Postal III PC Review


Once upon a time, there was a 13 year old boy who got Postal 2 from one of his friends because that friend’s parents weren’t handling that game. Overjoyed to have something other than King’s Quest to play, the little boy ran home and installed it. From that day forward, his life was filled with joy and a deep-rooted hatred for everything not cynical. That little boy then grew up to be a video game reviewer and was one day given Postal 3.

As you’ve probably guessed, my childhood was a bit morbid. I don’t know if it was my father making me watch Starship Troopers at the age of 8, or the copious amounts of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I was forced to surrender my mind to. I do know however, that games like Postal 2 helped raise me, and gave me an outlet to vent my frustrations when the other kids would throw rocks at me and beat me with icicles they had torn off the school roof. Because of this, I hold Postal 2 very dear to me as a game that will always be a massive ball of hilarity and fun.

That being said, Postal 3 is a massive ball of fecal matter hurled at my face at 98 miles an hour. It’s a textbook example of developers making a sequel without putting enough time and effort into it.

We’ll start first with the actual gameplay. Postal 3 has boiled down to a linear 3rd person shooter that somehow manages to do everything wrong. Whether it’s the hard to navigate weapons or the retarded AI, this game could not imaginably be any worse.

It’s one thing when I can’t hit an enemy with melee attacks to save my life. It’s a whole other situation when they seem magically pin-point accurate with every weapon they use. On top of that, if I even got within three feet of an NPC my camera would start to seizure and my guy would start slamming into walls for absolutely no reason. It’s as if an NPC that isn’t considered hostile will cause the postal dude to go postal and start running around in circles as if A Yog-Sothoth is giving him suggestive looks.

It’s safe to say the controls and the collision detection in this game were probably programmed by someone who decided to type with their elbows for a week. That aside, it’s still a terrible game. Not just because the gameplay is bad, but because they seem to still think that their target audience is 14.

Let’s be honest for a second. The Postal series is old. Anyone who SHOULD have been excited for Postal 3 would be roughly in the age-group of 19-26. There should literally be no 13 year olds who were excited for this game. The only plausible way I can see a small child being excited for Postal 3 to come out would be if they found an old copy of Postal 2 in their big brother’s CD case. Even if/when this did happen, I couldn’t imagine there being that many when compared to the older audience who wish to relive their teen years.

Unfortunately, Postal 3 is all about the teenaged boys. This would be fine if it was a new title altogether, but it’s not. It’s the sequel to one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. That doesn’t seem to hit Running With Scissors all too well though as they push out ridiculous crap that I haven’t thought was funny for years.

The issue is this. The Postal games have always been unoriginal by gameplay standards, but have always made up for it with hilarious situations. Unfortunately, this Postal game seems to have taken too much from inspirations like Gears of War. It literally feels like they spent half the time the game was in development watching Jackass, and the other half reading 14 year old boys’ Blogspots. They then combined the two and decided to make a clunky game out of it.

I’m sure in a few months they will have patched all the collision issues, the buggy cover set-ups, the bad AI, and a few other problems, but the first impression is over. I loved Postal 2 more than I’ve loved any other shooter. Postal 3 does the title shame.

4 out of 10