Postal 2

ORIGINAL REVIEW DATE:
2017
 the dude is back, and hes gonna have a SHIT fucking week. go about your daily buisness doing chores for the Dude and all hell breaks loose. this game is an utterly stupid, enjoyable, clusterfuck. the social commentary is actually funny, anti-pc, the gameplay is hilarious and fun and actually can be challenging, shooting mechanics feel like a proper oldschool FPS, the design of the city is not bad and feels freeroam, its fun!

kick someone on the ground, pour gasoline, light match, piss their burnt corpse out. GOTY

7.5/10

 

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

2023 RE-REVIEW, REPLAY 

Postal 2, developed by the infamous (famous?) Running With Scissors is a sequel to their first Postal game where you basically just go around small little top down maps killing as many people as possible in shooting spree rampages. Though, now, Postal 2 is a fully 3D open world sandbox type game thats brimming with personality and edgy dark humour. The game consists of waking up on Monday outside your trailer trash house, your wife telling you to run some arrends, then you take control of Dude and can pull up the map screen at any time to see your location, and the list of objectives and where they are. Its a simple, yet effective and intuitive system. The order you tackle any of the objectives is up to the player, and you can freely roam around this relatively big for the time (2003) open areas connected by loading screens.

The main campaign takes place during Monday to Friday. Each day you get a handful of tasks to complete, always usually seeming inocuous and mundane, stuff like picking up a package, getting milk from the store, return a book, pay parking ticket. But then theres other tasks that are more obviously crazy such as getting Napalm, or going to the clinic because it hurts when you piss. Yes, this game was notorious for a lot of, atleast at the time, insane 'inappropriate' things you could do in a video game. Stuff like pissing all over the place at will, on people, making them puke, pouring gasoline all over them and lighting them on fire (and cats, dogs , animals) and pissing them out. Theres even an arrend in the game where you have to piss on your fathers grave. Back in 2003 edgy dark humor like this was very shocking to see in a game, so much so that the devs themselves programmed a lot of this stuff into the game as almost a giant middle finger to the politics and media at the time which campaigned that violent video games create maniacs. Even the first day of the game has you going to the Running With Scissors headquarters to find it surrounded by angry protestors that are protesting violent video games, only to then barge into the devs headquarters and start shooting up the place. Twisted satire like this is all over the game and Postal 2 is just oozing with personality from the guys that worked on it. It doesnt feel like some meaningless corporate product designed to sell as many copies as possible, no, it feels like a bunch of jaded guys working together creating a piece of (sick?) art to offend, mock, satirize, and laugh at everything around them. In a way it reminds me of South Park's style of humor.

It's pretty hard to be bored while playing this game, everywhere you look are hand crafted posters, signs, details all over the place with constant little jokes or plays on words,usually very crude, immature, but with a dark sense of humor about it that all ties together the dreary bleak apocalyptic feeling and atmosphere of the whole world. Theres pedestrians all over the place and an impressive variety of them too, with equally strange designs to them almost like a cynical lense which views the entire human race as silly, trite, and stupid. The game gives off these misanthropic pessimistic vibes all over the place, no one in this game is a "good person" or respectable. Everyone is a joke and an idiot or a stereotype, and its not due to being uncreative but more an artistic design choice to make the world feel nihilistic and so valueless that all you can do is laugh at how stupid everything is. Its great and its not something you see in video games all that often. Running with Scissors personality shines through the whole experience, and I think thats why games like Postal 3 totally failed and miss the mark because it was outsourced to random Russian studio that just couldnt capture the same mood, humour, and atmosphere.

As for the basic gameplay elements: first of all the game has a rediculous amount of difficulties to pick from. There are something like 17 difficulties. The default is 'average' but then it goes onto 'Aggressive' , 'Hard', 'Very hard' 'Manic' "hestonworld' 'Insane-o' etc..etc..etc... I just chose to go about halfway of 17 so it ended up being 'Hard' difficulty that I played on. And frankly the game was still piss easy. If I had one gripe its that the game is too easy, and the difficulty selections dont really help to inform the player or set them up with a proper challenging experience from the get-go. The default difficulty should be way harder. For example, you might think that you should go around just killing everyone you see - but no, thats not really the case here. It's more something like Grand Theft Auto where civillians for the most part will leave you alone until you fuck with them, and if you do then cops come after you. But the thing is, simply running past everyone is way too easy and overpowered. If anyone ever attacks you, or cops are after you, 9 out of 10 times just running away from the encounter will spare you the least health and ammo and its really easy to do, especially since theres loading screen dividers all over the place that instantly despawn enemies. There are a small portion of indoor instances while doing objectives that feel like proper full fledged FPS levels that have a bit of challenge, those were fun, and I did appreciate how on 'Hard' difficulty I did find myself having to scrounce for health and pickups very frequently - something that was quite satisfying because there is an impressive attention to detail in all of the various random houses you can barge into, pickups laying in random places like toilets or sinks, ontop of beds, pizza laying on the kitchen table you can take, armor in the closet, all sorts of wacky items you can collect in your quick-use inventory like Catnip (slowmo), consumables (portable healthkits), Fish-finder (enemy radar type thing),  Cats (that you can put on your weapons as a silencer? i dont really understand the point of the cats to be honest but yeah it looks fucking crazy).  Oh, and cant forget the most important consumable item - Crack pipe. Yep, you can smoke crack in this game and it instantly heals you to over maximum health, but after awhile it starts to randomly hurt you for little bits of damage and your character will talk to himself about how hes addicted and he feels like shit. So naturally I was just smoking crack the whole game, great item.

There is a gigantic selection of weapons too, almost too much. Theres atleast a dozen melee weapons, Machete, axe, chainsaw, hammer, sledgehammer, switchblade, shovel, etc. Multiple pistols, shotgun, Assault rifle, multiple grenade types/rocket launchers - It's a lot, and I probably didnt find it all. Theres sort of an issue with balance here where most of the weapons feel kind of useless or like it was only put in the game for the sake of abundance, but not really if it has a real utility for gameplay. Most of the game I just used the Assault rifle, towards the end of the game I realized the Machete is extremely overpowered, and especially the gore system is really satisfying and slicing off limbs and seeing the AI reactions are quite fun. The world is interconnected and fun to explore, its impressive that a 2003 has a map this big and open world that wasnt the norm. Its rewarding to explore too, even for all the jokes and irony to laugh at. The game has a total of 1 boss fight which is this Krotchy toy guy with a rocket launcher, I guess it was sorta disappointing that theres only really one boss in hindsight.

Really though, the game isnt all that long about 4-6 hours Monday - Friday. Each day only has 3-4 tasks to complete, some of them you dont even encounter enemies. Its cool how some of the tasks you can pay with money at the NPC cashier for example to pay your parking ticket, or you can figure out another way to break into the buildings and complete the objective so I appreciate how its open ended. If I had to complain about anything it would be the lack of overall balance, the incoherent difficulty selections, the lack of challenge on even 'Hard', it can be kind of buggy or rough around the edges especially with some of the AI just not even shooting at you or spawning in front of you, or the cops being way too easy with them constantly saying "Stop or i'll shoot!" and being way too passive about attacking the player, but really Postal 2 is still an iconic, historic game even that ought to be played by basically anyone interested in video games, even for the novelty to demonstrate to them that yes, there are actually developers out there making games with almost scorn for the entire industry and actively mocking video games themselves through their own art, its a sight to behold, and I've been coming back and replaying this game for atleast over a decade now, it was pretty mindblowing when I found out about it all those years ago. like "Woah, I didnt know you were allowed to do THAT in a video game!" This is probably my second or third complete playthrough and I'll probably come back and play again, even just to see someone elses reaction to it.

Of course there are multiple expansions such as Apocalypse Weekend which adds Saturday/Sunday weekend, I beat it once before but Im going to play it again. Theres another expansion Paradise Lost which was released a whopping 15 or something years after the original game and adds a whole new week to deal with and I'll be sure to play that soon too.

8/10

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apocalypse Weekend

Apocalypse Weekend expansion was released 2005, around 2 years after the original game. It continues from where the main game leaves off, featuring the days Saturday & Sunday. The Dude wakes up in the hospital with a sun-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after the ending of the main game,  he survived and now has to do various tasks like for starters making some money from the hospital semen collection offering.

Apocalypse Weekend is a strikingly different design and gameplay style than the original campaign. No more do you have a map you can pull up to check your tasks, now its more these more or less linear back to back levels where you do one task at a time. You cant even check what your current task is, the game is so linear that it has faith that the player will easily stumble into progress. This isnt necessarily a good or bad thing, but it is very different to the open ended nature of the original campaign. There are a few semi-open world areas but its a far-cry from what you can do in the original, its more like a few city streets you can freely roam around at one point, but then the main character will keep saying to himself hes hungry and feels like cheap Chinese food, suggesting to the player thats the task at hand. Other than that, its really straight forward and plays more like a series of Doom levels with lots of indoors areas than some open world game. This expansion has an almost horror vibe at times, the game is almost entirely taking place during night or evening time, since you now have a head wound, youre constantly going through these trippy psychedelic trances where you hallucinate tons of Gary Coleman enemies running around , sometimes with cow heads, lobbing grenades at you or other weird shit. Theres zombies, mad cow disease - it's a lot.

My main gripes with the main campaign was the lack of difficulty, even on Hard. Well, I played Hard as well here, and I no longer have that complaint. For half of the expansion, its pretty damn easy. Especially the zombie sections - they dont pose much of a threat at all, even if you do have to blow their heads up to fully kill them. They walk slowly and dont really do much to the player. Although it is satisfying to blow them apart. Then you have other areas that are almost like MMO type quests where you have to kill X amount of certain type of enemy. At first you have to kill 20 zombies, then its like kill 20 mad cows, then its kill 50 zombies at some big mansion with the developer Vince, yeah these parts werent really challenging or engaging it was more for the stupid spectacle, not bad but not great. A funny highlight of the expansion is after the mansion shootout you get a real life video footage at the developer office of Vince Desi raging at his employees about this and that, and also about how the next objective was supposed to be a Pidgeon hunting area but it was cut due to budget then the game abruptly cuts to an in-game cinematic of the dude saying "That was the best thing ever" with feathers falling all around him - pretty insane and funny fourth wall breaking stuff. Its like the devs dont even really care if theyre making a "shit" game, its more about theyre making what they find enjoyable/funny/silly/cool and dont even care if their fans like it or not, they're just having fun with the whole thing not taking it too serious, I can respect that.

After this part the game takes a huge curveball with the difficulty. It's funny, while my main complaint with the main game may have been its way too easy, I think my main complaint with this expansion is the unbalanced weird difficulty curves. At first its braindead easy, then by the time you get around the giant underground Taliban complex it becomes one of the hardest FPS ever. Like the kind of bullshit quicksave after every single enemy killed type fiasco. The type of "oh fuck ive been at 1hp for the past 30 minutes and I have to constantly quicksave every inch to make progress' type shit. Don't get me wrong, its still really engaging and enjoyable, and it was cool to see Postal have these really linear handcrafted indoors Doom levels with constant balls to the wall FPS action with dozens upon dozens of enemies, crazy new weapons like M79 Grenade Launcher (not sure if new, but havnt found it in main campaign) Sawed Off shotgun (also same thing) , Mini nuke launchers, etc - but the balance and difficulty spikes are insane. Sometimes youll go through 50 or more enemies without a health pickup. It also does the trope where once you finally get to the end of a level, some event happens which forces you to go back through the whole level again in reverse with new enemies/blown up closed off areas etc. Again, not a bad thing, just some of these sections were frustratlingly hard. Its like Postal has a hard time with general game balance and a nice middle ground to keep the player constantly engaged and actively trying to succeed, while not being annoying or frustrating to play with constant quick-loads.

Anyways, the humor here is even more deranged than the base game. You have a part where the rednecks show up towards the end of the expansion where you have to get your dog Champ back except now since these rednecks are obsessed with BDSM and rape, they have hordes of pet dogs and cats wearing BDSM attire, yeah what the fuck. Its messed up but also so absurd its hysterical. Then theres another giant indoors/outdoors military complex that feels like something straight out of Half-Life 1 - indeed, there is even an elevator section that is copied straight out of it. The part where the slanted elevator goes down into that big double doors area, you probably know the place I'm talking about, atleast if you saw footage. They copied that whole vibe, it was a neat little cameo (?). The expansion features multiple CGI cutscenes that as far as I can remember the original game didnt really have, theyre well done and I find myself never wanting to miss a second of any of these Postal cutscenes because the most outrageous / interesting shit happens. There was a lot less of being able to just blindly run past all the enemies in this expansion, there were a few moments where it was more viable to simply run past everyone, most notably a couple outdoors segments where its apocalypse and everyone is fifghting eachother,  also the bridge area with the zombies and military, but other than that its not really viable to run past everyone it actually forces you to use strategy and fight, which I'm glad to see and enjoyed. The expansion has 2 boss fights, something I was glad to see. Atleast I think it was 2, I forget one of them. But the last part is a boss fight against one of the game devs Mike J and hes this weird giant demon cow thing. Unfortunately hes a bit too easy, again with the weird difficulty spikes. Theres floating skulls that go around his head you have to shoot all the skulls then its just a matter of blasting him with everything you got and the game ends just like that, with The Dude and his dog Champ kinda just driving off into the sunset after a nuke explodes. Oh yeah, theres a whole story plot about how the developers Ex-publisher stole their Gold master of the game and you have to break into their headquarters and kill everyone and get it back...yeah thats almost like a real life threat or bordering on deranged illegal territory its shocking to see, Dont think it would fly today, so yeah the writing and story is constantly entertaining atleast for the "WTF no way" fourth wall humor. Again, its pretty hard to be bored playing Postal.
So that wraps up this week of The Dudes life.
Monday-Friday (base game 2003)
Saturday-Sunday (Apocalypse Weekend, Expansion 2005, 2 years later)
Now I just have to finally play Paradise Lost (2015) to see what thats all about.

8/10

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost was made about 15 years after the last piece of Potal 2 content, as sort of an apology for the disaster that was Postal 3 being outsourced to some Russian dev. It was made as an apology and i guess you could say love letter to Postal 2 fans that strived for more of that original formula, tone, and content.

Unlike Apocalypse Weekend, it goes right back to the open world type of gameplay of the base campaign of Postal 2. The plot is simple as usual, your dog Champ is missing and you have to simply go around and ask if anyones seem him and look for clues. You arrive in this shanty town desert area and the whole vibe actually gives a kind of Fallout New Vegas vibe, indeed theres even a casino coin item you can get that references that game. So you start off asking towns folk and evnetually get redireted to the local animal shelter where of course you run into Running With Scissors type humor where animal research protestors break into the place and try to kill everyone including you. From there you go on to meet Vince Desi who gives you (in original Postal fasion) your usual daily tasks. Stuff like delivering motherboards of a new game to the local arcades, break into the competing game devs headquarters and wreck them, and mundane things like just getting toilet paper. Paradise Lost is almost like an entirely new Postal game since it features an entirely new week (Monday - Friday) and it takes a decent chunk of time to finish, atleast as long as the original campaign. It's more of the same kind of content as the base game where you can either have your patience tested by trying to complete the tasks in a manner that will really test your patience in funny ways, or you can "go postal" and kill and break in to complete objectives. The difficulty here feels more challenging and appropriate overall than Postal 2 / Apocalpse weekend, in terms of the pacing and how it ramps up. It starts off faily easy, but still engaging, but by the middle and last quarter it starts to really test your skills especially the last bit with the Survivalist encampment where its almost too much bullshit where theyre just total bullet sponges, still it was fun to be put to the limit, and it wasnt quite as much long distance hitscan bullshit enemies sniping you across the map, though it had some of that too. \

In terms of the new level content, its about half new content half reused old content. Youve got lots of familliar areas, either reskinned or spun around in weird ways like having a hellish theme or being repurposed for something else, then you have entirely new areas like the Winter Wonderland, and giant new encampments like Survivalist Encampment, The Wipehouse which turns the Whitehouse into a giant toile store,
A robot factory, a weed farm, and so on. It's almost like how Doom 2 is to Doom 1. Its largely the "same game" just more content.

Where the tone of the game differs from the original campaign or even Apocalypse Weekend is its way more off the wall wacky and "video gamey" than anything before it. For instance, the first two days are largely typical (atleast, by Postal standards) but starting Wednesday shit just goes really off the wall and wacky because you get kidnapped by that giant demon cow Mike J boss thing and you are his slave and have to do tasks for him. Like the base Postal 2 didnt go really crazy with fantastical fictional characters and stories, it was just some dude going about his daily mundane life in your everday town, but Apocalypse Weekend started to incorporate crazy fantastical shit, then Paradise Weekend ramped it up to 11 starting on Wednesday. I'm not sure if its a good or bad thing, its definitely entertaining like keeps you on the edge of your seat wondernig what the fuck kind of monstrosity or bizarre shit youre gonna feast your eyes on next - but at the same time I liked the whole vibe and atmosphere of just being an average guy trying to make it through your boring normal life with everyone around you being a shit head, not crazy fictional demons and shit. There zombies from Apocalypse Weekend are back, and still not much of a threat, mostly just run past them, something Paradise Lost features is an impressive amount of boss fights. I think Postal 2 only had 1 or 2, Apocalypse Weekend had a couple, but Paradise Lost has like a dozen or something. And optionally at the end of the game you can choose to either simply Leave the map, or go around the whole map again and encounter an additional 6 boss fights by killing all the faction leaders one last time, something I chose to do because I didnt wanna miss any optional cutscenes, content, or boss fights, and the special optional ending. So theres all sorts of different encounters and boss fights which were fun to strategize like taking catnip to go slowmo, drinking the energy drink for dual weapons, stock piling crack pipes until the perfect moment when you need it most, the bosses all use special animations and tactics doing all sorts of crazy shit you have to deal with, one of the bosses is even features Zack Ward from the Postal move, in a pretty funny cinematic he starts talking about all the movies and games hes been in and how no one really knows about him.

The tasks are a lot more varied and longer, too, usually its not as simple as picking up one single item ,but frequently youll have to go around the map collecting multiple items just to finish one task. It makes the world feel fleshed out and makes learning how to navigate a top priority. Though, its navigation isnt always as coherent as it should be, the map doesnt quite line up to the in-game world always the way youd think it should, and some of the connection tunnels stretch the imagination a bit, it works but it definitely makes the engine show its age. If anything I wish they would of put a compass in the game so you could atleast know what direction youre facing instead of having to open the map every 5 seconds, that kinda gets tedious.

To emphesize further fucked and fantasy the whole tone of the vibe gets, on Thursday you start working for Gary Coleman who has this deep demonic voiced servant that you have to go around and complete tasks for as well. There's a whole section on Thursday where you have to go through a giant Robot factory and it does like a Borderlands Claptrap parody , this was maybe my least favorite part of any Postal game. The whole thing was just kinda meh and dull and only had one enemy type, Robot machine things that piss at you, theyre not much of a threat so you kinda jsut end up running past all of them while trying to navigate through this bland looking factory.

Though the other task on Thursday where you must break into the bandit encampment and find a cure for your dog Champ is quite good. Again, reminds me of something youd do in a Fallout game or something. Its this cool post-apocalyptic complex thats fun to explore and it has a military boss at the end that was a pretty fun fight where he shoots rockets at you and waves of bandit enemies where you  hide behind selves and try to take him out.

Friday is weird, you start being friends with these weed smoking Peace loving terrorists and have to do tasks for them including getting C4, working at a weed farm, and getting a blasting cap to blow open some sectioned off part of town that you need to access to find your dog.
This part of the game is just crazy, it has you going through a giant sewer compelx, a really difficult Survivalist encampment that will really test your sanity with these bullet sponge guys, its like something out of a Stalker game. It was pretty cool but yeah maybe they could of toned down these guys body armor. Then you go work at a weed farm where you have to cut down weed plants with a wacker while the cops break in and try to kill you, this part was fine but kinda dull the only tough part was on the way out with these bullshit homing rocket cops placed around top of the mountains.

Now the real mindfuck is right towards the end of the game, you meet up with 'Alternate Dude' (the postal 3 guy?) and you blast through a tunnel into literal Hell to try to find your dog thats been turned into a monster, you crawl through hell full of zombies and traps, find your dog and have a boss fight with him - hes this giant monster version and you have to take down his healthbar and inject him multiple times with the serum cure, THEN 'The Bitch' your ex wife shows up and you have  a boss fight to kill her multiple times, THEN it doesnt end...theres another boss fight where you go further down into hell and fight a giant ugly demon version of 'The Bitch' again!... You think its over? Nope. It's like this last hour or two of the game is Saturday/Sunday, although it doesnt officially state it is in the save menu or anywhere else, but it really does feel like 2 extra days with the amount of shit you do. After these boss fights, you get put back into the open world, this time in total apocalypse, cats falling from the sky, everyone raging and going mad killing eachother and you have a choice:
A) Simply escape at the top of the map, and get ending 1
B) Go around the entire game world and kill each of the faction leaders again for a special ending

I chose B, because I didnt want to miss out on any boss fights or funny cutscenes (showing how entertaining the game is) and at first it was like a daunting task and sorta confusing, but after the second or third faction leader I killed it was a blast. Kinda just run past everyone rampaging in the streets and run straight to the faction leaders, visit the new Vending Machines, a new feature added, where you can buy equipment health and guns and stock up on consumables like crack pipes, then run around doing back to back boss fights. After its all done I managed to make it to the top of the map and fight Vince Desi one last time, and completed Paradise Lost with the ending where the Postal Dude became the God of Paradise and ruler of everything. The other easier ending (I looked up on youtube) he simply walks away and the place gets nuked.

Its hard for me to determine which piece of Postal 2 content is better or worse, it all kinda fits together as this one big package that should be experienced back to back, something you can even have an option to do from the main menu (Two weeks in paradise) but I chose to play them all separaetely the original way they were released. I like all pieces of Postal 2 content for different reasons, some things Postal 2 does better, like a more consistent tone and more grounded atmosphere, some things I like Apocalypse Weekend better, the more linear focused FPS maps and challenging parts, and some things I like Paradise Lost better, a huge packed world with all sorts of mindfuck fantasy elements in it and over the top post apocalyptic vibe and tons of boss fights. So once again I have to give Paradise lost the same rating as the other pieces of Postal 2 content, I like them all equally for various reasons.

8/10