I’ve been training all my life for this game. Those countless sessions of furiously whacking away at my junk helped prepare me for this simulator. Indeed, I can’t help but feel like I was destined to review this title, like some kind of prophet of the masturbation gods. And I take this role seriously.
I won’t shy away from my divine purpose. Wanking Simulator is pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be: a weird and somewhat amusing physics playground about jerking off over, well, anything really, and causing havoc and chaos as you pleasure yourself. And what I’m sure will prove to be a shock to nobody: it’s not good.
Certainly there’s some cathartic release to playing wanking simulator, much like the real thing. Causing everything not nailed down to crash around the environment as you pet the one-eyed snake is pretty amusing. Meanwhile jerking off over people as they lay unconscious or dead on the floor is as disgusting, morbid, and funny as you might expect, at least to begin with. After a short while though, it gets pretty repetitive. The thrill wears off almost the second you finish the act, again a lot like the real thing. As such, it rather successfully invokes the same kind of emotional response to actually spanking the monkey: the excitement, the release, the shame, and the disgust; it’s all there.
There’s more to Wanking Simulator than purely making the bald man cry. It’s a tale of revenge against a town that ousted you. Yes indeed, there really is a story. Each level presents you with a list of objectives before you can move on to the next level, asking you to steal and cause mayhem to enact your revenge. It’s a weak story and but it can provide that little extra structure if beating the meat in the sandbox doesn’t satisfy all your urges. However, poor voice acting suck a lot of the humour out of the affair, that and some juvenile dialogue. But this is pretty much in line with the intended experience, so it’s hard to fault the game for meeting expectations.
However, there are other issues. Cumming isn’t immediately obvious. (I never thought I’d have to type that sentence.) The controls say to hold the mouse scroll wheel to cum, but leave out that you must first access the menu and choose your kind of cum. Acting like some kind of filthy magic, there’s some variety to cumming, offering different effects and taking more of your cum bar to cast… spray, eject, whatever the verb may be. It’s actually quite a neat idea that cumming is essentially magic, it adds a little mysticism to battling the purple-headed yogurt slinger.
In fact the controls in general are bit all over the place, with odd key choices giving your hand a bit more work to do than you’d expect from a first person game, although that might be intentional considering the five finger shuffle experience.
Wanking isn’t everything in this game, you can just attempt to achieve the mission objectives for each level without blowing your own horn. With a mighty kick and punch at your disposal, as well as insane speed, some actual magic spells, as a whole host of weapons and drugs to help you, you can cause quite enough damage without riding the mayonnaise surf. But it’s hard going…sorry, I mean it’s a stiff challenge…the residents of this town will fight you for being a menace and it doesn’t take much to kill you and make you restart the entire level. You need to wank to not only raise your score, but because the healing cum ability is so crucial to keeping you alive.
There’s also something to be said for embracing the intended experience. If you’re going to play Wanking Simulator then you might as well audition your hand puppet as frequently as possible. However, if you should look down at your handy work you’ll notice your character isn’t actually holding anything at all. It’s just the motion. This feels surprisingly disappointing. If you’re going to make a wanking game then shouldn’t you at least make it look like you’re actually consulting Dr. Jackoff?
There’s a lack of conviction here, and that may be worse than the fact the game is shallow, overly difficult, with poor presentation. However, the one saving grace is the physics, this works pretty great, can lead to amusing situations, and adds to the satisfaction of jerking a room into oblivion or kicking a person so hard they smash through objects. Indeed, causing mayhem by generally interacting with the world and discovering the little extra things you can do is more fun than tugging the slug.
Wanking simulator is a game primarily about wrestling the eel, so it’s no surprise it’s not very good, but there are certainly some missed opportunities here that could have made for a more amusing title, something closer to Goat Simulator. Oh well, at least it made my friends laugh when they saw what I was playing through Steam.
Wanking Simulator
Pros
- Physics playground aspect can be entertaining
Cons
- Shallow story and gameplay
- Doesn't commit to the theme
- Very challenging
