Between the overly linear gameplay and the hideous crash bugs this one had potential and then just fell terribly short.
You once again assume the role of “The Postal Dude” (real full name) this time after the 5 days of events in Postal 2. He wakes up in the hospital with a severe head injury. He already has get well cards…all from debt collectors informing him that if he doesn’t pay up they’re going to repossess his trailer and euthanize his dog. He also gets one from his wife telling him he can die. Anyway, wasting no time (and this includes no time for recovery) he begins trying to score himself some cash. He sees a bulletin outside his room advertising top dollar for “Semen Research Specimens”. On his way to jerk-off and collect for it he’s blind-sided by hallucinations resulting from his head trauma. Now he’s in this screwed up, acid-trip-esque version of reality being attacked by midgets who scream like the Al-Qaeda women from P2 and have cow heads and others that just look and sound suspiciously like Gary Coleman. He eventually gets in touch with Vince and a few other guys from Running With Scissors (the company responsible for the game) and he has to work for them. To quote Dr. Evil, “Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight”. Blah, Blah, Blah, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda eventually the world ends for Paradise Arizona when he has to pull off a marketing gimmick for RWS’s new publishing venture and he decides to nuke RWS’s old publisher.
This game has a few enjoyable aspects. One group of them has to be any missions with the counter involved. Allow me to explain: Certain missions have a kill-limit in which you must kill “X” number of enemies in order to proceed. These include the Mad-Cow Zombies with Tourette Syndrome, Elephants, and Diseased cows. These missions are pretty fun. The zombies can only be defeated if you destroy the heads. Shotguns are nice here. Either way, you get to kill cows with a “Government Approved Sledgehammer” which you can lodge in the cow’s anus…once again we go back to the quote from Dr. Evil. And you have to kill elephants with a scythe so some nimrod can make souvenir elephant foot trash cans.. You have to kill a certain number of cows or zombies or elephants before you can proceed. For the most part these are fun. However, there are far too few of them.
Another high point is probably the new weapons. Eventually you score a bio-weapon in the form of a rocket launcher but I prefer the sledgehammer and the edged melee weapons. These are the scythe and the machete. These have the power to decapitate, sever limbs, and in the case of the scythe it can physically cut rivals in half. Nice touches.
Now for everything wrong with the game.
First off, I couldn’t play it for more than an hour straight without some sort of devastating crash. They blame the UT engine for the crashes but honestly, if you use it right it doesn’t crash. This game should have spent another week in testing. Seriously, the credits for the game are one screen…and it isn’t even a crowded screen. One of the testers was the guy in charge of marketing. Anyway. The constant crashes (and no patch to fix them) is slightly more than irritating. They also compensate for their horrid collision detection by adding this very gimmicky “Looks like you’re stuck” “There you go, now stay outta that spot!” message which moves you from your stuck place to a free location nearby (although once in the dog pound level it took me from the basement to the ground floor). The need for this gimmicky quick fix comes around much too often.
Next up let’s look at the AI…now I expect the zombies to be brain-dead morons who just attack until they’re killed but they’re all stupid. They use Molotov Cocktails in very confined spaces (killing themselves and several other AI characters), rocket launchers at point blank range, and grenades when you’re standing right on top of them. The only thing increasing the difficulty does is makes them even more trigger happy and gives more of them guns.
The sound in this game is also a big let down. They did a decent job with the Tourettes zombies but how hard is it to make an evil voice spew a handful of pointless obscenities? The zombies throw bile at you and when it strikes something it sounds the same as stray bullets hitting walls. Sledgehammers dropping on any surface is very muddled but sounds like dropping a piece of plate steel on a metal grate. When you bash the diseased cows’ heads in the chunks hitting the ground also sound like stray gunfire hitting something. They really lost it on the sound quality. Even Dude’s cell phone ringer is just one of the noises from the arcade in Postal 2. Some of the V.O.’s are ok but some of them are just bad. I don’t know if they were doing this to make fun of the characters or not but there is only one female voice actor this time around and she has one very short line in the first 3 minutes of the game. Any other female voice is just one of the production staff talking in a very shrill voice. Also, the head of RWS makes a cameo appearance in the game. He is in a video where he basically just screams obscenities into his office phone, cell phone, and at an employee while he tells him they don’t have to budget to include missions that the staff apparently really wanted in the game.
And now my biggest gripe. This game cost me just shy of $20 dollars. This game isn’t worth $5. The game can’t be more than 8 hours worth of play time (24 if you’re like me and play it till it crashes a few times, get mad at it, play something else for several hours, go to bed, and try to play it again). Seriously, this game crashed 9 times on me the first time I played through it. I tried it again tonight and it ALMOST held on. Then, towards the end it crashed and burned. Luckily I saw it coming and saved roughly 3 minutes before it happened.
Now this isn’t just hateful bashing brought on by someone who didn’t like Postal 2 to begin with...I have a review for that one submitted too. I was very generous with it and praised it. This game just seems to be a cry for attention. They seemed to **** the ingenuity and originality displayed in Postal 2 for this “Let’s try to piss everyone off and be cool” attitude instead of trying to make another respectable game.