Postal 2 was not a good game. It was a very important game to a great many people, but I doubt you’d find anyone who legitimately thinks Postal 2 was a good game. The magic came from three main parts: the open nature of the FPS, something still pretty new to the space, the over-the-top writing and no fucks given sensibilities, something important coming off the attitude era of the late 90s, and the modding capabilities and community that kept the game alive even after Postal III released and was quickly ignored. But I still need to be clear that Postal 2 was not a good game but it was a fun one.
Postal 4 is not a good game. It’s also not a very fun one. Postal 4 breaks at nearly every turn. It runs poorly on all types of systems, the loading times can be painfully long and even crash the game (see below), and the story fells incredibly dated with jokes relevant nearly a decade ago, and fails to push any boundaries.
For it’s part, Postal 2 came around when I was just getting out of high school and hit all the right notes for the Jackass generation. We weren’t looking for much outside pushing boundaries, causing a stir anyplace we could, and telling society to go fuck itself. Postal 4 comes out now that I’m an adult in a very different landscape, but instead of saying, well, anything, it falters in all the places Postal 2 nailed and ends up lacking the same impact Postal 2 had.
This isn’t to say that I’m against crass games that let me pee on people, but I tend to need something more, and I think the Zoomer generation needs/wants it too. These types of games are now a dime a dozen thanks to the indie scene and how trash Steam Greenlight was. The nature of the game simply isn’t as shocking as it was in 2003, especially after everything that we’ve gone through in the intervening time. Postal 4 simply lacks the “holy shit” aspect of the second game that had teens losing their minds, or the crazed parents and news outlets that banded against the original Postal.
I’m more shocked at the state in which the game was released. Items and objects phase through walls and break missions, you clip through the world and fall to your death, subtitles work when they feel like, loading is a coin toss to whether you continue or die, enemies shoot you without weapons in the hands, there are only a few character models for NPCs, and it features missions seemingly cloned in style and type from Postal 2. Everything about the experience feels dated in the worst possible way.
All of this means Postal 4 ends up feeling like a crap Steam Greenlight game that can’t even make enough waves to get a rise of of the Fox News generation that’s always looking for something to complain about or ban. It never feels like its pushing any boundary that might be off limits. I can think of something like South Park as an example as to doing it right. The show is still crass and wild, but it always tries to have a message underneath it all. Not only that but the show has adapted with the times and doesn’t feel like a relic of another era.
Look, I knew what I was going to be getting with Postal 4. I knew it was going to be a buggy mess like Postal 2 was. I knew it was going to be crass, crude, and feature broken shooting mechanics (and just about every mechanic as doors are even bugged out). I knew all of these things, but I had hoped that the writing would have evolved with the times, or at the very least alongside me, and that it would run as well as Postal 2 did on most machines. In the end it just feels like Postal 2 with a new coat of paint and some worse mechanics.
Postal 4 isn’t as smooth, the world feels less full, NPCs aren’t ever a threat, and it’s jokes are dated even for 2019 standards, let alone 2022 ones, and it breaks far too often. The weapons are clunky and don’t often register and seem mostly pulled from Postal 2. Playing missions for a Bane clone from a 10-year-old Batman film comes off more cringe than anything else. The world itself also feels smaller, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it also lacks any cohesion in style. Building are simply plopped into the world in the style that an 8-year-old would use. Some building are even totally empty and lack any styling.
And yet, I still can’t completely hate the entire experience because I knew what I was jumping into. Sure, Postal 4 has had a really rough launch, but there is a chance for things to get better down the road, and I did spend hours exploring and getting a few laughs from the experience. But right now it feels unfinished, buggy, but it’s also good fun at points. Killing random people is fun in bursts, Rick Hunter, alongside every voice actor who played the lead (or will play the lead) all are featured, and peeing on everything is as childish as ever. But it all feels very been-there-done-that. Look, Postal 4 is not a good game, but that shouldn’t necessarily stop you from having a lot fun with it if you grew up loving Postal 2.
That said, Postal 4 won’t be replacing Postal 2 anytime soon for most people but it has the potential to with a little more time and a little more love from the staff and the modding community. But as it stands right now, Postal 4 it feels pretty overpriced for what the game currently has to offer, as well as feeling less like a true sequel to Postal 2 and more of a retreading of what’s been done with a few new bells and whistles. I’d wager the team leaned on trying to recreate the magic that they had captured in Postal 2 instead of trying to do anything new and original with Postal 4. Hell, Postal III is pure Russian garbage, but it at least tried something different. It failed horribly, sure, but it tried at the very least.
If you are a teenager without much unsupervised access to the internet and this is your first Postal experience I can see you really enjoying how off the wall things can get for a little while, but if you’ve played Postal 2 for years you’ll be left wondering just what the hell Running With Scissors has been doing these past few years, because there just isn’t anything here to make Postal 4 worth getting over just playing more Postal 2 and its mods, considering they are pretty much the same game at the end.
“Postal 4 is unfinished and at times an unplayable mess that tries too hard to capture the magic that was Postal 2 instead of trying to do anything new in the 19 years in-between”
Pros:
+ You Can Pee On Everything
+ Makes You Want To Play Postal 2 Again
Cons:
– Crashes At Random
– Unoptimized Mess
– Clunky Combat
– Humor Feels Dated
– Terrible User Interface
Final Score:
About Author
