AUDIENCES LOVED POSTAL 4: NO REGERTS

CRITICS PUT OUT THE HIT

WHO WOULD YOU TRUST MORE? YOURSELF, OR A TROLL BEHIND A KEYBOARD?

POSTAL 4: OUT NOW

Dear lord this is rough. The floppy, beautiful skin of what will probably be a pretty good shooter in 3 years (probably like 1 month before the next battlefield comes out) masquerading as a full tentpole release for EA. 2042 is more blatantly a work in progress than some telltale episode 1s, it's so ludicrously barebones and buggy, but more importantly, doesn't seem to have even worked out it's core gameplay hooks and flow.

You really only need to play one game of conquest to see the cracks DICE apparently havent. Honestly, you merely only need to look at the map screen once. Maps are way, way too big and the way objective zones are set out means action across a map spreads out to such an extent you can go literal minutes without even seeing anyone, only to either get shot by a sniper or probably to do it to someone else. And weirdly, every weapon other than sniper rifles, and arguably to an extent them too, have terrible performance at extended ranges.

Making shots with even assault and marksman rifles at around 100m is a crapshoot and anything beyond that is basically pointless. When maps are absolutely enormous. It gets to the point where it's pretty common for you and an enemy to both see each other, pop off a few shots, realise that this will take like 20 seconds to resolve and just stop bothering.

The game does have some strengths when you play it's other mode - Breakthrough, which is a normal attack-defend set up much smaller versions of the conquest maps, though still with 128 players. These maps are still frankly way too big and all of them have one (or more) of those horrible chokepoint sections that attack/defend maps tend to do, and it's still rarely actually fun. But what it does have are flashes. When the fighting get's to the point where like 60 of the players in the server are fighting over one park or underpass or whatever, the sheer and utter chaos that erupts can be a riot. It really feels like a war movie, with helicopters crashing everywhere, countless streams of tracer fire going over your head as beautiful weather effects crash against a beautiful broken world.

And 2042 is beautiful. The skin of the pre-alpha game being playtested here is truly something, with a nice sense of heightened/semi-magical realism that's very cool, and when you're involved in the insane firefights, can be pretty remarkable.

But those awesome firefights are few and far between and way too much of 2042 basically forces you to admire the scenary because you've got fuck all else to do but try and wait for the fight to bunch up so you can actually have some fun. Much has been said about the lack of weapons, the bugs being so prevelant and the specialist system, and I don't really care because that's battlefield, that's going to be fixed - probably by the point no one really cares about 2042 any more, but fixed nontheless.

The problem is just that the gameplay lacks any momntum and flow and the maps are absolutely enormous for no good reason. You could probably add another 64 players and Conquest would still feel like a ghost town. If these things are going to be fixed, the whole direction of the game needs to change substantially - and I doubt that's going to happen.

November 2021 is truly going to live long in the memory as the month where every long running, blockbuster franchise dropped the ball, except of all things, Shin Megami Tensei.

Standing here, I realize you were
Just like me trying to make history.
But who's to judge the right from wrong.
When our guard is down I think we'll both agree.
That violence breeds violence.
But in the end it has to be this way.