Goat Simulator 3: PS5 Review

Developed by Coffee Stain North
Published by Coffee Stain Publishing
Platform: PS5

How you'll feel about Goat Simulator 3 may entirely rest upon how old mentally you are, and how puerile your sense of humour is.

That's not to say the game really sets out to do anything that raises the bar for gaming, it merely builds on what it's done before.

An open world simulator where you get to control a goat and do whatever you like, headbutt whomever you like, go where you want and just generally be goofy, the game really doesn't have lofty ambitions to amuse you in perpetuity.

While there is a home base which opens up the more work you do, and the more effort you put in, Goat Simulator 3 is less interested in the grind than it is in letting you out into the open to unleash chaos and carnage in a big open world map.

And for that, it's fine.

Sure, it's based in silliness and what probably could pass for low brow entertainment, it's packed full of bugs and lo-fi efforts that make you question whether they are deliberate or are actual errors which have been missed during development. 

While multiplayer is an option this time around, the game's inherent raison d'etre is to allow you to hurtle around its open world, and carry out mini quests for levelling up purposes. Whether it's freeing something from a zoo, or fishing the human way, the game's short term appeal lies in the bitesize nature of its puzzles, and the possibility that an NPC may be a suitable distraction to what you need to do.

From licking dynamite and dragging it around, to getting arrested or driving cars, Goat Simulator 3's the perfect kind of knockabout entertainment that handheld games used to be for. 

Yet despite the underlying stupidity of it all, there are moments when it's clear there's been some planning of the puzzles and their solutions. It's in these moments the game shines a bit more and the more janky graphics, insane physics and sheer dumb nature of it all can almost be forgiven.

And despite all of its low-hanging fruit ethos, there's no denying that it's actually fun at times to cart yourself through the large map, ragdolling at a moment's notice, or being thrust into the air by a manhole cover.

It's hard to deny Goat Simulator 3's sense of fun - whether the joke has longevity or will grate depends very much on your own mentality and tolerance levels for time wasting.