izigame.me

In 2024, after so many updates, this thing should be solid already - especially at the price the game is sold for.
But it isn't.
On Wensday missions the game started to repeatedly crash... I really wanted to like this game and I was ready to forgive a lot, but the repeated crashing pushed me to write this review :(
Visually it's crap :)
RWS made it cartoony, with cell-shading filter to enchance that effect. IMO - it just doesn't work here and here's why:
Assets don't have any consistent style. They're gathered from multiple packs from different authors.
RWS didn't even bother to (at least) re-texture these assets to make them a bit more original and coherent with each other.
One second you see hand-drawn cartoony textures, few steps later you see photo-sourced realistic materials - no amount of cell-shading can mask that.
I have nothing against using assets from stores, but - if you sell the game for a higher price - at least make the bare minimum of adjusting them to fit the project you're making.

And honestly - I just don't like that overly saturated colorful look, it reminds me of the worst corporate design trends from the last decade mixed into one (toilet)bowl.
Postal 2 wasn't the prettiest game in town, but at least it was coherent with it's style (and it had it's own style to begin with). It had a very disturbing, eerie atmosphere - and it was normalizing this eerie-ness to the point where it would feel 'normal' in the game's world. Kinda like patology is 'normal' in patological family ;p.
Postal 4 fails to create any atmosphere at all, a lot of the time it just looks like series of random asset-pack presentations ;p
There's a whole bag of bugs and problems waiting for you. You will get stuck driving the e-scooter, you will get ragdolled into outer space because of the crappy physics, you will see t-posing NPCs screaming at you, broken non-moving cats in the cat mission, glitching buggy minimap that doesn't react to your clicking, objects without collisions, objects with too large or too small or misplaced collision, invisilble collisions without objects, things floating 2 feet above the ground, things clipping through each other, textures that were tiled incorrectly, sometimes script-triggers won't trigger etc etc etc.... Ah, and crashing - don't forget about crashing :)

Alot of these things aren't even 'technical problems' - it's just plain old lazy, low effort crap RWS left in there... counting that people will just ignore it? Because it's so edgy and quirky aye? XD

The game's world and story is... surprisingly shallow? Here's why;
RWS probably thought that making the city bigger will automaticlly make this game better... but it's actually the opposite ;p
City is too big. Too big for what it offers, obviously. It's actually smaller than many open-world cities, it just feels too big, cuz there's not much to do or to see. Not much interactivity, not much initiative to explore. People barely react to you, seems like they have simpler AI than in Postal 2. No dirvable cars, no cars riding on the road, obviously. It makes the whole thing feel so fake. Why even bother with making all these long roads and wide streets, when you don't have skills and/or resources to put cars on them? lol
And yeah, there's also no cars in Postal 2 - but there, the whole world is designed around the player walking on foot - hubs are much smaller and densly packed. In P4 it just looks fake, empty and unfinished.
Instead of cars we have e-scooters, something similar to segways from Postal 3, which is ironic, because RWS distanced themselves from Postal 3 every chance they had, yet they made the same thing here.
So in general, there's just no fun in free-roaming around the city, travelling from mission to mission is just a boring necessity, artificially stretching the game's time.
So what about these missions then? They're... umm... functional :)
Basicly every mission is - do something x times, find/destroy x things etc. Then bunch of enemies will respawn around you, and you need to deal with them when escaping the area.
It was similar in Postal 2, but worked much better, because missions were somewhat grounded in the dude's life, somewhat believable - you go to do some errands just like normal human being would and THEN - when you do the normal errand, which is just a part of the dude's normal life - something unexpected happens to you. It makes it easier to empathise with the dude - he tries to have a somewhat normal life but weird stuff happens to him on the way.
Here it looks and feels like a low-budget theater of absurd. Missions don't feel grounded in the game's reality, it feels more like somebody in RWS had a whim and decided to insert something in there to fill-up the space. All of it feels as random as scrolling memes on the internet. Hard to get invested in this story, because it doesn't feel like a story to begin with. Just bunch of loose ideas that just 'happen' bc the game needs things to happen, right?
But what about the toilet humor?
Well, there's a lots of toilets in here, but I'm not so sure about the 'humor'.
Yeah - the game has a truckload of feces (literally), to the point where it becomes the core part of some missions. Clean up X amount of BIG POOP. Ok, but where's the punchline? Where's the joke?
It seems like the game doesn't really know what to do with all that fecal matter. So it's just there and... that's it. The whole 'humor' is just a large amounts of excrement exising in the game.
Same with sex-toys. They are in game... in large amounts... and... that's it. lol
The whole thing just lacks some real impact, some punchline, some actual joke? - anything that would make you care about all of this. Right now it looks like they added poop and sex-toys to the game, not becasue they had some ideas for jokes about it, but because the game is called 'Postal' and it has to check some boxes.
So here we go: poop=check, sex-toys=check.
The game's writing is pretty much trash too.
Dialouges try so hard to be edgy... but imo it just feels like some burned-out old dude tried to imitate the 'style' of teenagers. Just like the city - dialouges are too long, stretched-out nothingburgers. Characters talk a lot, without saying much of anything, barely any jokes or punchlines. And it's not like the plot needs lots of explaining. Nope. It's a very simple, mostly self-explanatory, which should leave a lot of space for memorable characters, interactions between them and lots of jokes :)
But RWS just fills-up that space with truckload of nothingburgers.
Remember these awful ads pretending to be memes, made by big corporations to promote their products? This game's writing gives off very similar vibes.
We have references to many pop culture things. But - just like with poop or sex-toys - they're just there, just for the sake of it. Postal 4 brings up a reference to something and... does basicly nothing with it. It just comes and goes, it seems like RWS was unable to bring anything to the table creatively. Again - no jokes, no punchlines, just a reference to something random mixed in some random place. Meh...
Gameplay is... well better than in Postal2 :) Shooting feels more refined, balanced better and enemies aren't as bulletspongey.
Also the new weapon-circle hud is pretty good and intuitive.
Unfortunately, RWS lacks the skill to design scripted fps levels, so when combat situation happens, you're pushed through the linear section that consists of copy-pasted boring corridors, with few boxes here and there. Enemies will pour out from their spawn points and run at you randomly.
It's just so boring.
C'mon RWS haven't you played any fps games in last 20 years? Can't you just copy paste from somebody more competent? XD
It's just sad, I'm not even mad, just dissapointed.