izigame.me

in my two decades of gaming, this is the first title to give me motion sickness. i really wanted to like postal 4, and running with scissors have proven that they take a lot of pride in their work, but they're still chipping away at sorely-needed optimization improvements years after release. to date, the framerate is choppy and constantly has migraine-inducing palpitations, like the heart of an average american. performance issues aside, there's a level of inspiration that just feels lacking here compared to the game's predecessor, postal 2. a few points of comparison:
postal 2 had a vast weapon selection to experiment with and visit all sorts of harm on people. in postal 4, the arsenal doesn't get much more exciting than the utilitarian workhorse weapons and a couple of dismemberment-capable melee weapons. even then, this game's dismemberment is very limited, and you'll barely be able to begin torturing a pedestrian before the light passes from its eyes.
postal 4's story follows the same formula as postal 2, but otherwise has little to no connection with previous events. al-qaeda, perhaps the most thoroughly-developed faction in postal 2 and 3, are conspicuously absent here. RWS staff Mike J & Vince Desi once again appear as themselves, but their self-inserts explicitly lack continuity with their postal 2 counterparts. the game might as well be another coma dream, for how few plot threads persist from Paradise Lost. returning the world of postal to the status quo isn't a bad idea, but postal 4 makes the same mistake as postal 3 in sweeping postal 2's events under the rug as quickly and conveniently as possible to roll back what little character development and worldbuilding the series has had.
postal 2's side content relied on creative scripted sequences that invited the player to step in with whatever sort of violence one pleased. the tora bora raid is one of the game's longest and most unique shootout sequences, explains the extreme taliban presence in town, and goes completely unmarked as an objective. in postal 4, there are gamey challenges to complete that usually follow a pattern of "use on of in to earn ". also sprinkled around the map are a large amount of collectible krotchy dolls and paintings, which can be redeemed for cosmetics and some other minor rewards. both activities quickly begin to feel like box-checking exercises. i spent most of my playthrough hunting for krotchy dolls, and in the process discovered a fundamental issue with postal 4's resource management system.
in postal 2, resources like health and money pickups only respawn after each ingame day, pushing the player to be increasingly clever with his movement and weapon use as difficulty increases in order to avoid running out of these finite resources. in postal 4, pickups respawn every time a map is loaded. due to all the time i spent collectible hunting, i quickly became so inundated with crack pipes that, despite playing on Very Hard, the highest non-gimmick difficulty setting, enemies could only kill me (and even then they struggled) if i wasn't able to take cover during the full second it now takes to smoke up. ammo is so plentiful (and perhaps bugged) that i finished the game with over 6,000,000 units of gasoline in my gas can despite my efforts to intentionally waste as much as i could on innocent civilians. in addition, postal 4 attempts to nerf the police disguise by introducing a suspicion meter; if the player commits too many crimes while disguised as a cop, the disguise becomes ineffective and the player is no longer protected against earning a wanted level. however, this nerf comes with another infinitely-respawning pickup: the police badge, which, when consumed, immediately clears the player's suspicion meter and wanted level. as a result, the player can cause a "sovereign citizen incident" at the police station, run into someone's house and simply eat a badge to make the cops call off the search for the impostor who just offed 40 officers on their last day before retirement. the effect of all this is that the game inevitably becomes a cakewalk outside of challenge runs.
if you've played Two Weeks in Paradise ad nauseum, you've made it through both Corkscrew Rules & Eternal Damnation and you're still desperate for a new week of postal, postal 4 does have the same gameplay and sense of humor as its predecessor, and it's not a bad choice to pick up at a steep discount, though i'd recommend turning the difficulty way up and playing straight through the main story without going too far out of your way for side content. for my money, though, the third-party spinoff postal: brain damaged feels like a truer successor, with creative, content-dense level design that builds on the same sense of surreal cynicism that inspired postal 1 & 2 in its own way. if you're new to postal, i shouldn't have to tell you that postal 2 is the definitive postal game and an incredibly entertaining game in its own right.