Death Goat is a twin-stick arcade shooter that is full of blood, guts, gore, and metal. The title spent a bit of time in Early Access before eventually being fully released on June 7, 2016. At the time of writing, it is the only game that the developer/publisher Terminal Press have released on Steam.
Being an avid, enthusiastic fan of metal, it's obvious that I was excited to play Death Goat. What could be better than slaughtering hoards of enemies to epic battle hymns and deathly doom ballads? Unfortunately, due to lack of overall content, the game falls incredibly short of anything spectacular. There are three "levels", which are just really different backgrounds, and five total characters to play as. The characters are simply different skins, and none of them have any deviation whatsoever.
Your goal is to stay alive as long as possible, which is actually pretty hard. The maps are small, and your overhead field of view isn't very wide, so it's very easy to get overrun by foes quickly. There are only three or four power-ups that you can pick up from fallen enemies; a laser shot, a melee-ranged ice sword, and a couple different burst shots. You start each game off with three lives, and three pentagram bombs; the bad guys will drop a bomb pick-up for you every now and then, but as far as I could tell you cannot regain a life once it is lost.
If your metal tastes are like mine, then you will find the soundtrack on-par at best. It's filled mostly with metalcore, deathcore, and melodic metal bands, while some blackened death, groove, and progressive metal is scattered sparsely. I won't deny that this is a good opportunity for these bands to gain some new fans, and to spread the word about themselves, but for those who enjoy heavy doses of death, black, and doom metal, you will find yourself disappointed. I was personally better off hitting the mute button and throwing on my own mix of tunes. As well, you can only pick one song per time you play... so if you survive the duration of the song, it will just repeat.
Overall, is Death Goat good? It's a mediocre twin-stick arcade shooter at best. You try to survive, to get the highscore, you die, you rinse and repeat. Once you get a certain amount of kills, you unlock the Death Tank which I suppose completely ravages your enemies, but by the time you reach that point you'll be completely sick of the game itself. The metal soundtrack is a good aspect, but it's really only an attraction gimmick at this point. There aren't exactly a wide variety of enemies or "levels", either, so the aesthetics really become boring over time as well.
Rating: 2.0/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.The Horror Network
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