So I had played through the base game of Postal 2 a while back and it was a game I had some very mixed feelings on. While I believe that it's a good, fun to play game with a great amount of replay value, the lack of polish in the gameplay, the buggy nature, and the sense of humor that has aged as bad as an awful take on Twitter, makes it a very polarizing game to say the least.
I never played the Postal games when I was younger, I completely missed out on them in favor of the PissStation consoles. I never was a PC person until just recently. Even back then if I was playing on a PC I was playing old DOOM games and old browser games. For some reason no one in elementary or middle school ever talked about these games, and after experiencing Postal 1 and 2 I actually don't understand why.
Postal 1 is just as controversial as Postal 2 if not even more so because my god, the tone of this game makes the second game look like cupcake shit in comparison.
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Right off the bat this game is MUCH darker than the later games, easily the darkest in the series. The moment you boot up the game your ears are assaulted by some loud horrific music and then after that your eyes might start oozing blood at the sight of the scary looking backgrounds. There is some very fucked up imagery here, it's almost like Satan himself made this game.
All of the loading screens have these very terrifying visuals that are hard to make out, followed by some twisted description of the level you're about to play on.
Funny enough, despite what I just said, this game still has a sense of humor. Not as on the nose like the piss and shit jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping like in Postal 2, but a sense of humor nonetheless, it's just a lot more subtle in this game, like yeah, your parents and or grandparents are really not gonna get it.
This is a game about mass murder, and it honestly takes a lot of balls for the developers to take a subject as controversial as mass shootings and decide to be tongue and cheek about it.
Obviously just like the sequels, this game generated quite a lot of controversy when it first came out, being banned from several countries such as Germany, Australia, and Brazil.
American Senators? Oh ho ho, they despised this game, just like Mortal Kombat.
Obviously your parents should have the idea of raising you as a child correctly, teaching you the importance of discipline, responsibility, and what right and wrong are, and not judge your morality and what you do in your life based on shooting at pixelated graphics on a fucking 1996 CRT monitor but hey, who am I to judge eh?
cough Grand Theft Auto
Seriously, it's a video game, not polio.
But the Japanese? Nah, they fucking loved this game haha, so much so that they designed their own levels. Yes, you get to shoot up Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.
Though there is one part in the game that actually made me freak out because I thought I was going to have to shoot up a school at one point but that didn't actually happen.
I mean, I know this game came out before the Columbine shooting but Jesus Christ.
The subtle sense of humor is actually very effective because once you notice it then you can appreciate the game more for what it is.
Some of these fourth wall breaking moments made me crack the hell up in laughter. I'll share some of my favorites.
I was in the middle of shooting at a group of enemies and I guess I was shooting someone's dead body, and the dead body said "Stop shooting you sick bastard, I'm already dead!"
Or how about the stage where you shoot up a nursing home and the description says "Did someone say they've fallen and can't get up?"
Or how about when you throw a molotov cocktail and the Postal Dude says "You must be cold, lemme warm you up!"
Or some NPCs saying SpongeBob lines like "MY LEG!" or "MY EYES!"
Or how about the easter eggs in the Tokyo stage? There are buildings and billboards such as "Shitoba" which is a parody of Toshiba, and "GESA" which is a spoof of SEGA and it shows Sonic the Hedgehog giving a middle finger.
Shit like that makes me laugh. While yes this game is edgy and dark, it still has charm and a sense of humor.
This is how you do edgy games and not make a game like Hatred (2015), where the main character's only trait is that life is shit and nihilistic and that everyone should just fuckin' die, and says stupid shit like
MY LIFE IS NOTHING BUT COLD, BITTER HATRED in a Shadow the Hedgehog type voice and then proceeds to run into the middle of the streets and just senselessly kill everyone with no sense of rhyme or reason, with no prior development and or motivation to root for this character.
So it just comes off as too bleak.
And tryhard.
And dumb.
If you're going to make an edgy and bleak game you need to have some lightheartedness or sense of humor or some charm to mix it up and keep the game from being monotonous and desensitizing, because it does get old after a while.
The Postal Dude on the other hand is likeable because of his iconic character design and funny one-liners.
And another reason why this game works so well is because it is fun to play, which is a good segway to jump into the gameplay.
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This is an old school twin stick shooter where the core movement and gunplay is designed around strafing. You use the WASD keys for moving around, the mouse for aiming and shooting, and the number keys for swapping weapons. I would have preferred the middle mouse wheel but the number keys get the job done fine enough.
Moving and shooting is fucking ace in this game. Wherever the crosshair is pointing will determine the direction the Postal Dude is facing, and as long as the crosshair is in the general direction of the enemy, your bullets will hit them, even from all the way across the screen.
When this game first came out it had tank controls. Tank controls are suited for FPS games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem, but Postal is a third person shooter with isometric and top down perspectives, so having tank controls in a game like that just sucked.
Only until around 20 years later did the developers swap out the tank controls with just the standard up, down, left, and right movement.
Really, guys?? 20 years later??
Another thing that is jank about the controls is that there is a suicide button. Why? shoulder shrug I don't know, there isn't really a purpose for it besides to get a chuckle or two.
But by default it's mapped to the Q key, and there have been a couple instances where I'm in the middle of shooting bad guys and swapping weapons and then I accidentally hit the Q key and I blow my own goddamn head off.
And once you hit that key, you can't cancel it out.
Also, out of the 8 weapons, you can only move and shoot with three of them: the standard assault rifle, the full auto shotgun, and the flamethrower. All the other weapons (the pump shotgun, grenades, molotov cocktails, rocket launcher, and the napalm launcher) make you stand still while shooting them.
However, you should pick off targets whenever you can, because it's easy to get overwhelmed and bombarded with gunfire and explosions, especially on higher difficulties.
The assault rifle has infinite ammo but it's a pea shooter, and the full auto shotgun is an absolute fucking powerhouse but it burns through ammo quickly and has short range, same with the flamethrower.
The rocket launcher and grenades can kill anyone in one hit, however the blast radius is so small you'd be lucky to kill more than one person at once, so if you were expecting to use them for crowd control than prepare to be disappointed.
And the napalm launcher has short range as well, but it does have a large blast radius and any contact with fire equals instant death.
There is another thing that is pretty jank about this game. To go to the next level you have to kill 90% of the hostiles, which the game does conveniently tell you, but the level doesn't end right away.
When you kill 90-100% of the enemies, you have to push the F1 key to go to the next level. And at first I didn't know what to do after I killed all the enemies. I got this game off of Steam so I didn't look at a manual for it or anything. I only found out after looking in the controls menu.
But what really sucks about this game is getting stunlocked by rockets. When you get hit by an explosion you get launched into the air, but it's possible to get hit by another rocket or grenade while you're already on the ground and in the middle of getting up, so sometimes, this can go on repeat until you die. This literally happened to me on the first damn level.
So if you see a rocket tracking you, cause some rockets home in on you, for the love of God, hold down Right Click.
What I do love though is the difficulty customization. You get a slider that goes from 1-10 and you can tweak it to whatever you want.
I actually prefer this over the generic usual Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, etc.
However, I played through almost the whole game on 5/10 and I honestly thought the game was too easy. You can soak up bullets like a sponge and the game is very generous with ammo and health pickups.
It's also probably because this game was originally designed with tank controls in mind, so having them swapped with modern mouse and keyboard controls kinda just breaks the game.
And this game isn't long. You can beat every level in the game in just 3 or 3 Β½ hours. So I recommend cranking up the difficulty for your first playthrough if you want a genuine challenge, that's what I ended up doing, starting over but on a higher difficulty.
What this game also needs is some boss fights. There are none to speak of. Maybe something like a tank, or an attack helicopter, or a guy in a juggernaut suit, anything to spice up the game and break up the slight montonony of shooting at an endless amount of enemies.
Back then the developers were just a very small group of indie developers, and while they are still an indie studio nowadays, they're much bigger than what they were back then, which is all the more reason to put more shit like that in the game.
Because after I finished this game I honestly was craving more. The only rewards you get for playing through each of the levels are Steam achievements, and that's it.
But damn this game is fun to play. In a way, playing this game feels cathartic. Back then this must have been an awesome stress reliever alongside your GTA games or DOOM games or whatever.
Besides the main levels there are optional mini-games you can do as well, but they're just levels that you have already played before, except that you do things like killing a certain amount of enemies as quick as possible, capturing flags, and surviving until a timer runs out.
This does pad out the game a bit more but it's not enough to be honest. There is no mod support or online Multiplayer. Postal Plus actually had online Multiplayer but it was removed from the Steam version. There is LAN Multiplayer (Local Area Network), but no one in my area plays this game, so yeah.
So what I believe the biggest problem this game has is its longevity. Playing through everything this game had to offer in such a short amount of time made me want more.
The Redux version of the game tries to remedy this by improving the gameplay mechanics such as giving the full auto shotgun its own ammo type, adding in a new revolver weapon, increasing the rate of fire of the assault rifle making it less awkward to use, adding a score to the game, adding additional settings like the option to turn off bullet tracers, and adding a whole new mode called Rampage, where you kill as many enemies as possible under a time limit and every enemy you kill in rapid succession adds a multiplier to the score you gain.
But regardless, Redux is still the same game as the original, just with a new art style and additional gameplay tweaks. The game is still insanely short and doesn't have much to offer post-game. And speaking of art style, I shall talk about the presentation and why I actually prefer the original over Redux.
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Besides the horrific music in the beginning and loading screen backgrounds, the original 1997 release of this game is goddamn pretty. All of the backgrounds were actually hand drawn and it looks very authentic, it just reeks of a 1990s PC game.
It looks like I'm running around shooting at people in an old cartoon. I just love games that look like this.
The character models are very low res and don't have any facial detail. This game came out the same year as games such as Final Fantasy VII, Quake 2, and Tomb Raider II, but like I said, this was made by an indie studio so who cares anyway.
However, the reason why I prefer the original 1997 version over Redux, and this might sound a bit controversial, but I don't really like the artstyle of Redux. It just looks cheap. I prefer the hand drawn authentic aesthetics of the original over Redux which looks like it was computer generated.
So about the soundtrack, there actually isn't much to talk about because this game barely has any music playing. Most of the time you're just hearing the gunshots, the explosions, the shouting of the NPCs, the bird chirping and the wind blowing of the outdoors, and the tunneling ambience of the cavern stage.
It can add to the edginess and sense of humor, but good thing I have a SoundCloud account if I desire some music lol.
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A cult classic if I say so myself. It's great to waste an afternoon on and if you just want something quick and simple to play. The simplicity of the game's content does hurt it in the long run, but hopefully in the future the developers give the game the same amount of love as Postal 2 and we get something like mod support or Online support.
The game feels great to play, it controls like butter, it made me laugh while playing it without being insanely on the nose like Postal 2, it's edginess done the right way, I encountered no bugs or technical issues, I love how you can tweak the difficulty, and it's a pretty game for what it is.
And all of the controversy surrounding it only just made it along with its sequels more popular.
I recommend it, but whether the original or Redux are better than one another is up to personal preference, but regardless of which one you play, expect to be hungry for more.
7/10
I never played the Postal games when I was younger, I completely missed out on them in favor of the PissStation consoles. I never was a PC person until just recently. Even back then if I was playing on a PC I was playing old DOOM games and old browser games. For some reason no one in elementary or middle school ever talked about these games, and after experiencing Postal 1 and 2 I actually don't understand why.
Postal 1 is just as controversial as Postal 2 if not even more so because my god, the tone of this game makes the second game look like cupcake shit in comparison.
[ πΌπππππππππ ]
Right off the bat this game is MUCH darker than the later games, easily the darkest in the series. The moment you boot up the game your ears are assaulted by some loud horrific music and then after that your eyes might start oozing blood at the sight of the scary looking backgrounds. There is some very fucked up imagery here, it's almost like Satan himself made this game.
All of the loading screens have these very terrifying visuals that are hard to make out, followed by some twisted description of the level you're about to play on.
Funny enough, despite what I just said, this game still has a sense of humor. Not as on the nose like the piss and shit jokes and Arab terrorist stereotyping like in Postal 2, but a sense of humor nonetheless, it's just a lot more subtle in this game, like yeah, your parents and or grandparents are really not gonna get it.
This is a game about mass murder, and it honestly takes a lot of balls for the developers to take a subject as controversial as mass shootings and decide to be tongue and cheek about it.
Obviously just like the sequels, this game generated quite a lot of controversy when it first came out, being banned from several countries such as Germany, Australia, and Brazil.
American Senators? Oh ho ho, they despised this game, just like Mortal Kombat.
Obviously your parents should have the idea of raising you as a child correctly, teaching you the importance of discipline, responsibility, and what right and wrong are, and not judge your morality and what you do in your life based on shooting at pixelated graphics on a fucking 1996 CRT monitor but hey, who am I to judge eh?
cough Grand Theft Auto
Seriously, it's a video game, not polio.
But the Japanese? Nah, they fucking loved this game haha, so much so that they designed their own levels. Yes, you get to shoot up Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.
Though there is one part in the game that actually made me freak out because I thought I was going to have to shoot up a school at one point but that didn't actually happen.
I mean, I know this game came out before the Columbine shooting but Jesus Christ.
The subtle sense of humor is actually very effective because once you notice it then you can appreciate the game more for what it is.
Some of these fourth wall breaking moments made me crack the hell up in laughter. I'll share some of my favorites.
I was in the middle of shooting at a group of enemies and I guess I was shooting someone's dead body, and the dead body said "Stop shooting you sick bastard, I'm already dead!"
Or how about the stage where you shoot up a nursing home and the description says "Did someone say they've fallen and can't get up?"
Or how about when you throw a molotov cocktail and the Postal Dude says "You must be cold, lemme warm you up!"
Or some NPCs saying SpongeBob lines like "MY LEG!" or "MY EYES!"
Or how about the easter eggs in the Tokyo stage? There are buildings and billboards such as "Shitoba" which is a parody of Toshiba, and "GESA" which is a spoof of SEGA and it shows Sonic the Hedgehog giving a middle finger.
Shit like that makes me laugh. While yes this game is edgy and dark, it still has charm and a sense of humor.
This is how you do edgy games and not make a game like Hatred (2015), where the main character's only trait is that life is shit and nihilistic and that everyone should just fuckin' die, and says stupid shit like
MY LIFE IS NOTHING BUT COLD, BITTER HATRED in a Shadow the Hedgehog type voice and then proceeds to run into the middle of the streets and just senselessly kill everyone with no sense of rhyme or reason, with no prior development and or motivation to root for this character.
So it just comes off as too bleak.
And tryhard.
And dumb.
If you're going to make an edgy and bleak game you need to have some lightheartedness or sense of humor or some charm to mix it up and keep the game from being monotonous and desensitizing, because it does get old after a while.
The Postal Dude on the other hand is likeable because of his iconic character design and funny one-liners.
And another reason why this game works so well is because it is fun to play, which is a good segway to jump into the gameplay.
[ ππΌπππππΌπ ]
This is an old school twin stick shooter where the core movement and gunplay is designed around strafing. You use the WASD keys for moving around, the mouse for aiming and shooting, and the number keys for swapping weapons. I would have preferred the middle mouse wheel but the number keys get the job done fine enough.
Moving and shooting is fucking ace in this game. Wherever the crosshair is pointing will determine the direction the Postal Dude is facing, and as long as the crosshair is in the general direction of the enemy, your bullets will hit them, even from all the way across the screen.
When this game first came out it had tank controls. Tank controls are suited for FPS games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem, but Postal is a third person shooter with isometric and top down perspectives, so having tank controls in a game like that just sucked.
Only until around 20 years later did the developers swap out the tank controls with just the standard up, down, left, and right movement.
Really, guys?? 20 years later??
Another thing that is jank about the controls is that there is a suicide button. Why? shoulder shrug I don't know, there isn't really a purpose for it besides to get a chuckle or two.
But by default it's mapped to the Q key, and there have been a couple instances where I'm in the middle of shooting bad guys and swapping weapons and then I accidentally hit the Q key and I blow my own goddamn head off.
And once you hit that key, you can't cancel it out.
Also, out of the 8 weapons, you can only move and shoot with three of them: the standard assault rifle, the full auto shotgun, and the flamethrower. All the other weapons (the pump shotgun, grenades, molotov cocktails, rocket launcher, and the napalm launcher) make you stand still while shooting them.
However, you should pick off targets whenever you can, because it's easy to get overwhelmed and bombarded with gunfire and explosions, especially on higher difficulties.
The assault rifle has infinite ammo but it's a pea shooter, and the full auto shotgun is an absolute fucking powerhouse but it burns through ammo quickly and has short range, same with the flamethrower.
The rocket launcher and grenades can kill anyone in one hit, however the blast radius is so small you'd be lucky to kill more than one person at once, so if you were expecting to use them for crowd control than prepare to be disappointed.
And the napalm launcher has short range as well, but it does have a large blast radius and any contact with fire equals instant death.
There is another thing that is pretty jank about this game. To go to the next level you have to kill 90% of the hostiles, which the game does conveniently tell you, but the level doesn't end right away.
When you kill 90-100% of the enemies, you have to push the F1 key to go to the next level. And at first I didn't know what to do after I killed all the enemies. I got this game off of Steam so I didn't look at a manual for it or anything. I only found out after looking in the controls menu.
But what really sucks about this game is getting stunlocked by rockets. When you get hit by an explosion you get launched into the air, but it's possible to get hit by another rocket or grenade while you're already on the ground and in the middle of getting up, so sometimes, this can go on repeat until you die. This literally happened to me on the first damn level.
So if you see a rocket tracking you, cause some rockets home in on you, for the love of God, hold down Right Click.
What I do love though is the difficulty customization. You get a slider that goes from 1-10 and you can tweak it to whatever you want.
I actually prefer this over the generic usual Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, etc.
However, I played through almost the whole game on 5/10 and I honestly thought the game was too easy. You can soak up bullets like a sponge and the game is very generous with ammo and health pickups.
It's also probably because this game was originally designed with tank controls in mind, so having them swapped with modern mouse and keyboard controls kinda just breaks the game.
And this game isn't long. You can beat every level in the game in just 3 or 3 Β½ hours. So I recommend cranking up the difficulty for your first playthrough if you want a genuine challenge, that's what I ended up doing, starting over but on a higher difficulty.
What this game also needs is some boss fights. There are none to speak of. Maybe something like a tank, or an attack helicopter, or a guy in a juggernaut suit, anything to spice up the game and break up the slight montonony of shooting at an endless amount of enemies.
Back then the developers were just a very small group of indie developers, and while they are still an indie studio nowadays, they're much bigger than what they were back then, which is all the more reason to put more shit like that in the game.
Because after I finished this game I honestly was craving more. The only rewards you get for playing through each of the levels are Steam achievements, and that's it.
But damn this game is fun to play. In a way, playing this game feels cathartic. Back then this must have been an awesome stress reliever alongside your GTA games or DOOM games or whatever.
Besides the main levels there are optional mini-games you can do as well, but they're just levels that you have already played before, except that you do things like killing a certain amount of enemies as quick as possible, capturing flags, and surviving until a timer runs out.
This does pad out the game a bit more but it's not enough to be honest. There is no mod support or online Multiplayer. Postal Plus actually had online Multiplayer but it was removed from the Steam version. There is LAN Multiplayer (Local Area Network), but no one in my area plays this game, so yeah.
So what I believe the biggest problem this game has is its longevity. Playing through everything this game had to offer in such a short amount of time made me want more.
The Redux version of the game tries to remedy this by improving the gameplay mechanics such as giving the full auto shotgun its own ammo type, adding in a new revolver weapon, increasing the rate of fire of the assault rifle making it less awkward to use, adding a score to the game, adding additional settings like the option to turn off bullet tracers, and adding a whole new mode called Rampage, where you kill as many enemies as possible under a time limit and every enemy you kill in rapid succession adds a multiplier to the score you gain.
But regardless, Redux is still the same game as the original, just with a new art style and additional gameplay tweaks. The game is still insanely short and doesn't have much to offer post-game. And speaking of art style, I shall talk about the presentation and why I actually prefer the original over Redux.
[ ππππππππΌππππ ]
Besides the horrific music in the beginning and loading screen backgrounds, the original 1997 release of this game is goddamn pretty. All of the backgrounds were actually hand drawn and it looks very authentic, it just reeks of a 1990s PC game.
It looks like I'm running around shooting at people in an old cartoon. I just love games that look like this.
The character models are very low res and don't have any facial detail. This game came out the same year as games such as Final Fantasy VII, Quake 2, and Tomb Raider II, but like I said, this was made by an indie studio so who cares anyway.
However, the reason why I prefer the original 1997 version over Redux, and this might sound a bit controversial, but I don't really like the artstyle of Redux. It just looks cheap. I prefer the hand drawn authentic aesthetics of the original over Redux which looks like it was computer generated.
So about the soundtrack, there actually isn't much to talk about because this game barely has any music playing. Most of the time you're just hearing the gunshots, the explosions, the shouting of the NPCs, the bird chirping and the wind blowing of the outdoors, and the tunneling ambience of the cavern stage.
It can add to the edginess and sense of humor, but good thing I have a SoundCloud account if I desire some music lol.
[ πππ£ππ‘ πππ€πͺπππ©π¨ ]
A cult classic if I say so myself. It's great to waste an afternoon on and if you just want something quick and simple to play. The simplicity of the game's content does hurt it in the long run, but hopefully in the future the developers give the game the same amount of love as Postal 2 and we get something like mod support or Online support.
The game feels great to play, it controls like butter, it made me laugh while playing it without being insanely on the nose like Postal 2, it's edginess done the right way, I encountered no bugs or technical issues, I love how you can tweak the difficulty, and it's a pretty game for what it is.
And all of the controversy surrounding it only just made it along with its sequels more popular.
I recommend it, but whether the original or Redux are better than one another is up to personal preference, but regardless of which one you play, expect to be hungry for more.
7/10