You play as a content monitor for an interesting mash of early internet communities before true social media. The premise that you are a voluntary monitor (think of yourself as a human adsense) directs you around the lovely crafted hypnospace even to communities that wouldn't interest you at first glance. The UI and graphics are simply stunning and thankfully lacking in popular memes which would take you out of the experience. You only need to know how to navigate a webpage to enjoy this game. Also "Hot Dad" lends his amusing musical talents for a couple tracks (playable in your own desktop version of RealPlayer/Winamp).
Alright so let me preface this review by sayingmy backgrounds in the world of darkness extend to the PC game VtM: Bloodlines. I felt that bloodlines treated the soucre material with respect while not stealing whole heartedly and including terrible ideas from the pen and paper games. That game was a great rpg, and blah blah blah. Anyway onto this redemption. This game came out in 2000 so i'll cut it slack in some places. First off this looks like a playstation era game, with models using always clenched fists, passable voice-syncing, and CGI cut scenes and sorta look like in game but not really. But this is fine, this came out around Deus Ex which shares a few of the graphical short falls. While voice-syncing is passable the voice acting is painful. The game takes place in the crusades (which i don't really remember taking place in Prague but okay) and everyone talks in "Old English" (tm) with nuns going "thee and thy, milord" its incredibly bad combined with the terminology of the World of Darkness (Cainites, Zombu, etc). Bloodlines eased you into this instead of giving you text dumps on unimportant names of lesser creatures you never meet. I guess the game jumps forever to present day New York at some point but the Crusade section is taking forever. Alright gameplay and the like. The UI takes up a good 1/4th of the screen. You have 4 character screens and the least helpful map i've ever seen. Oh and inventory tetris is back, this is manageable if the inventory takes up the whole screen but apparently it takes up the same amount of space as the UI. At least you can switch between party members with your inventories. Okay the most glaring flaws I suppose. This game wastes its source material, you get to play as a Brujah...thats it. Remember that PnP game Vampire where the draw of it was 10 or so unique vampire clans? Welp your brujah one of the more boring clans. It's not even an RPG. Its got all the things there for an RPG (A boring mine, a bunch of giant rats, swords) but none of the RPG elements, well except inventory management. Branching dialogue? Well, heres an example: A bishop told me to patrol the town at night, here are my options "I Agree" or "I Agree but I'm going to watch the church too". What? This is awful, i'm 2 hours into the game and their are no side quests? What is role-playing about this? Lastly The gameplay, forget the keyboard, everything is done with the mouse. click on a place to move awkwardly and get stuck on geometry, click an enemy to hit them once (yeah you gotta click a whole bunch). Left click to use spells and potions. Oh and the camera is stuck at this weird angle where you can only see the boring ground and 2 ft of a building, even though from some of the cut scenes the architecture looks pretty good on the church roof and such. In short this game is pretty bad, if you must play a vampire game, go deal with bloodlines whose's only flaw is the worst sewer level ever designed by man. Don't buy this unless its less then $5, even $6 feels like a waste of a dollar.
So underneath all the wackiness this feels like a bad FPS game mostly in the level design department. It doesn't matter if your in the post office, the butcher shop, the fireworks factory, everything hallway after hallway excluding the town which is just a hub between levels. Despite that you get alot of wacky weapons and power-ups (cat nip slows down time, and cats themselves make nifty silencers) and you can do pretty much anything to the town's people (light them on fire, pee on them, i'm sure there's other stuff) You're really limited to those activities. The "story" missions are straight foward either run through the hallway factory which is on fire...oh I mean the library/whatever building or wait in a line for 10 min or kill everyone before you. Thats pretty much the whole game, most of the madness will be spent in between missions in the town as you come up with ways to horrify and upset the town's people and local authorities. But that in itself is fun, I can't think of many games that allow you to do that with the variety of wacky weapons in postal. Oh I guess you get the expansion but it's not all that great. No more free roaming, just mission after mission. (To be fair they cranked up the wackiness with zombies and gary colemen things) through some more hallways. But that wasn't the fun of postal. So it's worth the 10 bucks i guess more like 6 but add 4 to that because GoG made it compatible with everything.
