Developer: Running With Scissors
Publisher: Running With Scissors
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
POSTAL 4: No Regerts – Review
POSTAL is just one of those game series that has a warm place in some communities. It’s a game series that reached cult status back in the day because of its originality and lack of respect for boundaries. You could just be an animal in this game (POSTAL 2) filled with violence, gore, and general bad behavior. Obviously, this spoke to certain people. There were high hopes for POSTAL 3 but it was ill-received in the end. POSTAL 4: No Regerts should have been the one chance for the series to come back alive, and while we were quite positive in our preview over 2 years ago, we now found that the game is, again, disappointing.
Story
POSTAL 4 just feels like, despite its long developing time, no effort has been put into the game. That’s the main issue with every aspect of the game, and it starts with the story. The main character of the POSTAL games is named The Dude, who is essentially some kind of guy in a bathrobe with a goatee and out-of-bed hair. The Dude his mobile home and car got stolen, and now he’s selling himself to anybody who has a job for him. This quickly gives you a list of things to do, though most missions and activities are just uninspired chores. Not only the missions, but the story as a whole feels hollow and is missing a purpose or reasonable goal. The towns you find yourself in are also filled with mindless NPCs that barely react to anything the way you’d expect. This way, the game quickly leaves you with a foul taste. Some things to do will still be fun, but sadly most missions and other events feel meaningless in this game.
Graphics
The graphics actually aren’t all that bad. While the cutscenes and general animations are pretty poor in quality and feel at least ten years old, the in-game experience isn’t bad when looking at the graphical quality. The visuals are a lot like the Borderlands games, with a thick outline and cartoon-like colors. However, what annoyed us most was actually the general performance. With a reasonable PC (we tried a laptop with a GTX 1070 as well as a PC with a GTX 1080) the game had some pretty bad loading issues as well as stutters during the gameplay. It took another try at a PC with a GTX 3060 to make things feel more smooth. This is quite odd as the game is lacking events and has to load “new” confined areas quite often, pointing toward bad programming. On top of that, we encountered multiple glitches and (game-breaking) bugs, such as a falling through the floor of the world or interactive objects not working anymore. POSTAL 4 is simply not polished, optimized, or finished.
Sound
The sound is of pretty poor quality as well. Aside from the voice lines of The Dude, for who you can choose three different voice actors, the NPC lines are clearly outsourced, and all have different quality recordings, as well as voice acting of different qualities. Music is barely present in the game, and sound effects feel cheap, where the idea of comedic value is fart noises and cartoon bumps. Again, it feels like no real effort has been made here to make something that’s actually funny or good.
Gameplay
POSTAL 4: No Regerts is mostly a first-person adventure/shooter. It has some Grand Theft Auto vibes with the violent options at hand, but it mixes it up with ridiculousness and juvenile behavior such as peeing on top of everything and making childish jokes. Now, sometimes this can work out great, but POSTAL 4 feels like a Duke Nukem game where the Duke has lost his final two brain cells to become The Dude. It’s not about the fact that the game could be offensive to some people, it’s about the fact that it adds barely anything of quality to the equation. Overall there’s a lack of imagination in missions, writing, and gameplay, and the developers tried to hide this fact by adding some offensive jokes to the mix.
We enjoyed racing on mobility scooters, and some missions were quite fun thanks to the ridiculous environments we found ourselves in, but the missions themselves were mindless. That being said, the programming and A.I. really are quite abysmal. Even if you don’t count the bugs and general issues you encounter, the game also does not feel right at the few times that it does work. As an example, early on in the game, we got to suppress a prison riot, mostly by force. Whenever we struck or shot an (armed) prisoner once, they immediately went docile. Bullets hitting enemies also felt really poorly programmed, with barely any proper visible impact. The game just isn’t that nice to play, unless you splatter heads on the wall with a shotgun that rips everybody apart. The game is also very easy when it comes to taking damage, as you simply have a lot of health. It feels like the core of POSTAL 4 is diseased, and we don’t see a patch or two fixing that after all this development time.
Conclusion
Even though we would like POSTAL 4 to be the best game ever that breaks all rules of decency, it really isn’t. The game is in no way optimized or decently programmed, and the story is also poorly written. The gameplay is disappointing, and the little fun we had was quickly overshadowed by all of the aforementioned issues. Maybe POSTAL 5 will finally be a redemption for the series, but we highly doubt it by now. We reckon that longtime fans will still get some entertainment out of this one, but sadly, we didn’t find this one to be all that fun.
Related Items
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[…] With Scissors’ POSTAL franchise has finally made its way to Sony consoles with the launch of POSTAL 4: No Regerts on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. The first-person shooter is bigger and better than ever, […]
[…] year we took a look at the ‘finished’ version of POSTAL 4: No Regerts, the latest installment in the POSTAL franchise. The series seemed a bit dead in the water during […]