POSTAL 4: No Regerts Reviews

This game just sucks, plain and simple. RWS captured lightning in a bottle with P2 and have been trying to recapture it since to no avail. The visuals here are garish and cluttered, the writing and cutscenes are passable at best, the daily tasks are mind-numbingly boring, the bugs are too numerous to count, and it feels like nobody sat down and playtested this mess. All I see is copy-and-pasted glossy and soulless Unreal Engine 4 assets. The biggest crime of all however, is the machete. Look how they massacred my boy. In P2 the machete was a dopamine printer. You'd enter a room full of NPCs and you'd leave with a pile of viscera in a matter of seconds. Now it's a faint shadow of its former self, as dismemberment has been pushed aside in favor of floppy UE4 ragdolls. We do live in a different era than 2003, but I sorely miss the humor of the devs at the time. It's way too on the nose nowadays and will age very poorly compared to the timeless gags of P2. Slingshotting Mexicans across the border is cool and all, but that's nothing compared to infiltrating Tora Bora and getting your hands on a WMD.

First game ive had issues with running on my PC. The developers need to optimize the game for better frame rate. The game either breaks or the frame rate drops so low its hard to do anything.

HUGE Postal 2 fan, but this game just simply has none of the charm to it. Performance is pretty awful, the map is inexcusably ugly for a modern game. All the characters/NPC's look like they've been drag/dropped from an asset library. Art style isn't really that consistent. I've tried multiple times to try and get in to it but I just can't. Shame because I've always wanted RWS to succeed.

DO NOT BUY. I had to use an extra 3 hours of my time just because of the autosaving/zoning into limbo issue. In addtion, automatic things do not trigger, meaning I have to keep reloading the game and when I do, I am in a totally different place where I´m supposed to be, my inventory/skins etc etc are gone and what not. I knew the game was going to be buggy, but this is just crazy.

Even if this game isn't perfect or as great as POSTAL 2, there is still plenty of fun to be had and this was made with much love and care by RWS as they did with POSTAL 2 and all the other games they made. It ain't perfect, but still fun as any POSTAL games... except 3...

[h2]So bad it’s bad.[/h2] [b]I’ve played my fair share of janky garbage. Heck, my favorite guilty pleasure is Duke Nukem Forever. It sucks hard, but captured a certain flavor that makes me come back every other year. Postal 4 on the other hand is like vanilla ice-cream covered in shit sprinkles. Even if you outmaneuver the crap it’s still a bland, tasteless experience that’s not worth the effort. Everything this game does Postal 2 did better twenty years ago![/b] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3429026041 --- Terrible Open world --- The devs made the classic mistake of going the “bigger is better” approach and bit off more than they can chew. The map is huge and empty, which many copied assets and so little to do. Traversing the map was a chore and there are too many buildings with nothing worthwhile. The world is so static you can’t even pop balloons or run over signs on your scooter. NPCs just wander around aimlessly. Rarely do you see them use scooters or do something interesting. Where is the fun stuff like the marching band from Postal 2? It’s all so lifeless und barebones. --- Terrible Inventory System --- The inventory is a nightmare to navigate because it hordes every single item you pick up including the many collectibles, which have no purpose outside of selling them at specific vendors. If you’re smarter than me you’ll probably rebind some keys sooner than I did to minimize the tediousness. Every so often when picking up an item it overwrites the one you had previously selected, so now you have to cycle through so much clutter that the fastest way is to pause instead and select the item you want directly. This game seriously needs to get rid of those redundant items so I don’t have to scroll through them every time I’m trying to find my healthpipes. --- Terrible Combat --- Postal 4 gives you many weapons and too be fair they are well animated – but most of them just lack [i][b]oomph! [/b][/i] NPCs barely react to you, can survive half a dozen pistol shots and melee is downright useless. It takes several swipes with your machete to chomp of limbs, so what’s the point? Enemies rarely get amputated and usually ragdoll after getting shot and that’s just not satisfying. [b]When I shoot a NPC in the face with a shotgun I want them to explode like a fckin piñata![/b] Even running them over with the scooter is not as entertaining as it should be. Nothing has any impact. --- Terrible Optimization --- My rig is powerful enough to play the latest Resident Evil and Cyberpunk in stable 60fps on Ultra, but Postal 4 is in a league of its own. It’s so badly optimized I had to turn off most post-processing effects, switch to potato-resolution and most settings went down to either medium and lower. This game looks like total ass and still my rig was struggling. And this is after years of updates. I shudder to think how bad it was at launch. Constant glitches, crashes and soft-locks haunted my playthrough. I managed to trap myself in a closet because the door wouldn’t open, I’d get stuck walking up stairs, textures taking their sweet time loading in, guns shooting continuously after respawn, enemies popping into existence, cutscenes not playing properly, after the mission were the dude get’s turned into a cat it wouldn’t turn me back – so many big and small issues… The last section in particular deserves special mention for how positively awful it is: You have to reach the maps exit by using the longest way imaginable and while every single NPC is shooting at you constantly. All you can do is drive, spam the heath-key and hope you don’t die. Adding to the frustration are stupid UFOs that will abduct you causing the game to glitch out or entrap you. I had to savescum my way to the credits. [b]No wonder this game gives you 5 autosaves. It’s barely functional.[/b] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3429024147 --- Terrible Humor --- The writers completely missed the point of Postal 2. Most of its humor came from the juxtaposition of the mundanity of life and the absolute insanity that would ensue. You’d patiently wait in line at the bank to cash in your cheque when suddenly robbers shoot up the place. It slowly built up the wackiness. Postal 4 on the other hand wants to be Mr. Funnypants. It tries so hard to make you laugh and nothing really works. Same with the satire. Postal 2 was dumb and edgy, but it has become a wonderful time capsule of the 2000s and the war on terror. [b]Now the devs play it so safe it’s not even safe-edgy – it’s just lame. [/b] I don’t know how many of the OG devs were involved in this, but let me remind you that in the very first game you could unalive actual Kindergarteners. It was vile, shocking and ballsy as fck. You’d think that in these dark times of PC wokeness the devs would go all out and create something magical, but alas with old age their balls must have shriveled away so now all we have left are lame reddit-tier jokes about mobility scooters. A punchline so lame Postal 3 did it first. Speaking of old age, you remember Bane from The Dark Knight Rises? You know, the movie by Christoper Nolan from over ten ago? Well, you meet a parody of him early in the game. There have been 5 Batman movies since then, but I guess the overused voice gag was too good to pass up. There’s also a recurring character who’s clearly supposed to be the G-Man from Half-life 2, a game that hasn’t been relevant in two decades. The only thing funny about this is how hilariously dated it is. The game makes fun of covid, but in the safest way possible. All we get is an unfunny announcement and NPCs wearing facemasks. Is that it? Why not have comical large covid bacteria roam the city infecting people and when you shoot it from afar it explodes making everyone around vomit blood. Or how about giving the player covid-grenades so we can spread the Shanghai Shivers ourselves? At least have NPCs fight over toilet paper or something. There are no jokes about the Orangeman or Sleepy Joe. The closest I could find was a Trump Halloween mask I couldn’t wear. The devs don’t even have the guts to make fun of the obnoxious woke crowd. Imagine if you could cancel people by pointing your phone at them and they shot themselves on the spot. Now [i]that’s[/i] comedy. A mission set inside an amusement park could have been the perfect opportunity to make fun of Disney and their dominance (and ruination) of western entertainment – but of course [i]nada[/i]. The writers couldn’t think of anything clever; so poop jokes it is. I’m actually insulted by the absolute state of lameness in this comedy game. --- Terrible Game --- The graphic designers did a fine job with the posters and vending machines. Cutscenes look good and are nicely animated. And as I mentioned before, the weapon animations are great. But all that talent is wasted because even if it was properly optimized the game still remains tedious unfunny slop. A shallow imitation of a game from twenty years ago. Playing this was exhausting. [b]Postal 4 is complete utter waste and I regert paying full price for this.[/b] PS: Oh, and RWS? That running joke about making fun of Postal 3? Yeah, that doesn’t work if your own sequel is arguably worse.

in my two decades of gaming, this is the first title to give me motion sickness. i really wanted to like postal 4, and running with scissors have proven that they take a lot of pride in their work, but they're still chipping away at sorely-needed optimization improvements years after release. to date, the framerate is choppy and constantly has migraine-inducing palpitations, like the heart of an average american. performance issues aside, there's a level of inspiration that just feels lacking here compared to the game's predecessor, postal 2. a few points of comparison: postal 2 had a vast weapon selection to experiment with and visit all sorts of harm on people. in postal 4, the arsenal doesn't get much more exciting than the utilitarian workhorse weapons and a couple of dismemberment-capable melee weapons. even then, this game's dismemberment is very limited, and you'll barely be able to begin torturing a pedestrian before the light passes from its eyes. postal 4's story follows the same formula as postal 2, but otherwise has little to no connection with previous events. al-qaeda, perhaps the most thoroughly-developed faction in postal 2 and 3, are conspicuously absent here. RWS staff Mike J & Vince Desi once again appear as themselves, but their self-inserts explicitly lack continuity with their postal 2 counterparts. the game might as well be another coma dream, for how few plot threads persist from Paradise Lost. returning the world of postal to the status quo isn't a bad idea, but postal 4 makes the same mistake as postal 3 in sweeping postal 2's events under the rug as quickly and conveniently as possible to roll back what little character development and worldbuilding the series has had. postal 2's side content relied on creative scripted sequences that invited the player to step in with whatever sort of violence one pleased. the tora bora raid is one of the game's longest and most unique shootout sequences, explains the extreme taliban presence in town, and goes completely unmarked as an objective. in postal 4, there are gamey challenges to complete that usually follow a pattern of "use [weapon A] on [quantity B] of [set of targets C] in [D seconds] to earn [$E]". also sprinkled around the map are a large amount of collectible krotchy dolls and paintings, which can be redeemed for cosmetics and some other minor rewards. both activities quickly begin to feel like box-checking exercises. i spent most of my playthrough hunting for krotchy dolls, and in the process discovered a fundamental issue with postal 4's resource management system. in postal 2, resources like health and money pickups only respawn after each ingame day, pushing the player to be increasingly clever with his movement and weapon use as difficulty increases in order to avoid running out of these finite resources. in postal 4, pickups respawn every time a map is loaded. due to all the time i spent collectible hunting, i quickly became so inundated with crack pipes that, despite playing on Very Hard, the highest non-gimmick difficulty setting, enemies could only kill me (and even then they struggled) if i wasn't able to take cover during the full second it now takes to smoke up. ammo is so plentiful (and perhaps bugged) that i finished the game with over 6,000,000 units of gasoline in my gas can despite my efforts to intentionally waste as much as i could on innocent civilians. in addition, postal 4 attempts to nerf the police disguise by introducing a suspicion meter; if the player commits too many crimes while disguised as a cop, the disguise becomes ineffective and the player is no longer protected against earning a wanted level. however, this nerf comes with another infinitely-respawning pickup: the police badge, which, when consumed, immediately clears the player's suspicion meter and wanted level. as a result, the player can cause a "sovereign citizen incident" at the police station, run into someone's house and simply eat a badge to make the cops call off the search for the impostor who just offed 40 officers on their last day before retirement. the effect of all this is that the game inevitably becomes a cakewalk outside of challenge runs. if you've played Two Weeks in Paradise ad nauseum, you've made it through both Corkscrew Rules & Eternal Damnation and you're still desperate for a new week of postal, postal 4 does have the same gameplay and sense of humor as its predecessor, and it's not a bad choice to pick up at a steep discount, though i'd recommend turning the difficulty way up and playing straight through the main story without going too far out of your way for side content. for my money, though, the third-party spinoff postal: brain damaged feels like a truer successor, with creative, content-dense level design that builds on the same sense of surreal cynicism that inspired postal 1 & 2 in its own way. if you're new to postal, i shouldn't have to tell you that postal 2 is the definitive postal game and an incredibly entertaining game in its own right.

I reallllly wanted to like this, I had so much fun in Postal 2, but honestly this game needs a lotta work and revising of the main formula from missions. I feel making it as Postal 2 was (the factions you are now hostile with progressively growing in number) would help this feel a lot better. Aside from the base game bein mostly underwhelming, I can't even finish tuesday because the graffiti mission has me softlocked each time I run it.

Clearly a child of love. Only mother could love that face. Play as a Postal Dude, a lovable crackhead, embodiment of chaos and intrusive thoughts. Overall less janky than a Postal 2. A little. A little more stable than Postal 2 too. Also, a little. Runs like crap regardless of graphical settings. Autosaves are often, but unreliable. Feel like the last holdout of game breaking glitches too. Guns no longer feel like it's 1997: they hit where you aim them, they have more animation frames than in Doom 2, headshots actually work. Money is more important than in Postal 2, where it was only useful for crack and akimbo powerup. You can buy pretty much any item in game now, and various quality of life upgrades like more inventory space or open carry licence. Definitely could use more Fast Travel points, because map is a lot bigger, and getting between jobs sometimes means plenty of loading screens. Pick your Dude: You can choose Jon St. John, Rick Hunter, Corey Cruise, or Zack Ward to voice Postal Dude. What a service! Has rampages, like PS2 era GTA. Damn, I miss PS2 era GTA.

This is absolutely bullshit. Poorly optimized, stressful missions and the map is ridiculously big and lifeless, especially the NPCS walking around aimlessly. I'm a fan of the Postal series, I have all the games (except Postal 3) and I tried everything I could to like this game but at the end of the day, it's just bad. The cutscenes, the story, the weapon animations, the music and the Dude's design are fine, but the rest of the game is... just purely bad. I regret everything!