Gameplay improvements and the included multiplayer support do little to make Postal 2 more than a mediocre game.
For the uninitiated, Postal 2 is the successor to 1997‘s Postal, which was an exhibition of violence and death and caused so much media attention that it helped pave the way for more adult-themed games to get into the mainstream like the GTA series and going as far as to be banned from most large retailers. Postal 2: Share the Pain is somewhat of a special edition of the original Postal 2 which was criticized for poor design, horrible load times, and general mediocrity all together. Despite these flaws and the ho-hum reviews given, the game still did well and went as far as appearing in a music video for the Black Eyed Peas.
The premise is this, you play the part of Postal Dude (yes, that's his real name), a resident of Paradise , Arizona . You follow him throughout the course of a week as he performs such menial tasks such as buying milk, returning an overdue library book, or getting checked for VD. Along the way, Postal Dude will get thrown into life or death situations with anti-violence activists, middle easterners, book burners and your stereotypical rednecks. As a matter of fact, the entire game plays off of stereotypes, from Habib the middle-eastern grocery store clerk to the aforementioned rednecks and turban wearing Muslims. The way the game pulls these off can be tasteless and even offensive at times and is not recommended for those who are offended at things like this. After skirmishes with these groups, they'll jump at the chance to open fire on you in the street. Furthermore, the game is wrought with a lot of toilet humor which some may not find funny at all. You might see some amusing things written on walls or said by people in the city, but depending on your level of humor, these could be few and far between. The game takes a queue from the GTA series and puts you into a living, breathing town with pedestrians and animals walking around seemingly going about their daily lives. By seemingly, I mean walking around aimlessly and having unintelligible conversations with other pedestrians. All are practically begging for your punishment as you go about performing your daily duties.
The game is played from a first person perspective. You control your character with the standard W, A, S, D control scheme. Unlike GTA, you're only able to make your way across town on foot, while cars are parked on the sides of streets but they only serve as nothing more than exploding props. You'll have nine weapons at your disposal, including batons, shovels, pistols, gas can / matches, shotguns, machine guns, scissors, rocket launchers, and the always popular diseased cow head. Unfortunately, Share the Pain doesn't add any new weapons in the mix. That doesn't mean the current weapons aren't sufficient, it's that some new weapons would be nice with the addition of the multiplayer modes. You do have the option to make one limited enhancement to your weapons, you can stick cats on the end of a shotgun to act as a noise suppressor and scissors can now bounce off of the walls like the razor gun in Unreal Tournament. Share the Pain also boasts new game play fixes, and this seems to be true. Load times have decreased somewhat and you don't seem to get stuck into as many objects anymore. There still seems to be issues with scripts, so be prepared to save before you wait in a line because if you cut, the script will break and you'll have to load your game and try again, which seems to go against the freedom the game touts. This goes along with the game's questionable AI. You can befriend dogs and have them follow you around and attack people or have them play catch with a severed head, while this is cool, the same can't be said for the human AI, which seems to have gotten worse with this release. You'll frequently see people stuck walking into walls, refusing to run away when they're hit with a shovel – opting to cower in front of you, and breaking the aforementioned scripts by mindlessly walking and getting stuck in people waiting in line. The latter scenario can be maddening after the third try. Once is okay, twice is ridiculous, but three times in unacceptable.
Rounding out the list of additions to this release are a couple of new areas for the player to explore. The mall now has a food court and some air vents to crawl through, and the Tora Bora mountains.
The new multiplayer component (which was promised as a free add-on after the original game's release) doesn't bring anything new to the table. You have your standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and snatch – Share the Pain's version of capture the flag where you'll have to capture the enemy team's woman and piggy back her back to your base. In deathmatch, you have a limited choice of skins to choose from while in snatch, you're assigned to a team consisting of cops, robbers, postal dudes, clergy, etc. Once the game starts, you're given a hint that three shots to the head will be enough to put down any foes and the game starts. The multiplayer levels don't offer much in terms of variety as they are original and / or modified areas seen in the single player game and don't offer much in terms of variety or fun at all.
Share the Pain isn't too much of a graphical power house despite being powered by the Unreal engine. Environments in the game are passable; while outdoor areas generally look good, they look more like a movie set and lack the openness of the GTA games. Indoor environments suffer though, sporting nothing more than randomly placed book cases, tables, and some arcade games. Walls, floors, and ceilings all feature boring, blurry textures and don't offer much aural excitement at all. Once you've seen one house or office, you've seen them all. You will see some locations that offer something different like a pool table, but those are sparse. Don't expect to see many, if any fancy lighting effects or particles either; even with all of the settings turned up the game doesn't come close to pushing the engine that's powering it.
Sound is standard fare. Pedestrians, as well as Postal Dude have a small variety of catch phrases and dialog, and normally the voice acting is pretty good (an exception would be producer Vince Desi as the multiplayer announcer, how tasteless is that?). A lot of people complained about Postal Dude's “DJ” voice, but it can be amusing as he's running down the list of what he has to do for the day or when he's trying to get people to sign his petition on Tuesday. Weapons all sound decent, especially the shovel which gives a satisfying “ting” sound when a head is severed, and resulting explosions all sound good.
All-in-all, Postal 2: Share the Pain is an improvement over its predecessor in terms of game play fixes. The addition of multiplayer support is welcome, but would have been better off as the free add-on as was promised instead of making people who previously purchased the game buy a new product, especially since the multiplayer support doesn't offer anything new or really exciting. At points, Postal 2 seems like it's being offensive just for the sake of doing so. Some might even think its games like this that are setting the industry back and keeping it from being taken seriously in the eyes of politicians. If you love low brow humor and have never heard of the Postal series, or want to see what all the hype is about, this is the version you'd want to pick up. There is some semblance of a solid game play experience in there. Still, these improvements and the included multiplayer support do little to make Postal 2 more than a mediocre game.