POSTAL is a horror game where you are the horror. It serves as a deconstruction of the moral debate on violence in video games. This is the game many anti-video game protesters like Jack Thompson, Joe Lieberman, and Hillary Clinton keep stereotyping all video games as, if it didn't have a terrifying story and a deconstructionist theme around the gameplay. This is a game where you massacre as many people, including innocent civilians, then move on to the next level to do the same. However, the pained screams of your victims, the ruined locations, the corpses piling up, the unnerving atmospheric sounds, and the terrifying loading screen music, all serve to make you feel wrong about going on genocide crusades. You play as the Postal Dude, who has a much darker personality in this game than later, more comedic entries in the POSTAL franchise. You follow the Postal Dude as he is having delusions of a plague making people violent with him having illusions of putting them out of their misery. But just listening to their screams makes you realise that you are wrong, but not the character you are playing as. The gameplay itself is a simple twin-stick shooter, but the tank controls in the original release were terrible. However, playing with a console controller or KB+M with the modern control scheme is much better. The game has a "2D background, 3D foreground" style to it similar to the PS1 Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games and it looks good here. The low-poly character models are unimpressive even for the time but the hand-painted backgrounds look appropriately gritty and are great works of art. The music and sound design are phenomenal and serve to make the game feel even more unnerving. The lack of music in actual gameplay just enhances the tone. This is an easy recommendation but I would recommend getting POSTAL Redux, a full remake with improved gameplay and visuals, as well as a lot of added features. This is still good for curiousity's sake, though.
This is one of the best fan remake/mods I have ever played and Caustic Creative deserves all the official support that Square Enix gave them. Fans have made the ultimate version of Deus Ex and I easily prefer Revision over vanilla now. The game has more depth, restored content (including features that the original dev team wanted to implement but could not) and improved graphics. You can even play this game with the new maps and updated graphics but vanilla gameplay, essentially making it Deus Ex: Master Quest. The revised maps may take some getting used to and some of the newer mechanics but it's still a great experience and an improvement to one of the best games ever made. The newer maps have many interesting things in them and they make for an all-new experience with surprises for Deus Ex fans. The updated OpenAL 3D audio is also phenomenal, it makes this already immersive game even more immersive. And while the updated DirectX 9 and OpenGL renderers are good, you can install DirectX 10 and 11 renderers to crank the graphics up to 11, and it looks fantastic, like playing Deus Ex with RTX On. It is still playable (albeit low-framerate) on my low-end Ryzen 5 3400G + Radeon Vega 11 iGPU PC and with mid-range PCs with discrete graphics, you can get those beautifully upgraded graphics with very little impact to performance. That said, I would have two suggestions for Caustic Creative to further improve the experience, fully make vanilla Deus Ex obsolete without Revision, and bring Revision closer to perfection: Number one: I would want the option to play with the original retail maps at the start of a new game rather than being forced to play with the Revision maps, here are the fixed retail maps: https://www.dxm.be/navigator.php5?lang=en&content=202 Number two: The Helios Texture Overhaul mod has really great-looking textures that may be even better than New Vision and HDTP, and can still work alongside them: https://www.moddb.com/mods/helios-texture-overhaul
Why would you remove the 3D audio in this game? It could've been re-implemented in OpenAL like with System Shock 2 or had both DSOAL and A3D-ALchemy in the installation and let a native installation of OpenAL do the rest.
