Untitled Goose Game

Honk! 

I was tempted to leave it there as that one noise sums up 90% of what makes Goose Game fun and this is what this style of game should be. Having some mindless, crazy fun and that’s exactly what you do when you take on the role of Goose.

 

So there’s some kind of weird storyline where you are in your home, as a goose, and start the game by Pressing X to Honk. That’s all the X button does but it can he used to great effect throughout the game. The goal of the game is to annoy as many people as possible starting with the gardener. Such annoying things include stealing his keys and hat and taking his keys and throwing them in the lake, all the while honking, spreading your wings and being generally cool. There is something oddly charming about being an asshole goose, it’s weird.

 
Gameplay wise it’s not great, sadly. Controlling the goose is a royal pain and getting him in the right positions to pick up items can be unnecessarily difficult. He also has a nasty habit of getting caught on the scenery and that’s without any unnecessary wing extensions. I forgave this though because the game is simple fun and that’s not something that happens that often.

The overall arch of the game sees you travel from the garden, to a street with shops, some more gardens and a pub. Each area has its own list of ways for Goose to be annoying. While Goose cannot be killed, probably because he’s not a fox, he can be shooed away and this happens every time you are seen doing something you shouldn’t be. What’s incredible about this though is that the NPCs are a total glutton for punishment. One women shoos you with a broom, which you can break by grabbing, but she doesn’t do anything else to try and stop you coming back for more harassment. It get’s so far that you can even lock her in her garage, which adds to the hilarity.

The NPC’s biggest piece of resistance is… whipping out a ‘No Geese’ sign. Yep, like that’s going to stop you stealing their shit. Essentially this just works as your cue to trigger the last piece of shenanigans before moving on to the next area.

The music is sinfully annoying but you won’t notice it too much because you will be focusing on trying to manoeuvre Goose into doing the next crazy thing on the list. Graphically, it’s cartoony and that’s fitting with the subject matter.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

There are five achievements for playing through the various areas and completing the overarching storyline. After that, there is a load of miscellaneous stuff to do for the remaining achievements and the game wins some points here as each area has a reset function so if you do get stuck, you can reset and start again. Essentially, this means that none of the achievements are missable.

I complained about the controls above and unfortunately, I think game acknowledges the controls are terrible because one of the biggest challenges early on is getting a cabbage to a picnic blanket. This is hard because Goose can drag or pick up loads of stuff… but not a cabbage. This means you have to play football with the cabbage to walk it over to the picnic blanket. This was hard enough but the game takes this one step further for another achievement in another area.

In the second area, there is a football being kicked around by a little kid. Again, without being able to pick it up, you have to guide the football through the second area, passed two NPCs in the third area, who both overzealously shoo you away, through three garden fences before pushing it between some goal posts. The hardest part of this is the last garden with the goal because some genius put the goal at the top of the garden, which happens to be at the top of a massive slope. So you can get the ball all the way to the end and then lose it, and it rolls to the bottom of the garden. It’s a struggle to then get behind it to push it up the hill and an even bigger struggle in getting it in to the goal.

Another notable one is for collecting five flowers from around the map and placing them in basket in a back alley. This is tricky as you have to know what flowers count as there are several non-achievement related flowers throughout the game. Also, there is a bit of a problem with the list in general as the majority of these things are secret achievements. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to work out which random things are achievement related but I’ve moaned about this before.

And that lastly leaves the meta game of doing runs through each area against the clock. I was a bit concerned about these as there is a lot of randomness that happens throughout the game, however it became quickly apparent that the 7 minute time limit is actually more than enough time to complete each area. The third area can do one though. One of the objectives is for getting one of the NPCs to put a bow on you by pretending to be a goose statue. It seems completely random whether or not the NPC either mistakes you for the statue or shoos you away for being a real goose and this is fine in the normal game, but when you’re up against the clock, it’s unfair.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Secret Achievement issues aside, Untitled Goose Game is a game that serves to remind people that games can actually be fun by tasking you with doing a load of random things. The only issue is one of price. Doing everything on the achievement list, which is effectively doing everything the game has to offer twice, can take between six to eight hours if taken at a leisurely pace. The game is currently retailing at £16.74 so it’s not great value for money.

Cars 2

I’m not sure why I went back to Cars 2 but it was a good feeling to clear off another one of the games I started in 2018. Apparently, I’m still trying to clear all the movie tie-in games despite the fact I hate them. Or maybe I‘m searching in vain to find the only good one? Which I won’t because apparently that is Spiderman 2 for the Playstaton 2.

 

Cars 2 isn’t a true movie tie in. It just uses the framing of the Cars franchise to create a loose Mario Kart rip-off. There is a career mode of sorts where you play through an assortment of different game modes that revolve around either using weapons against AI or racing against AI… or racing against the clock while using weapons against the AI.

 

The problem with using Cars as a framing device is that all of the characters are incredibly irritating. I suppose it’s worth considering that I’m not the target audience for Cars however, this is where game difficulty doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think I’ve mentioned this before but when the subject material is targeted at children, the gameplay should match it and while Cars isn’t Dark Souls on the scale of difficulty, it’s certainly not easy to the level of its target audience.  Typically, as soon as children are stuck on a level, they will stop playing and I imagine this would happen at some point soon after the tutorial. So why would you make a game this long if it’s not going to be played the whole way through?

 

Focussing on the annoyance of the interludes between gameplay, the attempts at framing the story around Cars 2 (the whole secret agent thing), is totally pointless here and makes no sense when you factor in the fact that you can select any character to do any race. It’s as flawed as it is unnecessary.

 

Turning to the gameplay itself, there are a limited selection of weapons and it suffers from the AI’s ability to continuously avoid obstacles and hit you with everything they pick up. Racing is equally as frustrating because when there are no weapon items, it’s basically a case of maximising the drift capabilities of your car to gain speed boosts and picking up speed power ups. However, if you aren’t in first, you won’t get any of these because the AI hoovers them up even on easy difficulty. I think what I’m trying to say is that the gameplay is unbalanced in favour of the AI, however it counter balances this by having them not get too far ahead of you by deliberately holding back. This isn’t levelling the playing field, it’s poor and lazy game design.

 

The arena battles are another area of frustration and the Hunter Mode is a perfect example of crappy gameplay. Having to steer and line up weapon shots in a fully explorable environment rather than a circuit race just highlights more poor game design and horrible balancing. Again, the AI has laser aim and will hit you with everything, more often than not a split second before you fire off your own weapon.

 

Sound wise, along with the terrible annoying voice overs, the music is equally as galling where it takes the cartoony approach of being continuously upbeat when it the end, all this does is make the entire experience depressing.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

While the achievement list boasts 50 achievements, in reality it’s 49 as it’s carrying a ‘get all the other achievements’ achievement, which I can only imagine is because they ported the list from the PS4’s trophy system.

 

Anyway, the vast majority of them involve doing races and events and completing the main campaign, from which the main the goal is to finish at least 3^rd in every event. Doing so is required for one of the main achievements and this is frankly a relief because the AI gets some shitty advantages in the latter part of the game. In races, they get speed boosts out of nowhere and if you are in 4^th or 5^th going into the final lap, you may as well quit because even if you get close to 3^rd, the AI will get a normal missile pick up that will hit you with laser guided precision. I’m all for having a competitive game but let the entire field be competitive. If you’re in third on the last lap, you don’t fire a missile backwards to consolidate your position if the guy in 2^nd is right in front of you. It’s frankly ridiculous.

 

Aside from finishing the events, there’s quite a bit of miscellaneous stuff the game wants you to do. One of the more notable ones involves getting 40 quick starts. These can only be done in regular and battle races and they are very picky about awarding them to you. Essentially, you have to rev the engine by hammering the right trigger but you have to start at the earliest opportunity and keeping going until the green light. Doing this in one sitting by repeatedly restarting an event will result in wanker’s cramp.

 

There’s a lot of rewards for using specific weapons and doing certain things in certain events but thankfully a lot of this can be done by using two controllers. In fact, there are six achievements tied to playing the multiplayer game modes, Disruptor and Arena mode and both are mini grinds.

 

Again, there are loads of other repeatable action achievements but none are worth mentioning as they are fairly easy and just take a bit of time. There is, however a totally nonsensical achievement for collecting shit in a racing game. I hate it when they do this, it’s contrary to the point of the game and the only way to get some of the hidden collectibles is to not compete in the actual race event taking place. One of them was so obscure that I was there for about 20 minutes trying to get the stupid jumps right while watching my opponents complete their 7^th or 8^th victory lap.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Cars 2 is a boring completion but at least it was a free Games with Gold title. It’s not overly long and can be grinded through in less than 10 hours but to honest, it will feel like longer and there are better uses of your time. Such as drinking bleach. With razor blades in it.