The Goat Simulator designers try to replicate the success of the goat game by swapping the animal for older people and adding blood, beheadings, and dismemberment. Goes wrong.
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Analysis of versions PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch .
Just Die Already is a crazy open world video game in which we control older people , a small title that could have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the fact that it was signed by the designers of Goat Simulator : that successful game of physical humor and hooliganism paved the way For the appearance of similar works, and here DoubleMoose , an independent Swedish studio led by Armin Ibrisagic, game designer at Goat Simulator , have tried to replicate the formula of the goat game by changing it for elders but keeping the rest of the characteristics practically identical.
What we will find in this title is a grotesque sandbox in which we can control an older person to choose between four characters , although it is only an aesthetic decision because nothing is playable modified: the Just Die Already map is completely open once we have passed the initial tutorial and we can explore it however we want, interacting with the objects, vehicles and people that we meet on the streets of this dangerous city. The grace of this game is that practically everything on the stage can kill usFrom antipersonnel mines to electric eel tanks, though the grandmothers we drive are quite tough and can keep walking even if they’ve lost virtually all of their limbs.
Dismembering the elderly: who would have guessed it was not a good idea?
We begin our adventure in a precarious residence from which we have to flee, something that will serve as a kind of tutorial to get hold of the controls and mechanics of the game: we can grab things, hit with certain objects, become rag dolls and roll … All these actions are carried out with a somewhat crude execution, typical of physics-based games in which sometimes somewhat absurd situations occur that, depending on the context, can frustrate us or make us laugh. Just Die Already has a solution designed for moments of traffic jam: with the push of a button we will return to a nearby control point that will restart our physical form allowing us to return to the ring in one piece.
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And it is that one of the main claims of this video game is that the characters can dismember in surreal ways , so that sometimes we will not control a whole person, but simply a torso or a head. In most cases, our elderly end up with severed legs or arms , or they can even lose the entire trunk. Nothing happens; As long as the life indicator does not run out, our character will not be completely dead and the game over screen will not appear, so we can continue playing in the form of a bloody meat bud.
If we lose our legs we will crawl on the ground using our hands while leaving a trail of blood.
The representation of this dismemberment is quite grotesque, but not for the better: Just Die Already moves in a strange aesthetic where the sympathetic and cartoonesque is combined with the gore , so there is no real sense of horror before what we see (the blood, explosions or beheadings are not realistic), but it is somewhat unpleasant to see how all these tragedies happen to what are ultimately older people . The authors have wanted to give this work a kind of hooligan humor that does not end up curdling well and remains a crude adolescent comedy that, perhaps, an audience interested in this can find on streaming platformstacky humor completely out of date . In this sense, Goat Simulator understood physical and absurd comedy much better, and did so without the need to blow the goat through the air or show its head rolling on the ground while we can control it.
In addition, the graphics of this game leaves much to be desired . For this analysis we have tested the Nintendo Switch version and, as you can see in the images, it is a very bad port : there are saw teeth everywhere, the drawing distance is very short, it is played at very low resolution and with an aspect too blurry … All these problems are intensified in portable mode, so the recommended way to play it on this platform is connected to television. Even so, there are more graphical problems in addition to the poor quality: we have also encountered a good number of bugs that even hinder a smooth experience .
‘Just Die Already’ presents a rather poor graphic quality, at least in the Nintendo Switch version.
When retiring does not mean resting
Although we can explore the city of Just Die Already with total freedom, the game proposes a series of objectives marked in a diary that serves as an aid and as a common thread so as not to end up lost in the middle of the stage without knowing what to do. As happened in Goat Simulator , here are a huge amount of secrets that are hidden in the most unsuspected corners of the city: only by letting ourselves be carried away by madness can we discover new forms of movement that will allow us to access these secret places, something that adds a touch of interest to the game. For example, there are narrow places that we can only get to by being a torso, so before accessing them we will have to lose the limbs and the head, for example.
The best thing about this game is the way in which it lets us discover new corners of the stage thanks to its level design that does not invent anything, but gives the occasional interesting situation that keeps the flame of curiosity more or less alive . Being able to interact with practically everything is also something worth mentioning in Just Die Already , especially for that sandbox facet taken to the extreme that allows us to get creative with the objects that we find out there . The pity is that not all of them work as well as they should, and the physics are not as well simulated as a game of this style might require: there is freedom to do what we want, although on more than one occasionthe technical limitations of the game serve as a limit to carry out the crazy things that we were promised in the beginning.
The humor of ‘Just Die Already’ is so evident that it will rarely make us smile.
The balance of the strengths and weaknesses of Just Die Already generally leans towards the negative side, but it does so even more when we decide on the cooperative multiplayer mode that the title has available: today it is practically impossible to find one Game in which to test this online game format for up to four players, or at least it is very difficult if you don’t have other friends who also have the game to be able to create a joint room. In the times that we have tried to create a public game, which have not been few, we have not received many visits to our server, although they have always been driven by chaosthat has practically made it impossible to coordinate with the other players. In addition, the performance of the game is highly compromised in its online mode , even if there are no players in the game. That it does not have a local cooperative mode is a failure, in our opinion, since we admit that it can be fun to do crazy things in company, but it is tedious and not feasible to play with strangers.
Conclusions
Just Die Already is inspired by Goat Simulator taking some of its best aspects, such as free exploration full of secrets and absurd physical humor , but without understanding the virtues of that unique and successful video game. The comedy of this title is much more vulgar than that of the goat game, in part because it changes the animal for older people whom, moreover, it does not hesitate to mutilate; in fact, it makes that action a main mechanic that helps us to access secret areas, forcing us to damage our character even if we don’t want to. If the crude humor was not enough in itself to not be able to recommend this title, its low graphic quality, the discomfort of the controls and the multiple bugsof those who show off manage to subtract points from a proposal that, taken in another way, could have become fun. Not recommended, not even for its difficult-to-access online cooperative mode , although it will surely give streamers and youtubers good times .
