POSTAL 2

Takes the piss out of everything - a great game, great fun.

Postal 2 has some 0k humour in it, there are bits that are quite funny, but the thing that really defines Postal is the endless boredom of it. You go somewhere, you cause havoc. Big deal. Mowing down unarmed pedestrians just feels like a waste of time. There is nothing whatsoever to get you invested in this game in any way. The game tries its best to offend you, but ultimately it's just offence for the sake of it. It can't offend you because the sheer amount of offence makes the offence nothing but routine. You can't even vent your anger in this game because the game world itself is utterly apathetic! Go ahead, the game says, cause a massacre in the street, set people on fire. The whole thing will be repopulated with clones two minutes later. And that is the game's biggest flaw. It just doesn't inspire any emotion. Nothing you do in this game matters, and so there is no reason to do it.

This game isn't fun, at all. It's funny, albeit with outdated humor such as the part where Postal Guy votes spoofing the Gore/Bush ballots. The gameplay is just incomprehensibly bad. The spread on the guns, all of the guns, is ridiculous. The shotgun has, I think, 4 pellets that will go literally anywhere except the person you're aiming at unless you're so close they cannot physically go anywhere else. Shotguns are a close-quarters weapon, but fuck me, this is makeout-range combat! Assault rifles and submachine guns are often described in games to be spray-and-pray weapons, this is literal in this game. I cannot conceive of how you could use such a weapon strategically or skillfully. Pistols, while not as bad, have much more than the usual video game pistol. In contrast, npcs have pinpoint accuracy. Someone ten buildings away with the same shotgun you use will tear you to shreds in a matter of seconds. It doesn't matter if you're in a small hallway or a wide street. All you can do is hope to take them out before you lose too much health, then another five hostile npcs found line of sight with you. The sheer number of weapons and items is cumbersome. Variety is good, but there's about five distinct weapon types and thirty different weapons. You can't swiftly switch to a specific weapon under pressure. I'd say Half-Life had about as many weapons as you can before it gets inconvenient. Items, too, are just too plentiful. Unlike weapons, most of them are useless in combat. The map, a newspaper, cat food, Gary Coleman autographs, all get in the way of you trying to find the healing items, most of which barely heal you. Even if the combat was passable, it's just tedious and unsatisfactory. Most games' basic actions, usually movement and attacking, are reasonably fun. Shooting aliens in Half-Life is fun, stomping on Goombas is fun, moving Tetriminos in Tetris is fun, shooting people in Postal 2 is just not fun even with the blood, profanity, and dismemberment.

Postal 2, like it's predecessor, was a game made specifically to generate headlines. The reasoning being, I suppose, that it's easier to rile up conservative, anti-violent video game types than it is to make an original, innovative game. I suppose it worked for the first game, which sold much more than you would expect a simple top-down shooter to sell. Postal 2, however, is a FPS; it's main selling points (aside from the graphic violence in it) where silly things like a cameo appearance by Gary Coleman, and the idea that you don't technically have to do anything violent to beat the game (though the denizens of Postal Guy's town do everything in their power to jostle you into, ahem, 'going postal'). The graphics are good for the time, and the sounds are acceptable. You can set people on fire, pee on them, blow their heads off, use the business end of a cat as a silencer...strangely, bodies can't be dismembered other than being decapitated, which normally wouldn't be a big deal but seems like a large omission in a game like this. All of that stuff is fun for a little while, but it starts to wear thin fast if you've ever played a gore-fest game before. After that, the main thing that keeps the game going is it's sense of humor, which consists mainly of toilet jokes and ethnic stereotypes. The main thing that really sucked about this game where the loading times. They were ridiculously long when the game came out (and are still uncomfortable on my current machine) and are far, far too frequent. The game didn't do much to alleviate the problem in it's gameplay either; there are points where you will have to cross one of the numerous load points, just to walk up the street a few meters and into another load point, collect an item there and go back through the two loads again, drop the item off and go back AGAIN to do something else! There are times where more time is spent looking at loading screens than actually playing the game. The price of all those pretty graphics I guess, but was it really worth it? No, not in my opinion. So, there you have it; a game selling itself on it's violence and free form gameplay, while doing neither particularly well. If it weren't for the terrible loading problems, I could recommend this game for a laugh at this price, if you are into silly potty jokes and things like that. As it is, I can only really recommend it for serious fans of the original.

Just non stop crashes and errors with 5 frames per second. I honestly don't get the appeal.