POSTAL 2

I'm giving this game, a first persons shooter, a single star. The reason is extremely simple. The guns aren't fun to fire. This is the one thing an FPS should have. And they fucked it. You have to hit people in the head 4 times with a deagle to make them go down, and there's no such thing as stagger, so during that time they'll also be hitting you. The game attempts to do things no other FPS does, but that doesn't matter if you can't do the basic premise of the FPS right in your FPS.

This game can be great fun in small doses. This game isn't for someone looking to sit down and power through a shooter game. This game is really more about mindless killing, and though guns (among other things) will often be your tools of death, this is not a shooter first. This game is violent self indulgence first, shooter second. Though it is disturbing to say, this game can be a great relief when you've had a stressful day. The game is about The Dude completely mundane every day task such as picking laundry and milk, getting an X-Mas tree (In July), and a few other dull tidbits. What makes it fun is how over the top the game can be; how the game dramatizes trivial events. Think Southpark meets Duke Nukem.

Games present themselves in all different ways. Although this game might not have ever been high on graphics or loading times what it does do right is entertain. I had enough fun and laughed enough to over look its many flaws and recommend it to others.

In short: EXTREMELY ACQUIRED TASTE - TRY THE DEMO AND THE FREEWARE MULTIPLAYER "SHARE THE PAIN" FIRST IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS. Playing the game to beat it is probably not the best experience. You are supposed to experiment with the bystander-slaughtering methods such as setting them on fire and getting them mercilessly mauled by your dogs. The best part of the original Postal 2 (and 1) is how it took soccermom and political correctness whiners and let you slaughter those people. If you do not like experimenting and being creative with games instead of being told what to do, you have very little to enjoy in the game (a 2/5 at most for you, 5/5 for the fanatics). Beating-wise, the first five days are pretty solid, Apocalypse Weekend is a bad potpourri of horror, arcade, comedy and military-shooter gameplay. (The paid DLC Paradise Lost takes the worst parts of the two and amplifies the awfulness. There is almost no striking comedy content in it, just more superficial stereotypes. Oh and those spitting, hard-hitting, super-accurate zombies are the worst.) There is a lot of walking long distances in the game, probably because you are supposed to mess with the people you come across during those long paths. Including the scissors-throwing nutcases at the asylum. The description states that it comes with first TWO (2) expansions. That means it has Share the Pain multiplayer mode with its own executable (still has active servers, all old networking options are there such as Direct IP and LAN). Apocalypse Weekend adds Saturday and Sunday to the first game. I recall StP worked quite well with its Capture the Flag gameplay, despite the weapons not specifically made for PvP use. E.g. no one is going to walk into your gas puddles unlike NPCs. You have to find the Postal2MP (.exe) in the ShareThePain\System subdirectory that also houses the level editor (I failed to get it to work).

In Postal 2 you walk around fairly empty areas filled with people who are just randomly walking around. The areas are tiny and even on a modern PC with a SSD loading takes several seconds. You can find weapons everywhere and shoot the people with it. There is no aiming or reloading. There are basic fetch quests and unskippable cutscenes. That's it, that's pretty much the entire game. It's basically an asset flip with voice acting and the ability to sometimes pee on people. I didn't expect anything from this and it's even worse than i thought it would be.