POSTAL 4: No Regerts

This game still isn't great. I played it on release and felt underwhelmed, and still can't consciously recommend it to people who enjoyed Postal 2. Postal 2 is a good game despite it's setbacks, and Postal 4 tries awfully hard to reach that same style of comedy, but misses the mark and hits a bystander instead. It's still buggy and crash-prone, and the writing and story feels almost flat and uninspired, lacking in the real satirical awfulness of Postal 2 and coming across more to me as an edgy teenager re-writing that game in a more modern setting but missing the key points of what made it a fun experience. It's got a lot of the hallmarks of Postal: cat silencers, urinating, political incorrectness, etc, but it lacks the life that Postal 2 had. I'll still support RWS with all my heart, I stand by them as a company, but they can surely do far better than this. The people defending RWS's decision to release the game in the state it's in are obnoxious, and blaming people pointing out the game's flaws as "SJWs" or whatever else helps nothing. Postal has always been an unapologetic and vulgar car-wreck of a game series designed to offend as many groups as possible, video gaming's South Park long before South Park games were a thing, but Postal 4 just feels uninspired. It feels like RWS tried too hard to capture the lightning in a bottle they had with Postal 2, and it resulted in stories and missions that just weren't interesting or fun to play, among other issues. The open world is massive, yet feels empty, almost like the poor man's New Vegas. Postal 2's map was compact, important areas were placed in a way that was easy to navigate, Postal 4's map makes it a pain to do absolutely anything, as all of your objectives are spread out over such a large area of land. I will say, though, the voice acting is quite nice, I like having multiple options for the Dude's voice, and Jon St. John was a good pick. TL:DR, Play Postal 2 again, don't bother with this game for now.

It sucks to admit but this game is pretty awful even beyond performance issues (which as of 2023 seems to be greatly improved). The main issue I have is that the writing of this game isnt irreverent, dark, constroverial, or even funny. It feels very safe and relies heavily on low effort toilet and dildo jokes that wouldnt even make a 12 year old crack a smile, when the devs are backed into a writing cornor or cant think of a funny thing to discover in the map these are the go to for them. Anyone who knows this series will realize that Postal and "safe comedy" go as well together as Mayo and Jelly. The second major issue is that the map is much larger than Postal 2's yet is filled with nothing to do, I hope you enjoy catching cats, searching static houses with no interactability, boring in game challenges, and especially mobility scooters. your ass will be seated in one for 65% of your playing experience with the remainder of your time mosly going into the other activites mentioned. I wont say its worse than 3 but I will say its not much better. Im a long time fan of the postal seires and wanted this game to succeed, I know the devs promised future updates but to be frank, unless they scrap the enitre story or world map this game wont ever be much better than it is now.

Everything there is functional, ticks a lot of the right boxes in terms of how we can interact with the environment, the actual gameplay itself is solid, the weapons feel fine, but I just don't know. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on I'm having a really hard time feeling the "magic" I did(and still do) with Postal 2. That game is still one of my favorite PC games of all time. The actual missions...as much as it kills me to say this...are actually kind of boring. Not just because of the lack of factions that remain hostile towards you throughout the remainder of the game. The tasks themselves seem to lack the same personality that the missions in postal 2 had. Not that what's there is necessarily bad, it just feels like something is missing. This is how I felt when the EA was first released. We are now up to the game's 3rd day, and that feeling hasn't really changed. The closest I've seen to the original feel is the mission where you have to spraypaint the billboards and have to fight off a bunch of SJW's. That feels in the right direction, but it's one mission already halfway through the game if it's M-F like the original was before AW and even that is a one-off. You don't see them again after that mission is over. Yeah it's better than Postal 3, but that's not a very high bar for comparison. I also feel like the animal mission on the first day needs an option to just blow up the guy's van and get assaulted by hillbillies as opposed to killing a bunch of pets. So far that's the only mission I flat-out don't really like at all. tl;dr -- A solid framework for a great game, but it has a long way to go before it's anywhere near being able to live up to postal 2.

Postal 4 always ran quite choppily on my lower scale of mid range machine. Even when installing on my SSD but with the last update it's actually running well, even on high settings and far draw distance. So i do commend them for that and continuing to update the game after the 1.0 launch which was over a year ago. The game itself however is not that great to be honest. Though there is fun to be had it falls short of the laughs postal 2 gave me back in the day. And the more recent Postal Brain Damaged is also a better game. However, on a good sale I would recommend giving it a spin if you like the humor of the other games of the franchise. Especially now it's optimization seems fixed.

So I just finished the last mission of the Alpha state of this game and I had a great time. The graphics are good and color is vibrant. I actually like the semi-cell shaded style. The weapons feel nice. And the violence, gor, and obscenities are still there! Great stuff! There is only a couple of bad things I have to say about Postal 4 in it's state right now. One is that the game is a little buggy, the streets and building are empty, and the game did crash a couple of times. The other thing is that the Alpha only goes up to Teusday. However, this game is still in it's alpha form and it can only grow and get mor epolished from here (hopefully). So after putting in a little over 13 hours into the game and I can say that this is a pretty damn fun game. I cannot wait until more of the game is released and the bugs and other things are polished. 8 out of 10