Goat Simulator Remastered

Ah, 2014, what a year. The 8th generation consoles had just been released, and we were all incredibly excited to see the vista of new gaming experiences, only the new hardware could produce…. And we waited for several months as the great gaming drought of 2014 lasted freaking months! No joke, between January to September of that year, we had half a dozen big releases and the same amount of indie titles too … It was bad, very bad. But we did have our saviours, including Wolfenstein: The New Order, Sniper Elite 3, Not Thief …. And of course, the buggy, wild ride of a troll game that is Goat Simulator. And after 10 years of goat mayhem, it seemed like now was a great time to remaster this beloved cult classic.


What is Goat Simulator Remastered?

Goat Simulator: Remastered is the definitive collection featuring the cult classic 2014 game and the many, weird and wonderful expansions. At its core, Goat Simulator is a massive sandbox where players take on the role of the goat and cause as much mayhem and chaos as possible, without any real rhythm or reason. You can pull off all types of shenanigans, from wrecking people’s houses to blowing up containers of highly volatile and explosive materials, to simply putting on a jet pack and blasting yourself off into the Troposphere. It’s the sort of game where you can switch off your brain and go with the flow as around every corner is a new venture of madness waiting to happen.

The most recent game to mimic this style of gameplay and concept would be 2024’s Squirrel with a Gun, which we loved. But that has a “plot” and paths which you could follow and understand. Goat Simulator, for the most part, is just a manic joyride where the concepts of time, logic, and reason, are thrown into a blender.

And that’s what made it so brilliant in the first place.

The remaster expands on the chaos with multiplayer, all the expansions, a facelift, and some quality-of-life choices that don’t harper the original core gameplay but allow people to come by and pick up.


THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! THAT’S WHY HE IS THE GOAT! THE GOAT!


I don’t know how to truly describe anything of Goat Simulator, other than it’s a madcap sandbox where you play as a goat, you’re placed in a large environment where many intertwining events are happening, and you can engage with them, usually causing mass panic, mayhem, and millions of dollars worth of emotional damage! And with the plethora of DLC content now in this neat package, you can embark on your wildest goat dreams in space, fighting zombies or making them, or doing some good old-fashioned robbery in a Payday-themed expansion.

They’re all here, and while it might have been nice to include some brand-new content, I do appreciate that everything is here, and nothing is left out like how some other remasters in recent years have handled their content gathering.

What tends to be the case is a lateral playground of destruction, where you roam, you wonder, and you find and figure a way to either conquer or destroy something beautiful. Be it a peaceful protest pointy vegetables or blowing up an entire gas station (for your protest or not!). These usually full down, ram something with your head, and the deed is done. It’s simple, but the total freedom and no sense of direction do allow for creative problem-solving. And I do admire that of the original game and early expansions, where it boils down to a couple of button presses, and there is an abundance of useful tools to further expand your creative destruction.

This trend kept going for a few expansions, the developers decided to rethink the formula and add just another layer of mechanic depth for the later DLCs. Not a whole much more but changing the formula just enough to refine the core experience. Be it a fake Goat MMO RPG, where you can free peasants trapped in poop, to unleash a deadly zombie outbreak by licking unsuspecting humans.

The in-jokes, and small nods to gaming trends, and genres are quite humorous, and the sheer chaotic antics of being a crazy goat will entertain most for sure. There’s a wide variety of environments, minor gameplay tweaks in each offering of the Goat expansions, and the mutator menu helps in granting various outcomes and modifications in gameplay on the fly. The new coat of paint and seamless performance is a fantastic change of pace from the original, which while beloved was quite rough around the edges, especially when it came to the frame rate. But here, the remaster does an amazing job at keeping the carnage at 60 frames a second, and never did I run into any issues with performance.

What I did run into were some annoying bugs (not part of the charming bugs …), a lack of coherent guidance for simple things such as equipping and unequipping items, and the god-awful controls. Former stuff I can live with it, but the controls being the same without any tweaks is just pathetic… especially as Goat Simulator 3 seems to have much better controls, avoiding the tank nature of the movement, and stiff, clunky disposition which have you doing things and heading in directions you didn’t want.

It's not so bad in the main game, and a couple of DLCs, but when precision is highly required, and with collision detection that can be super iffy, it can grate on the nerves fiercely. And it goes without saying that if you’re not into gameplay that lacks a sense of structure, purpose or a clear direction towards the endgame, then this isn’t for you. But Goat Simulator and the DLCs all have a quirky charm: games that reward creativity, free-thinking, and just being balls to the wall weird with your interactions in a game world. You’re a goat in a playground that reacts violently to you, and you as a goat have to relish the mayhem, do things like blow up gas stations, create zombies, and partake in a Goat themed RPG or a GRPG!


Never a dull moment with this Goat – Overall?

While it certainly shows its age and constraints in many ways, there’s something so wholesome and pure about Goat Simulator, and the remaster makes it even more so when displaying the wide variety of content that came about after the original release. Sure they’re usually revolving around the same concept, “Be the Goat, Destroy the World, and have fun”. But for the right-minded person, these playgrounds of destruction, crude but witty humour, and charming intentional brokenness will provide hours of joyous mischief and thundering belly laughs….

It did for me!

++ Fantastic, nonsensical fun
++ Visual and performance improvements are great
++ Includes all the DLC in one neat package
+ New features and mutation options add more replayabilty

- Controls are still bad!
- Some annoying bugs ... unintentional
- A couple of the DLCs aren’t as fun as the rest


The publisher kindly provided Goat Simulator Remastered for this review.