Customer Reviews

Postal 2

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Spend a week with a nutcase in Postal 2. Complete with a "Jackass" style warning label on the loading screen, developer Running With Scissors (RWS) gambles that they can stuff a game full of enough blood and gore to guarantee an assault by family-values groups, yet still make enough after the lawsuits to turn a profit. Let me be clear upfront, this game definitely delivers in the sick and twisted department and deserves the "M" Mature rating more than any game I've seen. Postal 2 is not designed for kids, but just like trashy rated R movies, I'm sure this game will be appreciated more by kids than adults.

In order to push the envelope (snicker) RWS enlists the services of the Postal Dude; a goateed Gen-X slacker in a Matrix-style trenchcoat that starts the morning by kicking the dog and shooting the air conditioner for making too much noise. His nagging trailer-trash wife/girlfriend sends him on a list of ordinary missions like shopping for milk, cashing a paycheck, or picking up a christmas tree (in July), yet the situations our buddy Postal Dude finds himself involved become anything but ordinary.

You see, Mr. "Dude" just wants to keep to himself and get through life without being hassled, yet all these people just won't leave him alone. He goes to his job at RWS and a bunch of video-game protestors bust in and start blasting away. He goes to the mall to get a book signed by Gary "I ain't going the the joint again!" Coleman and cops turn the place into a war zone. He goes to ... his dad's grave (seriously) and he's captured by a bunch of rednecks, locked in a brewery basement, and turned into a gimp - Pulp Fiction style.

Politically-correct this game is not and you can tell the developers had fun dreaming up scenarios that many will find offensive. Animal-lover? You probably won't like how the neighborhood cats become a shotgun accessory. Religious? You probably won't enjoy the holy war that the catholics and the muslims declare on each other. African-american? You probably won't enjoy the ghetto-slang of Krotchy, the child action figure... I shouldn't need to comment on the violence in this game, but after a particularly bloody and brutal episode involving a meat-processing plant you may not want to eat a steak again.

So you've got a sick sense of humor and not one politically-correct bone in your body. What's not to like? The problem with Postal 2 lies in the execution (not the people, the game.) Like the previous Postal, the graphics and gameplay seem very amateurish compared to the others currently out there. I didn't think it would be possible to create a bad game using the Unreal Warfare gaming engine, but this comes close. As a first-person shooter, it fails miserably. Everyone attacking hits you instantly, sometimes through walls, yet even on the easiest difficulty settings you have to pump about 40 rounds into someone to drop them. ... this game offers almost no interaction with the outside environment. Even the Postal Dude comments on the cars being "useless exploding props."

Most annoying, however, are the godawful load times. The installation was probably the longest I've endured in any game and crossing from one tiny section of town to the next subjects you to load times resulting in waits of over a minute. Since you are frequently sent from one side of town to the other, you will spend more time waiting for the game to load than you will actually playing the game.

There are some fiendishly clever moments and I'll stand neutral on the "garbage-in garbage-out" controversy this game will inevitably generate. What I will say is you will need to overlook some serious flaws in the mechanics of the game to be able to enjoy its twisted humor.

Hope the review helped.

First off, I'm going to say something that I am sure someone else writing a review for this game has already said, "This is NOT a game for the faint of heart..." If there were a definition for, "violent" or "controversial" this would be it. You are a white [man] known as Mr. Peepshell, or the, "Postal Dude,"whom lives in a trailer behind someone's house and your soul task throughout the game is to run around a city commiting tasks that you would think to be simple for your .... wife. Freedom-wise, this game outdoes any of its predecessors tenfold. You may go into ANY building, interact with ANYONE you see on screen, and do virtually anything you want, from sticking a cat on the barrel of your gun to use it as a silencer, to urinating all over the place in some poor fool's house. This game pushes new boundaries in ignoring what the rest of the world thinks. You can pour gasoline on someone, light a match, throw it on them and they will be engulfed in a ball of flame and slowly burn to a charred corpse, crawling on the ground crying desperately for help. Even kick bodies and watch them flop around realistically, splattering a grotesque decal of blood on the wall. Walk into convenience stores and kick merchandise into people's faces, only to soon be attacked by enraged policeman. Something I may need to mention is that this game is extremely racist. The convenience store is controlled by a bunch of arab women who attack you if you decide to go into the "employees only" section. Gay dance clubs are strewn throughout with in which you can interact with some, let's just say, "interesting" NPC's. Anything you would not want your innocent little darling of a child to see is thrown in this game tenfold; do not expect anything wholesome. Even the kindest of people can have their heads blown off by, well, you. Religious references are intact and mocked horribly. (For example, you go to a church to confess your sins in one of the missions and a bunch of psychotics....burst through the door, and before you know it, the priests whip out shotguns and say they must, "Do it all for the glory of God."

I suppose you are wondering why I enjoy this game. Simple answer; I'm sick. That and the fact you can run around with virtually no restrictions and fulfill all the dirty little thoughts that go through your head. If you have a strong stomach and a gamer's desire for, "No limits," buy this game. Otherwise, get over it.

I got my copy of Postal 2 a few days ago, and have played it through about halfway. Overall, the game is fun, but there is one big drawback - the load times! It seems like every 2 or 3 minutes, I'm waiting for a section of the map to load. This can take up to a minute and a half, even though I turned down some of the settings and am running it on a 2 Ghz system.
The graphics are good, if a little repetitive (there are only about 5 or 6 different NPCs, they just have different colored outfits on, and some of the indoor environments are kind of boring), and the gameplay is great. I found the controls easy and how you interact with the environment good. But, you can't really "go postal", because it's too hard to kill your enemies. It takes several shots to kill anyone, even if you shoot them in the head. In fact, it doesn't seem to matter where you shoot them. I found myself running away most of the time, just 'cause it's easier.
Overall - A fun game, but the load times pretty much ruin it.

This game is kind of a pain to play, since the load times are so long, but the extreme violence and twisted things you can do make it a nice, wholesome experience. I bought this game, and went home and played it. I was almost offended at how violent it can be(almost). Do not let kids play this game!! The patch makes the game load faster, plus it adds some new weapons, like a cat launcher!! The cats also come in handy as silencers, but you will have to get the game to check that out. I applaud the develpoers for making a game that mimics real life. You can choose to be good, or you can go postal.

Everything Im about to say concerning Postal 2, you've probably already read. The shock value of lighting innocent people on fire and going on random ... crazy rampages ebbs away rather quickly. And when I say LONG load times, I mean exactly that. The gameplay map is divided into about 8 or 9 main sections. You traverse this map section by section. Everytime you wish to travel to a new part of the map you get stuck between areas with load times that can last up to 5 minutes. - Yep, I said 5 minutes. I ran the game on a 1.8 gz cpu with 512 ram. - Still took a ridiculous amount of time to load. The constant 'hurry up and wait' in this game extinguishes a gamer's lust for blood and nulls any interest you may have had for its mundane storyline. Considering how brilliant and user-friendly today's FPS can be, this game has no excuse for being so outmoded in its playability. 3 years ago this game would have knocked my socks off. Now it comes across as too little to late and so much wasted potential.

I was excited about this game when I heard about it. It sounded like a really cool game that would push the limits and maybe finally get video games to the point where they had the same freedom as movies.

The over-the-top violence and subject matter isn't a complete novelty, other games have done much of the same stuff, though none have pushed the envelope quite so far. In this first person shooter, you can [urinate] on people, You'll here quite a bit of the F word, Racial stereotypes (such as a pakistani or indian quickimart owner who is running a terrorist cell from the back) and you can smoke weed, set people on fire, kick around severed heads and other such things. It's pretty cool, and fun for about 20 minutes.

After the shock value wears off, you're left with a game that isn't very compelling. Postal has some cool concepts, for instance you play the game by doing various day-to-day tasks, like going to get milk or the mail or going to get Gary Coleman's autograph. In theory, the whole game can be played without breaking the law and without resorting to violence. There are various ways to do any task. You can go pick up the milk and pay for it legitimatley and leave. If you try and cut in line the owner yells at you, so you actually have to wait your turn. Very cool. You can pay and leave and that's that. Or you can walk out without paying in which case the owner pulls out an M-16 and starts sparying hails of bulltes your way.

This open endedness is very welcome... but often itself is a bit less compelling than it could have been. The game seems a bit one dimensional, despite the freedom it allows. The city isnt particarly fun to explore because it isn't completely interactive and you cant drive vehicles, or work different objects. Most objects wont evenb show damage (I smacked a TV with a shovel and it didnt even break). The graphics are good in some places and in others feel bland and uninspired. The gore isn't very realistic (Except after a person burns to death), and a system like Soldier of Fortune 2 would have been a big improvement. The weapons have a good variety, and offer some interesting combinations (soke somone with gasoline, then throw on a match, and then [pee] out the fire). But the guns arent very authentic feeling, it's basically just arcade style killing.

Postal does have some nice details in some places. Comments canbe entertaining. Bump into someone and they might flip you the bird and say some obscene things to you. {pee] right in someone's face and they might vomit all over... nasty stuff. This is a game you prbably want to keep out of the hands of your 6 year old, but for us adults... that's just good fun.

The problem is the fun gets old fast because there isnt much else and the depth is really an illusion. The game feels dated, like a better version of redneck rampage with better graphics (not very much better... the unreal engine offers much more than they used).

Bottom line: After you get sick of setting an innocent person on fire and then [urinating] on their red, burnt corpse, this game will feel empty and unpolished. Others will love this game, and I had fun for a bit, but I probably wont shell out the money for this one. I reccomend playing the demo before you buy, and make sure to play more than 30 minutes, because the cool parts of the game get old pretty quick.

Postal 2 is a very fun game overall. Really, you have to take everything in this game with a grain of salt, because after playing only a few minutes of it, you'll realize that this isn't meant to be taken seriously at all. If you do take it seriously, then you don't have any sense of humor and should stop playing before you start complaining. Yes, a lot of this stuff will offend those of you who don't like violence and/or animal cruelty. But, once again, DON'T TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY! This doesn't have the disturbing seriousness of its predecessor, so you can go ahead and laugh it all off. Trust me, you will. And if you don't, stop playing and don't whine and complain.

This is, as I've said before, a very, VERY fun game. If you have any built up frustrations from society's madness, you can let it all out with this. Think about it, what other game allows you to
a) Go up to some random person and shock him with a taser until he collapses to the ground twitching
b) Decapitate him with a shovel
c) Punt his severed head down the street and let your pet dog fetch it for you
d) Pour gasoline on his corpse and throw a match at him to set him aflame
e) And, as a final insult, urinate on him to put the flames out
Wow. Now THAT'S political incorrectness!

Still, if you like that type of stuff (that is, if you're a total sicko like me), you'll get a lot of laughs from this. I remember the first time my dog fetched a man's detatched head for me. I was laughing so hard, I spent ten minutes kicking it away and letting it bring it back, dropping it at my feet, turning around, and barking and wagging his tail for me to kick it again. Yes, I am that sick. But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

As far as plot goes, there's really none to speak of. But hey, I don't play these type of games for the plot (I play the Silent Hill series for that), I play these games just for one reason: for fun, and that's just what this game delivers. The graphics are okay, but I honestly don't give a hoot about that. Once again, it's the gameplay and fun factor I'm after. A lot of people don't like this game simply because it doesn't have top-notch graphics. Well, those dolts would like the game more if they just stopped obsessing over the graphics and got busy PLAYING THE FRICKIN' GAME! What a novel idea: playing a video game. Dang, that's brilliant.

This game does a good job of making the GTA series look like a Barney episode. It doesn't discriminate, though; it insults every race, both sexes, pretty much everything that exists. So it may be offensive, but at least it's not biased.

The game functions like any run-of-the-mill first person shooter: you have a respectable selection of weapons, you can go around and kill anything in sight, etc. But, in addition to the usual guns (handgun, automatic rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle), it also has a good amount of "creative" weapons that you can use for some really interesting kills. Examples of this are the deadly throwing scissors, molotov cocktails, a clipboard, a rocket launcher, a shovel (decapitation, anyone?), a stun gun, grenades, and your trusty tank of gasoline and matches. There are many firefights you can get into, and some of those are cases in which you're so outnumbered that running-and-gunning will just end with your death, and you have to use your different weapons for strategies to win. Also, a lot of the civilians who walk around are carrying firearms of their own, and if you happen to get into a little quarrel with gun-wielding lunatics, if you holster your weapon and run down the street, taking a few hits, you may be able to get either the police, ATF members, RWS (Running With Scissors) guys, and normal civilians to take out their weapons and fight your assailant. As long as you look like an innocent victim, it's all good. Actually, the RWS guys will attack any and all people assaulting you, and won't harm you, even if you join the firefight. If you attack them, they'll return fire, but only after many hits. These guys are your buddies. One of the most fun things to do is to spark firefights among normal people and just watch the bullets and blood fly. You can let them go crazy and do the killing for you, something you could never do in the GTA games without a code. There's even a survival mode for you to play in where you're a pacifist and everyone around you is going postal. There are 11 difficulty levels, and 19 errands. While that may seem like limited gameplay, make no mistake; there's no time limit to complete those errands, and you can explore the town (which isn't too large, but allows for enough exploring anyway) and do whatever the heck you want. While Paradise may not be as vast and complex as Vice City or Liberty, it still allows for good open-ended gameplay. You can blow up cars, explode or set aflame large crowds of civilians (including highly flammable marching bands - something that we all loved in the original Postal), blow people's heads off with a shotgun, decapitate someone with your shovel, kick people in the face, punt trash cans at someone, kick a person through a window, kick a severed head at a police officer to piss them off, the list goes on and on. Or you could be creative and pour gasoline on a detached head and punt it at someone, lighting them on fire, blow up a car and let it land on some innocent bystander, or anything else your deranged mind can think of. But, again, you don't have to be violent. You can choose to be peaceful, or homicidal, the choice is yours. But, some advice: to enjoy this game, go crazy; it's fun.

About the only thing I can complain about is the horrid loading times. There are a lot of them, and they're very, very long and tedious. This can get annoying, but once you get over it, you learn to ignore them. Well, at least a little...

All in all, this is a great game for those of you with a good sense of humor and a strong constitution. If you don't mind the gore and blood, love having fun, and putting a cat on a shotgun to act as a silencer, then this is the game for you.

Postal II is an excellent game i would recommend it to anyone who loves action games and would not mind over the top violance. I have never played the first Postal. You play a guy called The Postal Dude. He reminds me of the Blood dude Caleb. Postal 2 is almost like a first person Gta3 without driving. Postal 2 has no plot. It takes place in Paradise, a frictional place and during five working days, starts on monday and ends on friday. All you do is do is run errands for your wife like get milk, return library book, giving a gift to uncle ect. In one mission Gary Coleman appears and you need to get his autograph. Almost all these errands end in disaster, like being attacked by tree lovers. The selection of weapons are great though none unique, a gun, a shotgun, a machine gun, a napalam launcher ect. There is a way to use the shotgun as a silencer but i have never tried it since i like cats (dont ask). The weapon effects are really nasty. If you change your costumes to something else you can go anywhere and do anything you want, no body not even the cops would mind and the game will be very easy even on the hardest difficulty. Postal 2 is built on the Unreal 2 engine. It runs great but the load times are really long and the latest patch fixed nothing. The outdoor areas are beautifull but the art direction for indoor enviroment are not good. The charecters look and move strange but it fits well for a game like this. It's fun hearing people and your character swearing all the time. The biggest problem other than the load times is that the game quite short for my liking but it has a great replay value. If only the load times are short the game could me more fun.

[Edit] Forgot this, Install the latest patch, the load times are fixed and the game loads much quicker. It has a couple of new maps, weapons and few new charecters. The patched version has the best level of postal 2 so i highly recommend you to install the patch.

Playing this game I kept being reminded of Eddie Murphy's movie "Raw." It was his follow-on comedy concert to "Delirious" where Eddie had been stung by his critics and was showing his anger, which got in the way of being funny.

Similarly this move shows the flack the developers got from the original "Postal." It starts with a disclaimer about violence and makes several pointed jabs at a certain congressman, and doesn't focus on either the humor or the action. There's literally dozens of ways this games could have been more humorous or (unnecessarily) more violent.

The much belabored violence to me seemed fairly tame. If anything this seemed almost in the same theme as Duke Nuke'em 3D, with the aliens and monsters replaced by civilians and a few bad guys. Indeed, an alternative title might have been "The adventures of Duke's homely younger brother."

The appearance of the game is a little behind the times, looking more like something circa 2000 than this year, and the AI of the other characters leaves a lot to be desired. Despite swapping lots of heads and body parts it's obvious you're seeing the same seven or so people over and over again, and for some reason they're all walking around aimlessly. As for playing it's old-style first shooter, the machine gun is a surprisingly weak weapon, the shotgun is one of the most powerful (Like in Doom) and you only see splatters of blood--there's no body parts flying around except for boint plank headshots.

As the developers say the game is only as violent as you are. You have a week where you have several daily errands to run, and if you play the game non-violently the only times you kill anyone is when you're trying to save your own skin. It also becomes very boring. It's not until the second half of the game some puzzles and challenges come up, but all stuff you've seen before. Essentially the game boils down to how much you enjoy blasting away at random at the populace, about half of whom fight back, and how long you can survive. (Althought smoking the catnip does give a very cool Matrix-like slow motion to everything.)

Easily offended people will be horrified at this game, but for the most part it's a fairly crude and simplistic theme that get most of it's attention from the people who've complained about it. There's been more violent and offensive games released, just this one self-consciously centers on it.

I'd love to love this game. I've been a computer nerd for nearly twenty-five years and "politically incorrect" pc games take the edge off the day when I get home from the nine-to-five. My present pc is no slouch vis. power/memory/graphics, but installing "Postal2" and keeping the game from crashing is a nightmare...
I've followed the instructions on the official website, downloaded the patch, downloaded "DirectX 9", re-installed numerous times, ran the game in "safe mode", submitted bug reports...
The result???
A beautifully twisted vision of a potentially GREAT game which because of the "bugs" is ultimately aggravating and *NOT* worth the $$$.
Unless you have tomorrow's top of the line gaming machine with *all* the bells and whistles, my advice is to wait until they can work the bugs out or it comes way down in price.