You know, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I am so completely split down the middle of how I feel about it. I don’t know if I hate this game or if I fucking love it.
This game just REEKS of the early 2000s and it has aged like the moldy milk stains on my apartment wall. It feels like this game was coded on a fucking Maxi Pad by a small team consisting of first year college interns. It’s so dated and yet it doesn’t feel outdated at the same time, I just can’t describe it..
I typically review games in a neat and detailed structure. For example, I start with the story, then I get into gameplay, content, etc. But this game is such a fucking enigma that it’s very hard trying to describe it in that kind of format. So instead I’ll just do Cons and Pros.
{ Cons }
The graphics look like a dog’s asshole even for 2003 standards, the textures look especially lousy, like they’re from a game that came out at least 5 years earlier, the character models look hideous and their animations are very unconvincing, the seams between each area of the town are hidden behind by these really ugly rock formations that just make each map look like jumbled messes, and special effects like explosions, fire, and cigarette smoke just looks cheap and unconvincing as well.
The movement and gunplay is the definition of JANK. Platforming, since there are moments in this game where you have to platform, is clunky as shit because of the slow movement speed. Guns deal the same amount of damage regardless of what part of the body you’re shooting, maybe except for the shotgun, but sometimes shots don’t register at all, and guns never need to be reloaded meaning that even guns like the shotgun and the pistol can be shot infinitely without reloading which is fucking ridiculous.
The weapon swapping mechanic is also incomprehensibly bad, and I don’t know if that’s by design or lack thereof. It’s clunky as fuck and there are many times where it takes longer than it should to equip the weapon I want to use.
The map is almost borderline useless. It doesn’t give you a clear indication of where you’re going, meaning you will be opening the map constantly just to see if you're going the right way. It's shit.
The main character is as bland as a snarky fuckboy in a low budget B movie, with every generic one liner you could think of and with a voice as monotone as when I had strep throat at 23 years old.
And the sense of humor in this game is as funny as watching your favorite actor end up in a crappy reality television show. It’s the kind of humor that middle school special ed kids would find hilarious. And I know this because I’ve been in one. For three years. I was a pretty stupid fucking kid back then.
Toilet jokes, piss and shit jokes, butt jokes, 9/11 jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping, dick and balls jokes, homosexual gun toting rednecks, violent video game protestors, suicide jokes, the cops being fatfucks who love doughnuts trope, and the fact that fucking Gary Coleman is in this game. It’s all pretty low brow stuff. It’s all as tasteless as a military salt lick.
I do have a sense of humor, and granted this game did get some good laughs out of me, and obviously the developers went out of their way to make this game as over the top and offensive as possible, but even at the time that this came out, the game is politically incorrect in almost every way, it’s aged as badly as the first 2-3 seasons of South Park. It feels like the jokes here were written by a 10 year old at times.
The first Postal game was much darker but at the same time there was a tongue and cheek vibe to what you were doing despite it being a game that is centered around mass shooting, and it was at a subtle level, but now Postal 2’s sense of humor in a nutshell is
Piss onto a doughnut and feed it to a cop and watch in amazement as he pukes all of his intestines out!!
Yeah because for some reason there is a mechanic where you can unzip your junk and pee on people to make them vomit.
Also, this game is buggy as fuck. Good god this is a poorly programmed game.
I’ve encountered many bugs like graphical glitches, the engine doing weird shit with the textures, frame drops, even though I’m running this game on a high end PC so it’s clearly not an issue with the hardware, it’s just a bug in the game itself, getting stuck in areas that I can’t get out of so I have to reload my save, NPCs getting stuck in T-poses, NPCs walking around but without the walking animation, dead bodies getting stuck in walls and ceilings, falling through the map, NPCs forgetting how to use stairs so they just walk off and kill themselves, enemies shooting at you without aiming their guns, the bad gun hit registration, NPCs just exploding for no reason at all, and the NPCs getting stuck on fucking everything.
Doorways, stairways, walls, and even each other. There are also a lot of spots where you can just get on top of the map and stare off into the gray unprogrammed void of video game limbo. One time I had to start the whole game over from at least the 3rd or 4th day because some guy was blocking a door I needed to go through to get out but I couldn’t kill him, even if I loaded my save file.
The AI is also laughably bad. There is a lot of inconsistency to it. Enemies either stand there and let you shoot them or they are cybernetic beings that know your exact location and can shoot you the moment you turn a corner with insane accuracy.
I’m sure defenders of the game will say the bugs and glitches have added onto the game’s charm, and granted some of this shit can be funny, but all of these issues can impact the overall quality of the game. A lot of this shit has been ironed out since what I've been told, the game was much, much buggier in its early days. This game is running on an old ass Unreal 2 Engine from 2003 so I guess the developers can't really do any more, but damn, it's not really enough. The optimization of this game is rough even nowadays.
But, I do give the developers props for sticking to their guns and continue to support the game. There are only a couple other studios that continue to support and update games that are this old to this day.
{ Pros }
So with everything that I just talked about, you would think that I hate this game right? Well to be honest, I don’t actually. Something about the gameplay feels cathartic and charmful. It reminds me of a simpler time where games didn’t try to be these massive open world RPGs with a huge emphasis on cutscenes and presentation instead of just giving absolute freedom to the player in how they want to play the game. The best comparison I could give is Grand Theft Auto III.
Postal 2 right off the bat gives you the freedom to do whatever the hell you want and it gives you that free reign all the time. You can actually play this game like it’s fuckin’ Undertale and beat the game without killing a single person if you wanted to. And this in itself can make for a completely different kind of experience that you normally don’t get anywhere else, especially in the First Person Shooter market.
But it does have that GTA III jank where you have to play through each day to unlock more areas of the map which can be annoying, but being able to play each day however I want and take my time with everything is praise well deserved. The moment I start the game, I am free to do as I please. You wanna rampage? Well, do it, why not? There’s no one stopping you.
You wanna play the game like a pacifist? Knock yourself out. I'm sure that in itself can make for a pretty interesting playthrough.
And this free agency to the player can make for a game that feels unique in its own way, a game where you could just unwind and relax after a hard day of work, where you can relieve yourself and just turn your brain off for a couple hours.
And despite the bugs and glitches, the game can still be fun to play thanks to the very good gun aiming, the ridiculous arsenal of weapons, and the fact that the game makes you feel like an unstoppable badass.
Speaking of guns, there are a ridiculous amount of weapons in this game. You have your standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades, molotov cocktails, a rocket launcher, a nightstick, and a chainsaw.
But you have other ridiculous shit like a homemade flamethrower, a diseased cow head that is so toxic that it causes people to vomit blood until they die, actual scissors that you can throw at people like shurikens, a napalm launcher, a taser, a shovel that can behead people (somebody clearly watched The Evil Dead), a protestor sign (so you can show off your alpha male weeb dominance), a pocket knife, hedge clippers that also behead people, and a gasoline canister so you can light people on fire and blow shit up. YEAH! WAR CRIMES!
Hey, it's not called the Genova Convention when you're playing this game. It's the Genova Suggestion.
And finally, there's a grenade launcher that shoots exploding cats and you can also use.. cats as a suppressor for your gun. I guess someone in the development team really fuckin' hated pussy but I digress.
There's also a nice little nod to the first Postal game where on the second day you can set a marching band on fire with molotov cocktails.
Despite the really fucking stupid humor in this game there are some jokes that were genuinuely witty and got a laugh out of me, like where you get people to sign a petition to get “whiny congressmen to play violent video games” which is probably the most accurate thing this game gets, or how the game breaks the 4th wall and makes fun of the player for saving way too often.
Or when on Friday you suddenly catch Gonorrhea so you take a visit to the Vend a Cure at the clinic and the robot AI asks you to pee in a cup. And doing so makes the AI respond in disgust.
And despite the game’s buggy nature, the game in the long run is fun to play. In a way, it’s nirvanic. As I kept playing, I actually got addicted to it. The cops aren’t really much of a threat, and maybe that's because of the piss poor AI, but it actually does add on to the freedom of just going around killing, looting, etc.
Also, I love how you can approach every situation in this game. For example, instead of cashing your check or buying milk from the store you can just fucking rob the place. I also like the amount of surprises and easter eggs to be found by exploring. If you can get on top of the rooftops you can find weapons and whatnot.
And one of the best things about the game is how the theme of the game changes depending on what time of year you’re playing in. For example on Valentine’s Day all of the NPCs walk around holding flowers and you can go to a kissing booth and pay $5 to kiss the gimp. On Saint Patrick’s Day you can find a little leprechaun running around and if you kill him before he reaches his pot of gold you get rewarded with a shitload of cash. And if you catch him he will grant you one wish but they’re all just tricks. For example, choosing “I wish for hot bitches to work my balls” will just spawn a bunch of flaming pit bulls that attack you.
On Easter you can actually engage in an epic boss fight against the Easter Bunny wearing a fucking kung fu outfit. On April Fools Day there will be a fake DLC menu and trying to buy anything doesn’t do anything except make the Postal guy scold you, you filthy gamer whale. And on Halloween, the NPCs will wear costumes, it will be night time and you can fight skeleton soldiers straight out of Army of Darkness, and ghosts can randomly appear. Also, all of the shovels are replaced with plastic devil pitchforks. Details like that can really add onto the game’s charm.
{ Final Thoughts }
So now with everything I’ve talked about you probably understand why I’m so split down the middle when it comes to this game. It’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good game. There’s a lot the game has going for it but there are some serious strikes against it. It's very hit and miss in a lot of ways. Sure there is some quality here, but the lack of polish that the game presents even 17 years later really does not help. There is a semi lack of authenticity here. The gameplay and sense of humor has aged worse than 21st century American social justice.
I haven’t played a game this divisive in quite a while, but maybe it’s the good kind of divisive. I mean for fuck sake, the studio’s name is Running with Scissors. I can tell from that name alone that these guys are fucking cheeky.
I can tell the developers must have had a lot of fun making this game, but a lot of the content in this game can really rub you the wrong way because of how dated it all is. I give props to the developers for going out of their way and giving the middle finger to people who were bitching about the controversies of video games, and just wanted to make a game that is both offensive and yet fun to play at the same time, because at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking video game, it’s meant so you can simulate what you just can’t do in real life, but there is a somewhat lack of professionalism here, they’re definitely not Rockstar Games.
I prefer the more gritty, grounded, and yet very subtle tone of the original Postal over
HAHA pee pee poo poo titty cumslut terrorist neckbeard
But, it’s a fun game, they had fun making it, so it’s somewhat of a win win, and all of this shit just made the game more popular. I just wish it was executed better.
There’s a lot wrong with it, but there are many things it does well. Maybe if I played the expansions I’ll have a better view on it, but this review is just my opinion on the base experience.
I give this game 7 Gary Colemans out of 10.
It's a very average game and there aren't that many games out there like this one. It can be mindless fun and anyone who really likes old school FPS games will really get a kick out of it.
This game just REEKS of the early 2000s and it has aged like the moldy milk stains on my apartment wall. It feels like this game was coded on a fucking Maxi Pad by a small team consisting of first year college interns. It’s so dated and yet it doesn’t feel outdated at the same time, I just can’t describe it..
I typically review games in a neat and detailed structure. For example, I start with the story, then I get into gameplay, content, etc. But this game is such a fucking enigma that it’s very hard trying to describe it in that kind of format. So instead I’ll just do Cons and Pros.
{ Cons }
The graphics look like a dog’s asshole even for 2003 standards, the textures look especially lousy, like they’re from a game that came out at least 5 years earlier, the character models look hideous and their animations are very unconvincing, the seams between each area of the town are hidden behind by these really ugly rock formations that just make each map look like jumbled messes, and special effects like explosions, fire, and cigarette smoke just looks cheap and unconvincing as well.
The movement and gunplay is the definition of JANK. Platforming, since there are moments in this game where you have to platform, is clunky as shit because of the slow movement speed. Guns deal the same amount of damage regardless of what part of the body you’re shooting, maybe except for the shotgun, but sometimes shots don’t register at all, and guns never need to be reloaded meaning that even guns like the shotgun and the pistol can be shot infinitely without reloading which is fucking ridiculous.
The weapon swapping mechanic is also incomprehensibly bad, and I don’t know if that’s by design or lack thereof. It’s clunky as fuck and there are many times where it takes longer than it should to equip the weapon I want to use.
The map is almost borderline useless. It doesn’t give you a clear indication of where you’re going, meaning you will be opening the map constantly just to see if you're going the right way. It's shit.
The main character is as bland as a snarky fuckboy in a low budget B movie, with every generic one liner you could think of and with a voice as monotone as when I had strep throat at 23 years old.
And the sense of humor in this game is as funny as watching your favorite actor end up in a crappy reality television show. It’s the kind of humor that middle school special ed kids would find hilarious. And I know this because I’ve been in one. For three years. I was a pretty stupid fucking kid back then.
Toilet jokes, piss and shit jokes, butt jokes, 9/11 jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping, dick and balls jokes, homosexual gun toting rednecks, violent video game protestors, suicide jokes, the cops being fatfucks who love doughnuts trope, and the fact that fucking Gary Coleman is in this game. It’s all pretty low brow stuff. It’s all as tasteless as a military salt lick.
I do have a sense of humor, and granted this game did get some good laughs out of me, and obviously the developers went out of their way to make this game as over the top and offensive as possible, but even at the time that this came out, the game is politically incorrect in almost every way, it’s aged as badly as the first 2-3 seasons of South Park. It feels like the jokes here were written by a 10 year old at times.
The first Postal game was much darker but at the same time there was a tongue and cheek vibe to what you were doing despite it being a game that is centered around mass shooting, and it was at a subtle level, but now Postal 2’s sense of humor in a nutshell is
Piss onto a doughnut and feed it to a cop and watch in amazement as he pukes all of his intestines out!!
Yeah because for some reason there is a mechanic where you can unzip your junk and pee on people to make them vomit.
Also, this game is buggy as fuck. Good god this is a poorly programmed game.
I’ve encountered many bugs like graphical glitches, the engine doing weird shit with the textures, frame drops, even though I’m running this game on a high end PC so it’s clearly not an issue with the hardware, it’s just a bug in the game itself, getting stuck in areas that I can’t get out of so I have to reload my save, NPCs getting stuck in T-poses, NPCs walking around but without the walking animation, dead bodies getting stuck in walls and ceilings, falling through the map, NPCs forgetting how to use stairs so they just walk off and kill themselves, enemies shooting at you without aiming their guns, the bad gun hit registration, NPCs just exploding for no reason at all, and the NPCs getting stuck on fucking everything.
Doorways, stairways, walls, and even each other. There are also a lot of spots where you can just get on top of the map and stare off into the gray unprogrammed void of video game limbo. One time I had to start the whole game over from at least the 3rd or 4th day because some guy was blocking a door I needed to go through to get out but I couldn’t kill him, even if I loaded my save file.
The AI is also laughably bad. There is a lot of inconsistency to it. Enemies either stand there and let you shoot them or they are cybernetic beings that know your exact location and can shoot you the moment you turn a corner with insane accuracy.
I’m sure defenders of the game will say the bugs and glitches have added onto the game’s charm, and granted some of this shit can be funny, but all of these issues can impact the overall quality of the game. A lot of this shit has been ironed out since what I've been told, the game was much, much buggier in its early days. This game is running on an old ass Unreal 2 Engine from 2003 so I guess the developers can't really do any more, but damn, it's not really enough. The optimization of this game is rough even nowadays.
But, I do give the developers props for sticking to their guns and continue to support the game. There are only a couple other studios that continue to support and update games that are this old to this day.
{ Pros }
So with everything that I just talked about, you would think that I hate this game right? Well to be honest, I don’t actually. Something about the gameplay feels cathartic and charmful. It reminds me of a simpler time where games didn’t try to be these massive open world RPGs with a huge emphasis on cutscenes and presentation instead of just giving absolute freedom to the player in how they want to play the game. The best comparison I could give is Grand Theft Auto III.
Postal 2 right off the bat gives you the freedom to do whatever the hell you want and it gives you that free reign all the time. You can actually play this game like it’s fuckin’ Undertale and beat the game without killing a single person if you wanted to. And this in itself can make for a completely different kind of experience that you normally don’t get anywhere else, especially in the First Person Shooter market.
But it does have that GTA III jank where you have to play through each day to unlock more areas of the map which can be annoying, but being able to play each day however I want and take my time with everything is praise well deserved. The moment I start the game, I am free to do as I please. You wanna rampage? Well, do it, why not? There’s no one stopping you.
You wanna play the game like a pacifist? Knock yourself out. I'm sure that in itself can make for a pretty interesting playthrough.
And this free agency to the player can make for a game that feels unique in its own way, a game where you could just unwind and relax after a hard day of work, where you can relieve yourself and just turn your brain off for a couple hours.
And despite the bugs and glitches, the game can still be fun to play thanks to the very good gun aiming, the ridiculous arsenal of weapons, and the fact that the game makes you feel like an unstoppable badass.
Speaking of guns, there are a ridiculous amount of weapons in this game. You have your standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades, molotov cocktails, a rocket launcher, a nightstick, and a chainsaw.
But you have other ridiculous shit like a homemade flamethrower, a diseased cow head that is so toxic that it causes people to vomit blood until they die, actual scissors that you can throw at people like shurikens, a napalm launcher, a taser, a shovel that can behead people (somebody clearly watched The Evil Dead), a protestor sign (so you can show off your alpha male weeb dominance), a pocket knife, hedge clippers that also behead people, and a gasoline canister so you can light people on fire and blow shit up. YEAH! WAR CRIMES!
Hey, it's not called the Genova Convention when you're playing this game. It's the Genova Suggestion.
And finally, there's a grenade launcher that shoots exploding cats and you can also use.. cats as a suppressor for your gun. I guess someone in the development team really fuckin' hated pussy but I digress.
There's also a nice little nod to the first Postal game where on the second day you can set a marching band on fire with molotov cocktails.
Despite the really fucking stupid humor in this game there are some jokes that were genuinuely witty and got a laugh out of me, like where you get people to sign a petition to get “whiny congressmen to play violent video games” which is probably the most accurate thing this game gets, or how the game breaks the 4th wall and makes fun of the player for saving way too often.
Or when on Friday you suddenly catch Gonorrhea so you take a visit to the Vend a Cure at the clinic and the robot AI asks you to pee in a cup. And doing so makes the AI respond in disgust.
And despite the game’s buggy nature, the game in the long run is fun to play. In a way, it’s nirvanic. As I kept playing, I actually got addicted to it. The cops aren’t really much of a threat, and maybe that's because of the piss poor AI, but it actually does add on to the freedom of just going around killing, looting, etc.
Also, I love how you can approach every situation in this game. For example, instead of cashing your check or buying milk from the store you can just fucking rob the place. I also like the amount of surprises and easter eggs to be found by exploring. If you can get on top of the rooftops you can find weapons and whatnot.
And one of the best things about the game is how the theme of the game changes depending on what time of year you’re playing in. For example on Valentine’s Day all of the NPCs walk around holding flowers and you can go to a kissing booth and pay $5 to kiss the gimp. On Saint Patrick’s Day you can find a little leprechaun running around and if you kill him before he reaches his pot of gold you get rewarded with a shitload of cash. And if you catch him he will grant you one wish but they’re all just tricks. For example, choosing “I wish for hot bitches to work my balls” will just spawn a bunch of flaming pit bulls that attack you.
On Easter you can actually engage in an epic boss fight against the Easter Bunny wearing a fucking kung fu outfit. On April Fools Day there will be a fake DLC menu and trying to buy anything doesn’t do anything except make the Postal guy scold you, you filthy gamer whale. And on Halloween, the NPCs will wear costumes, it will be night time and you can fight skeleton soldiers straight out of Army of Darkness, and ghosts can randomly appear. Also, all of the shovels are replaced with plastic devil pitchforks. Details like that can really add onto the game’s charm.
{ Final Thoughts }
So now with everything I’ve talked about you probably understand why I’m so split down the middle when it comes to this game. It’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a good game. There’s a lot the game has going for it but there are some serious strikes against it. It's very hit and miss in a lot of ways. Sure there is some quality here, but the lack of polish that the game presents even 17 years later really does not help. There is a semi lack of authenticity here. The gameplay and sense of humor has aged worse than 21st century American social justice.
I haven’t played a game this divisive in quite a while, but maybe it’s the good kind of divisive. I mean for fuck sake, the studio’s name is Running with Scissors. I can tell from that name alone that these guys are fucking cheeky.
I can tell the developers must have had a lot of fun making this game, but a lot of the content in this game can really rub you the wrong way because of how dated it all is. I give props to the developers for going out of their way and giving the middle finger to people who were bitching about the controversies of video games, and just wanted to make a game that is both offensive and yet fun to play at the same time, because at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking video game, it’s meant so you can simulate what you just can’t do in real life, but there is a somewhat lack of professionalism here, they’re definitely not Rockstar Games.
I prefer the more gritty, grounded, and yet very subtle tone of the original Postal over
HAHA pee pee poo poo titty cumslut terrorist neckbeard
But, it’s a fun game, they had fun making it, so it’s somewhat of a win win, and all of this shit just made the game more popular. I just wish it was executed better.
There’s a lot wrong with it, but there are many things it does well. Maybe if I played the expansions I’ll have a better view on it, but this review is just my opinion on the base experience.
I give this game 7 Gary Colemans out of 10.
It's a very average game and there aren't that many games out there like this one. It can be mindless fun and anyone who really likes old school FPS games will really get a kick out of it.