cloud appeared. Unfortunately, most events are like this meaning the humour or the ridiculousness of the scene is completely wasted due to poor optimisation. Sound quality is also of a significantly reduced bitrate, making the voice acting sound grainy and cheap. Outside of assets and animations, you can get stuck in interactions that prompt you to press X to exit, only to do nothing at all, forcing you to quit to desktop. It seems to me like the port needed more time to cook, but was rushed out to be available after this morning’s Nintendo Direct.
This is such a shame because, at its core, Goat Simulator 3 is a funny, reference-laden physics-based adventure that has an almost cult following. Despite these issues, I still had fun completing quests, and I laughed at a lot of the references. It’s clear Goat Simulator 3 is only a patch or two away from being udderly enjoyable (no, I’m not sorry for that pun.) With all these problems, I still found hours of enjoyment causing mayhem. There’s also two-player local and online co-op which I played alongside my daughter running amock. There are mini-games to play like a Splatoon parody that sees you have to paint as many items as possible in a short amount of time. My daughter and I were giggling as she headbutted me around the boardwalk while painting people, kayaks, and boxes. It’s these small moments that make me see just how much potential there is in this wonderfully silly game, but the technical issues hinder it at almost every turn.
For my goats looking into Accessi-billy-ty, there are several options you can change like turning off motion blur, turning on camera smoothing, turning off camera shakes, and adding subtitles. All inputs can be rebounded for ease of use. Since the graphics can be muddy at times, my vision-impaired goats may have a hard time discerning objects from the environment. The game doesn’t have a mini-map, but you can pin locations on the in-game map which guides you with an indicator on the top of the screen, making it easier to find and locate towers and objectives. As always, I recommend doing further research to find out if Goat Simulator 3 caters to your needs, and I encourage people to let me know what I can mention to help you make a more informed purchase in future reviews.
If I could sum up how I feel about Goat Simulator 3 on Switch in one word it would be “Disappointed.” Goat Simulator 3 on Nintendo Switch is a rushed, unpolished port, that needs a lot of work before I could recommend it for purchase. It’s marred by horrendous graphical issues like assets failing to load, looks average, and is more expensive than its counterparts on other formats. It’s a shame because, at its core, Goat Simulator 3 is a fun-spirited game with plenty to do, but on Switch it currently feels like it’s in alpha testing and is a frustrating, disappointing mess. For $40 AUD, you goat be kidding me… I’ll let myself out.
So What’s It Like? Goat Simulator 3 is like Goat Simulator 1, but goat-ally in need of a patch…
