NOT RECOMMENDED. This game in one word: DULL. Because all you do is kill mindless amounts of identical enemy crafts. The gameplay is so superficial that an average players get bored of it in an hour or two. It is very telling that the all players average is 3h 12min for a supposedly 30 h game. It drags on too long and the gameplay keeps getting worse rather than better. The dialogue gets much more fillery and boring after the PITA section and game design flaws start to become more frequent. E.g. suggesting the weakly-armed, stealth R-crafts for the battle-heavy missions with no stealth elements. The Lighthouse one is so blatantly broken it's not funny: if you choose to side with one side, the next mission is an automatic Mission Failure. The main plot is very weak "seek the random person you randomly met for the rest of the game while doing obvious filler missions." Oh, there is the fun part that wastes a lot of time: useless mission infos (read: you have no idea what to do when the target waypoint is not there) and no mission checkpoints or saving. Some of the missions are also perfection-only e.g. the races, meaning that you need to have the exact setup and also make zero mistakes, to be able to beat them even on the lowest difficulty. This also applies to some of the longer missions. Have fun uselessly wasting your time with it. I guess that is "fun" to some people.
ONLY FOR THE RACING GAME CROWD. THE CASUAL FUN ENDS WITH THE FIRST NOVICE CUP AND AFTERWARDS IT IS THE LAZY GAME DESIGN "DRIVE PERFECT OR BE LAST" DEAL. Harder difficulties require you to drive better i.e. faster, which makes the car extremely likely to flip over, instantly making you lose the race. If I was going to drive perfect, I might as well drive real car and actually win something, for the same challenge. With a game with extremely arcade controls, you would think it was more relaxed. The music is nice, I guess. The whole idea of artificial difficulty is to make the lackluster content last longer and to practically try to pad out the gameplay hours by requiring grinding and / or / AKA repetition. I cannot recommend a game, of which 20% of the main content is okay while the rest is figuratively urine-flavored. Technically, it is one of those Glide / 3dfx / Voodoo accelerator card games. Goodluck trying to window this one, probably won't work. Back in the day, these games were marketed 90 % with the accelerated graphics. Today, they look like low-detail-textures with some smudges on them. Nowadays, beginner devs with Unity and no programming skills can create better stuff fast. At this point it has nothing worth remembering left, let alone paying real money for. Get Flatout 1 or 2 instead, no artificial-difficulty padding there. Get FO2 if unsure, that's the more casual-friendly one.
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE TO MESS AROUND, DISCOVERING JOKES IN ADVENTURE GAMES. There is not much goal-wise (very few adventrue games do), though the content is very good and entertaining, at least for once until you forget them and come back to refresh years later. E.g. the barn scenes are pretty solid. The humour is not exactly of the "most hilarious" type, more like "superbly written" one and a bit on the drier side. All in all, if you like the 1990s adventure games, you will like this one. It has a surprisingly lot of content, considering that it got cut in half because of animation delays. The whole idea of the game is to interact with everything to cause interesting comments or actions to happen. E.g. there apparently is a 'hole' item (that is completely optional) that you can use on various plotholes. For comparison, Full Throttle had barely any extra dialogue and not many consider it short or minimal in content, despite the game length of about two hours. Someone mentioned sound cutting out and other technical issues. I tested it and found nothing like that. It ran perfectly on a 64-bit Win 10 laptop system using mostly 2019 Intel hardware. The game runs with ScummVM.
RECOMMENDED ONLY IF YOU ARE OKAY WITH A CONTENT-SPARSE, SHORT TIME-WASTER OF FEW GAMEPLAY HOURS. The overall gameplay feel is that you make a couple tweaks here and there and mostly let the game SLOWLY play itself while you watch. It gets very already-seen / deja vu after just a couple of missions. Still, most mobile games are like that due to the exclusive touchscreen control scheme. If you are into RTS or strats w/ any complexity, BUY ANY OTHER GAME. Curbing your expectations is essential when you come from desktop to mobile software - it's not going to be anywhere that good. If you really like games and are really into it, you probably get much more depth and satisfaction out of even the crappiest 1990s RTSes than this one. It may be even the cream of the crop on mobile, yet it is still worse than a lot free stuff out there. FreeCiv, FreeCol, FreeYourMomsBasement, etc. The fact is that all they seemed to change with the port is switching the touch screen controls with mouse ones. They do work without isssues AFAIK, though. For context, the missions are about 10 to 20 minutes long. 12 missions plus some Art of War AKA trial / challenge mode for few extra scenarios. The music is surprisingly decent, though not memorable. To summarize, it is a simple tower-defense-in-reverse game despite detailed, pre-rendered graphics. It does not introduce anything new or special and focuses on the (visual) polish. Expect shallow, bite-sized gameplay chunks and you will not be surprised in any way.
AVOID LIKE A PLAGUE. DOES NOT WORK ON INTEL GPUS AND HAS REMAINED UNFIXED FOR 15 YEARS. IT IS CHEAP BECAUSE IT SUCKS. NONE OF THE PATCHES FIX ANYTHING. A -1/5 technical garbage-fire and ripping off of Microprose's creations. Used to have the system-killing Starforce copyprotection crap to ultimately prove how much it was about money instead of creating something unique and worth playing. BTW, zero guides how to get the wine going. No, does not work outta box, had to guess cmdline options. (OOtB: THE CMDSStream error.) Review over. The rest is to help the fellow scammed men to get it to work on Linux. Here are the steps. 0. Download and extract a custom, non-numbered widescreen patch zip (unless you want to play with a F'd-up, 50%-of-the-right-side-missing screen). 1. Download Lubuntu 20.04 and burn it on a 8+ GB USB stick with Rufus (MBR+BIOS settings req.). 2. Set BIOS (smash F* keys or DEL to get theere) to disable Secure BOOT, enable possible Legacy BIOS and ACPI modes and enable CSM. Then boot with your USB stick. 3. Select to start without installing (any changed data will not be saved on the stick). 4. Install wine32 and winetricks. 5. Use 'sudo winetricks' to install "windows components" and select 'dsound' and 'directmusic' and to change the sound to 'alsa'. 6. Get the UFO.exe of the selected res into the game dir. 7. Go open your UFO's hard drive (opening it automounts it, very important). Then modify and apply the following cmd to run Aftershack: sudo wine /media/lubuntu/[hard_disk_partition/path/to/UFO_dir/UFO_720p.exe --options multisample=4 anisotropy=8 loadall=FALSE video_caption=TRUE loadall=FALSE nointro=TRUE fullscreen=FALSE nointro=TRUE nosound=FALSE (No sound without 'sudo' even with sound on, weird.) Change to: nosound=TRUE if it fails to find a sound system. At least it plays then. F the devs for not fixing all this. P.S. Gameplay-wise: MUCH WORSE than Aftermath. Early Difficulty Spiking Broken Pathfinding Feature Creep Busywork etc.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It takes some XCOM elements while failing to make them fun or incorporating in a fresh way. The Biomass thing is stupid AF. Worse than UFO Defense with the overall lack of new content alone. The plot is extremely weak and stupid. Every single mission is the same. One enemy with paralysis / MC can ruin your game FAST. 3/5 as an XCOM game, 2/5 without the franchise sympathy. Also repetitive. And repetitive. And r... Gameplay: Pseudo-real-time without any real-time unit AI - you still have to micromanage your dudes for them to do anything, including returning fire. Repetitive, identicial missions that you play hundreds of during a single playthrough. Once the difficulty jumps happen, the game gets gruesomely more difficult, even if you play on Easy: 1. when the second tier Transgenants happen, 2. when aliens appear and 3. when aliens start carrying Psi weapons and heavy-damage plasma guns or worse. The more difficult the game gets, the slower and the more boring it gets (you always get heavily punished for being daring). Some of the missions start you surrounded by tons of enemies that will paralyze and / or mind-control you before you can do anything, provided that you are not dead already. Oh yeah, the game likes killing you. Especially when you are crippled w/ weapon supplies such as not being able to make any human or the hybrid alien munitions. If you are not a casual player, DON'T. You will not like the game even with cheats. Even with cheats it's tons of work, which is not good in a game. It is stuck with the tabletop RPG setting with maps and weapon damage calculations. Try the new XCOM games instead. You need some serious nerd's curse and full-fledged autism to complete a single 50h playthrough. It's hundreds of mostly identical maps and units, killing thousands of enemies (for no real gain) and grinding through the finish line at outside-Earth location ripped from the original UFO Defense. This game has no soul of its own. Zero.
CAVEAT EMPTOR. If you like new games' design style where you don't have to fail the mission (and endure the long-ass loading times every time) a dozen times just to figure out what you are supposed to do, you are not going to like this. The unit AI is very random: sometimes they react to enemies behind them, sometimes they won't shoot at an enemy directly in front of them. This is a kind of game that requires a high tolerance level for annoyance and repetition (read: grinding, a common Russian game trope). It relies on the superior-opposition type of unfair challenge (mostly massive numbers of enemies) and other obsoleted game design tricks. You have been warned. The gameplay is mostly about commanding troop squads. The problem is that the controls for doing so are terrible. You are constantly wrestling with the controls if you try to manage even three (3) squads. Anything above that is not manageable. There are a lot of quirks with even basic movement commands that make the whole process a gigantic micromanagementfest. E.g. whenever you command a troop to move, it will often reset back to the standing posture, which is suicide on the battlefield. Even this quirk has a sub-quirk, because sometimes it instead keeps the posture for no reason. Hence the need for constant monitoring and management. The biggest issue with the squads is simple: vehicles. Vehicle MGs shred a squad member INSTANTLY. Maybe realistic, though not fun. Expect a lot of save-scumming because of this. The game likes to spawn new vehicles BECUZ CHALLENZ. The mission design is not very good for what I have seen. It relies on player having to defeat huge numbers of enemies even in the early maps, greatly nullifying the satisfaction for each individual kill. Also, the weapon drops are random, meaning you can get RNG'd hard in the A bc you need those explosives to defeat the tanks and heavily armed troops the maps are full of. Second mission makes you waith an hour and 3rd is an insta-fail mess.
RECOMMENDED, though prepare for the plethora of repeated tracks, racing positions as the sole progress qualifier and dodgy track design with e.g. objects blocking the vision of the road and collision hazards. Generally it is an improved over the prequel, where one bad collision could break your car to the point of losing you the race and generally you were heavily punished for risky i.e. fun driving. Here, the cars are much more durable and it is much easier to beneficially collide with other cars. Content-wise, it has the same problems such as tracks that feel the same and the cryptic bonus modes where you mostly waste time earning nothing while trying to figure out what and how little exactly the devs were thinking when they implemented those segments. Unless you time your actions in a very specific way or play keep-away in derbies while making specific types of collisions, you are not going to gain anything for your efforts. Graphics: pretty solid and generally runs without choking. Sound: the soft rock is slightly better than in the prequel, though still something you probably want to mute. The car sounds, likewise. Put some music or sth on the background if you want to listen to sth. Gameplay: driving is okay, though it has the same annoying wobbliness (the side-to-side thing) and crash-happy jumping physics as most Codemasters driving games. In an arcade-y one where you are absolutely forced to drive very fast i.e. constantly over 100 km per hour, it is not fun to constantly wrestle with the car, trying to keep it close to the road, with bush-hidden rocks and make-shift ramps to mess you up. Messing up is really annoying, as generally two collisions in a row is enough to drop you from the first place to the last. Even with all handling upgrades, the problem still persists. You cannot really take in possible road hazards because a slight slack in handling focus is enough to crash you to the side of the road.
In short: ONLY FOR HARDCORE FANS. It does not try to add in anything new and instead mixes together elements from past Postal 1 and 2 games, turning it into a mess. It has five days, though clearly the production values are much lower than with the original base game. Basically, outside boss fights and cinematics, there is very little new content such as witty pedestrian comments. The game tries to retrace the places from the original P2, though it feels horribly stale and deja vu. Also the game engine is much more crash-prone here than in the OG, especially on the last, fifth day, especially when loading a game outside the main menu. A lot of content is recycled from P2. There is nothing new here. Same places, usually with a slight twist. E.g. Uncle Dave now has greenhouses for the herb-pruning task. Overall, this feels like a half-hearted expansion that rides to re-milk the original game's content. (The biggest original section in it is a cow-milking sub-game. If you already expected Mad Cow Disease references, THAT is how lame the "NEW" content and humor is. NOT. FUNNY. IN THE SLIGHTEST.) Especially the days in the middle are mostly filler and Dude even mentions it during a cinematic scene.
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).
