“Sometimes they come back” – this dusty phrase, considered a gambling cliché, nevertheless perfectly describes Postal 4: No Regerts. In this case, in the form of a seemingly new game from Running With Scissors, the iconic second installment, one of the most hooligan, punk, violent and at the same time satirical games in history, has returned.
The Long Road Home.
After Running With Scissors’ much-publicized collaboration with Akella ended in scandal, divorce, and the 2011 release of a failed third installment (to which the original authors were effectively no longer involved), Vince Desi, the longtime leader of RWS, had few options going forward. Forget and start anew? Maybe, but that takes resources, talent and money. So he chose to forget and start anew.
The first thing they decided to do was to forget Postal 3 like a bad dream – and in 2015, the add-on Postal 2: Paradise Lost really turned the events of the third part into a nightmare. A year later, the HD remaster of the original, Postal: Redux, was released. To work on both projects Vince involved not new professional developers (some veterans left the studio), but modders from the fans, which affected the technical quality. Especially Postal 2: Paradise Lost which suffered from bugs as much as Dude suffered from urinary incontinence.
Dude on Cooney Island.
The fourth installment, which came out in early access in 2019, was made along similar lines. In fact, it’s a remake of Postal 2, ported to the Unreal Engine 4 (admittedly, it’s a mess, but more on that later). Not only are there the same ideas and the same narrative structure broken up into days of the week, but even the scripts and assets have largely been moved from Part 2. And that catches the eye.
Well, in general, we got the same smelly mix of toilet humor and hypertrophied to the level of parody cruelty, where no one prevents you from discharging a line into a passerby or cut off his head with a shovel, pee on anything and anyone and even put out a directional jet fire. Here you can use your right leg as a universal lockpick and your cat as a silencer on the barrel.
Clearly, the plot is technically new. It wasn’t enough for Dude, whose hometown had turned into radioactive dust, to have his trailer stolen from the parking lot while he was relieving himself. And now our hero in a purple bathrobe and boots, along with faithful dog Chemp is forced to go to the nearest town to earn money. But the essence of this has not changed. Every new day we run errands to make money. Moreover, many of them are already familiar from previous Postal episodes, such as running through the streets and asking passersby to sign another crazy petition.
Dude starts out by cleaning sewers, screwing in light bulbs, catching stray animals and escaped convicts through our own fault, and issuing fines. Then you have to become a game tester, disrupt political debates, sabotage an amusement park in Cooney Island (yes, the theme is exactly what you think it is), work for the local mafia and even for the fun-loving mayor, obsessed with installing bidets all over town.
But what difference does it make? Well, yes, now you can shoot and burn demonstrators who advocate the good old-fashioned toilet paper with napalm, and shoot down artificial vaginas with a jet of nuclear urine at the shooting gallery on Kuni Island, where aggressive ladies walk around in a female genital costume (there are also characters in a penis costume – equality is respected). Funny? I don’t know, I laughed mine off in Postal 2. You can, of course, grin even now, but it’s like watching “Beavis and Butt-head” and Bloodhound Gang videos at 46. It’s fun, but not for long.
However, it’s all a matter of tastes, about which we won’t argue here – I’m sure that many people will like it all. But there are also objective things. In his video review of the early alpha version, Elman Huseynov said that we watched it for nothing. And among other things, he complained about the lack of content, the fact that there are no police officers, and the houses are just empty boxes-billets.
Play
In the full version, of course, everything is brought in, including the cops who, if you kill passersby in front of them, start hunting for the Dude. But, again, this didn’t change much in essence. The inhabitants still wander aimlessly from side to side along roads that no one but us drives on – the city is just a setting for shooting and taunting passersby. The game design is still as outdated and primitive as the shooter gameplay from the noughties.
Many would say that this is normal for a game with such a thuggish concept. There are also fun new weapons like the chainmail scythe (which also serves as a hook-and-loop), water pistols and a cage with carnivorous pigeons, which makes destroying everyone around you really fun and juicy in some places. The little car races look good, too – there are some interesting situations in general.
But first of all, I would still like a conceptual development, and also, as an option, a sharper and more topical satire. But Vince Desi and his comrades prefer to fool around and bully just for the sake of bullying. Also, of course, a stance, but to me it’s exactly a joke, repeated twice.
And secondly, enjoying Postal 4 is hindered by its technical implementation. The AI is dumb and buggy – the enemies can just stand still when they get the crap kicked out of us. One time I got stuck with cats that I had to lure to the animal capture site. I had to kill the tailed ones to dump the corpses into the car – I wasn’t even surprised that they counted me out.
In addition, there’s terrible optimization – wild fps lag happens even to the owners of powerful machines, and on those that are weaker, the game can turn into a solid “slo-mo”. Constantly there are long crashes on the “seamless” locations, not infrequent and crashes on the desktop. In addition, there is no translation into Russian. In general, it seems that the authors made Postal 4 in roughly the same state in which constantly stays Dude – shoveling pizza and chocolate donuts and drank beer to fill your bladder with what you can fill up the game all around.
That’s what I’m really thankful for, though.
It’s clear that much of what we criticize other games for, in Postal 4: No Regerts can be called an artistic device – this also applies to the primitive shooter mechanics and the “city-tyre”. And many, I’m sure, will get their dose of pleasure and nostalgia. But I’m very sad about the technical execution and lack of fresh ideas. It remains to be hoped that the authors will keep their promise and keep polishing and improving the game after release. Although the future of the series still does not look very cheerful.
Pros: it’s actually the good old Postal 2, but on Unreal Engine 4; it’s funny in some places; there are some cool new weapons; Dude’s expressive voiceover.
Cons: terrible technical implementation; lack of fresh ideas; buggy AI.