Postal 4 is a first-person shooter developed and published by Running With Scissors, and it’s a follow-on from Postal 2. Yes, that is right. We skipped straight passed 3 into 4. I am not sure why, but we will speak of this no more. For those who know, you know, and for others who don’t, just forget about it. Now buckle up, as this will be a rough read, just as the game was a rough one to play. So much so that I could not even get through it all.

I like to think I am extremely open-minded as I don’t care what people do or say. I have no emotional connection to any sort of touchy subject. This gives me the ability to watch and play games that are considered controversial. The way I see it, as long as it has a good story, is fun to play, etcetera, I don’t care about the cancel culture issues. It is not my job to critique on behalf of others hurt feelings, but boy, was Postal 4 treading the line.

In Postal 4, you play as The Postal Dude and follow the same system as in Postal 2; you are stranded and need money to keep moving. It is here you must search for money in the fictional Arizona city, Edensin. Get it? Eden and Sin. As I was saying, it is pretty much a copy of Postal 2, running errands to make money in the sketchiest way possible for sketchy people, all the while listening to terrible jokes that are often out of place or not related to anything happening.

They’re just randomly blurted out. I could forgive a lot of this game’s humor if it was a little cleverer, like South Park, Family Guy, or SNL comedy, where they make controversial jokes, but they are done in such a way that we can appreciate the humor of it. Postal 4 tries this, and for the most part, they are close, but more often than not, it misses the punchline and ends up being unfunny toilet humor.

Gameplay is Janky at best. Firefights seem like one giant slow-framed mess. You might shoot someone, but it doesn’t look like you have shot them. Navigating items and weapons is a chore. You put away your weapon using L1, but this isn’t used to pull it out again. Instead, you have to hold down L1 and bring up the weapon wheel, which is also a pain to use.

The easiest mechanic of the game is whipping your dick out, which in the grand scheme of things, is the least useful thing in this game. I just feel they could take inspiration from so many different games when it comes to the UI, items, and weapons, rather than wasting a whole button on exposing yourself.

Postal 4 does bring back some nostalgia as it reminds me of my PS2 graphics. Maybe not quite that bad, but close. It looks terrible. You can barely walk a quarter of the map before it just stops to load in the assets of the next area, even though it is one map, and it’s not even that big.

The NPC characters move around the map with no purpose, or even in a way that makes them seem necessary to be there, except to make snide remarks. After the first few missions, like many other games, I like to go off and explore. I tried doing that but got bored after ten minutes, as nothing was engaging. Nothing off in the distance caught my eye and had me wandering for hours completely in awe.

The music is alright. It’s rock music heavy and I have nothing against rock music. Even the voice acting was not great, and the writing could have been stepped up a bit more with the dialogue. Every now and then, the subtitles would double up, and while it wasn’t the worst thing to happen during a conversation, it might need a fix. Ambient sounds were constantly drowned out by dogs barking everywhere, to the point where the dog and cat culling mission started to look better.

This, unfortunately, is a subpar game, and while I am sure it has a loyal cult following, for me, I am afraid it missed all of the marks. At no point did I laugh out loud and rarely did I even smile. My humor is pretty dark and I normally love games like this, but not this one. It needed better writing with more intelligent setups for its jokes, a better UI and item/weapon management, smarter NPCs with more human interactions, and better combat graphics. I am sure some people will enjoy this, but I’m also concerned about the well-being of those people. Are you ok?

Written by: Adam Brasher