Are you tired of being nice? Do you just want to go postal? Well, you’re in luck because after many years of waiting and Postal 3 being a thing, the Postal series is finally back in proper form with the soon-to-be-released Postal 4: No Regerts. The Postal series sits in a weird place for me because if you’re a fan of the series you’re going to love this game and I could end this review with “it’s better than Postal 3“, but if you’ve never played a Postal game before then you’re not going to see the hype about this release.
I was first introduced to Postal with the second game in the series through a good friend. I thought it was really funny. It was super violent, super dark but it never took itself seriously and had a lot of black humor in it. I found it fun to try to be just a normal guy and have all this crazy stuff was happening around you. Postal 2 came out in 2003 at the height of these crazy experimental first-person shooters. The genre has come a long way since then; however, it’s nice to come back to a first-person shooter that doesn’t take itself seriously. Fast forward almost fifteen years and whatever the hell Postal 3 was, we’re finally getting a true successor to Postal 2 with Postal 4, and oh boy does it remind me a lot of Postal 2 in both good ways and bad ways.
Postal 4: No Regerts opens up with “The Dude,” and his trusty Pitbull Terrier, Champ, rolling into the small Arizona town of Edensin looking to start over again. On the way to Edensin, The Dude’s motorhome is stolen, leaving him to wander into town without a clue. So he begins searching for his lost motorhome. Throughout the week The Dude takes odd jobs given to him by powerful people in the town while in search of his lost motorhome. The jobs he takes range from collecting signatures for a petition to put in a bidet in every home in America to immigrating people into Mexico.
Over the week, you learn more about Edensin and attempt to track down your trailer. Honestly, I found the story to be pretty engaging because it didn’t take itself too seriously and kept up the humor that the series is known for. For me, another reason why the story was so engaging is that Jon St. John lent his voice to The Dude for this title. Now if Duke Nukem isn’t your preferred style of voice there are many other voice-over options that you can choose at the start of the game. So you can tailor the game to the way that you want to play it.
In Postal 4: No Regerts there are a lot of similar gameplay styles and features from Postal 2, which I don’t believe is a bad thing at all. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I picked up this title, and it’s exactly what I wanted. It’s a good game to play and turn your brain off. Outside of the main story, there are a lot of side missions that you can take part in like scooter racing, firefighting, and much more if you just want to experience Edensin. There is also a myriad of weaponry that you can choose. One of my favorites, the cat silencer from the previous games, is back but honestly finding out what new weapons you can find is half the fun of Postal. Just going around with just my finger guns was a pretty enjoyable time.
Even though this is what I expected out of this title, if you’re not a fan of the series, what you’re going to find is an unpolished buggy mess of a game. Keep in mind that I’m running this game on max settings due to a recent upgrade on my PC. The map doesn’t always load all at once and every time you get to a section where the map needs to load the game stops autosaves. If loading that part of the map was instantaneous it would be fine but there are sometimes it takes 30 to 45 seconds to complete this loading. There are certain times I accidentally broke the map’s loading and I would fall off the edge of the world. There are other times as well when I would respawn in a stage and none of the enemies would be there or none of the events that I needed to trigger would trigger, so I would have to load a previous save. It was frustrating, to say the least.
The AI of the enemies isn’t necessarily the smartest but they know exactly where you are at all times or they just don’t move at all until you shoot them once. There were many sections in the game where I could just walk past people even though they were supposed to be hostile toward me. I did encounter a lot of sound glitches as well, primarily when I was fighting one of the last bosses. He was firing rockets at me. I shot him once and his voice-over lines would repeat on top of each other so he would be saying multiple things at once and then he would just stop. A lot of the problems that I have with the enemy interactions of this game is they just kind of stop and don’t move. Though it is clear that Running with Scissors cares about the series so I’m sure that these will be quickly patched out once more people get their hands on the game.
Overall I got what I wanted out of Postal 4: No Regerts. I got a Postal game that was better than Postal 3. I enjoyed my time with The Dude again and I have no regerts about the time that I’ve spent playing it. I don’t feel right giving a number to this game because it’s a good Postal game but it is not a “good” game if that makes sense.
So my overall score is Better than Postal 3.
