Postal 2 Review
Originally the deadline was a bit harsh, so Martin shot us. With his bare hands.
Version tested: PC
One has to wonder what Running With Scissors have been doing since the original Postal's release in 1997. Making friends with Gary Coleman and selling homemade cookies to save up for an Unreal engine license we suppose. Postal was - in a word - dire, so have Running With Scissors become big or clever while the videogaming world has matured around them?
Shock tactics

What is a pinko, anyway?
The idea behind Postal 2, say Running With Scissors, is that it's only as violent as you are. Certainly, there may be submachine guns, shotguns, shovels and Molotov cocktails arbitrarily placed throughout (ugh) "Postal Dude's" hometown of Paradise, but you don't have to use them. You can, if you like, spend a week of the Dude's life fulfilling the menial tasks that form the trials and tribulations of our trench-coated protagonist.
But that's not how it works. You can either let the game provoke you into a homicidal rage, or you can die and reload. We'll take one of the first missions as an example: pick up your pay cheque. We saunter across town, taking in the sights, watching the inhabitants of Paradise going about their business, trekking through two traffic tunnels which signify load points of roughly 90 seconds each until we finally arrive at work - the Running With Scissors office. Once you've picked up your cheque (and been fired, as it turns out), the picketing parents outside decide to take their protest up a notch and storm the offices with assault rifles in the game's first supposed effort at irony.
Now, you can try to flee unscathed, but it's not going to happen unless you're playing on the absolute easiest setting. You either die and reload, or fight back. And so it goes on. Once you're (somewhat willingly) pushed over the edge, it can admittedly be fun to indulge in the opportunities for mindless violence that arrive at every turn of a corner, and in every random box of a building you enter. However, knocking the heads off civilians with a shovel, using cats as shotgun silencers, and setting fire to marching bands before extinguishing the flames with a stream of your own urine wears thin in about an hour's play, after which there is nothing to do but trawl through the game completing menial tasks by any means necessary.
Desperate measures

I honestly have no words.
And you really do have to employ any means necessary, as the game starts to become so ridiculously hard that creatively despatching adversaries is usually sidestepped in favour of getting shot of the uncannily accurate and curiously armoured civilians and/or police officers as quickly as possible. Somehow able to take a couple of shotgun blasts to the head, marauding Paradise-ites are usually more likely to whip out the firearms than even you are, when they're not showing you the finger and calling you a "f**king pinko."
It really does feel as if the odds are stacked right up against you right from the outset, and it's usually easy enough to become accidentally embroiled in violence and find yourself being cuffed by the cops just for defending yourself when masked gunmen rob the bank, which prompts a relocation to jail and your subsequent escape. Either that, or you die and reload. Again.
When you aren't killing (and even when you are for the most part), Postal 2 is not fun. You queue up at a bank, you queue up at a convenience store, you witness flagrant racial stereotypes paraded as comedy, you walk past billboards showcasing unfunny jokes... it's boring. Extremely boring. Traipsing back and forth across the uninspiring levels to achieve pointless goals, and often having to sit through two or three load points in the process, only compounds the dullness.
Witless

Taking the bid to appeal to all types of meat eater a little too far.
Frankly, after about two hours with Postal 2, the whole thing begins to reek of a flimsy attempt to goad "Family Values"-oriented politicians, and not much more. The Unreal-powered visuals are just about of a whimsical quality, as are the supposedly "motion captured" animations, although the exterior environments are a little more detailed and lusher than the plain, boxy interiors throughout the game's sprawling map. The weaponry is poorly balanced (it's actually easier to bump someone off with a shovel than an assault rifle), but does allow for some creativity. Our preferred method of "self defence" was to lead a trail of oil to a larger pool, step well back with a lit match and wait for them to come running. Whoof, toasty, but again fun for five minutes until we start looking for something else to do.
If the comedic side of the game reached any level of sophistication beyond playing keep-ups with a severed head and urinating on passers-by until they puke, then Postal 2 could have been marginally more entertaining. GTA3 managed it - senseless violence, sardonic wit, genuine humour, and apparently menial tasks peppered with a sense of fun that urges you to continue. There is no reason something similar could not have been pulled off with Postal 2, aside from the fact that Running With Scissors clearly wouldn't know intelligent comedy if it used their rear ends for a silencer - the biographies page on the RWS website says more about these witless hacks than we ever could.
Throughout the game, there are references to the use of the videogame industry as a scapegoat for nannying politicians and American gun lobbyists refusing to take responsibility for the state of the few misguided crackpots that make the news every so often. However, instead of using their position wisely and crafting a scathing, sophisticated social satire of middle America, Running With Scissors have chosen to flaunt their freedom of expression in the worst possible sense - with provocation rather than consideration - and they haven't even managed to come up with a decent piece of entertainment.
Conclusion
We were hoping Running With Scissors would be capable of pulling off more than a decent looking Half-Life mod crafted by a 13 year-old boy with a concerning fetish for mindless slaughter, but that's what it feels like we've been playing. The basic toilet humour running through the piece can't hide the short-lived gameplay, and leads to an extremely unfulfilling and tiresome experience that any sane person would be hard-pressed to push on with.
We honestly can't think of a reason to recommend that you purchase Postal 2, so save your money. Download the demo, find out how to extend the timer, and you'll have all the fun you're likely to get from the retail version.
3 / 10
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Comments (72) Latest comment 5 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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Indeed.
the biographies page on the RWS website says more about these witless hacks than we ever could.
Yeah for EG. I dislike the muppets too.
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Phil Murphy is a writer and political activist who co-founded the civil rights organization Brassroots, Inc., a decade ago. Having captured two felons at gunpoint on two separate occasions, he's twice testified before the United States Congress in defense of Americans' right to keep and bear arms.
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Fact is, Red Neck Rampage did it years ago and looked better (even though it used the creaking Duke Nukem 'Build' engine).
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Why do I feel Errol will be playing this for years to come?
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God you're not wrong!
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I'm using IE6 by the way.
Edit: it's happening in Opera as well, all other review's screenshots are fine, hmm I wonder what's different about my PC?
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Same here...
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Oh my god, you are obviously 13. I claim my free donit.
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Arhh, thanks.
BTW, can we still be friends?
Apologise for spelling humour wrong, first.
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Because, as this is just my opinion, the game is created by morons for juveniles who get there kicks from the disgusting. Its a sicked, fucked up game and that's the only selling point it has.
This game was a fresh breathe in all the crappy fps games that have been released the last couple of months.
Postal 2 isn't a hundredth of the game Vietcong is.
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Oh my god a chinese guy, weeeeee.
They're Vietnamese. There's a huge difference. You should know regardless of the game.
The game was to friggin green
Yep, the jungle does have a habit of being green. Its one of those things it does.
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Ok.
I just wonder where there any monkeys in vietcong? Just wondering, because i didn't find any monkey.
Not found any yet. But there are chickens.
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Nope.
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Well, I haven't seen any, but you can hear them. Actually a very good moment in the game, when the guide stops, raises his arm and whispers "Monkeys!".
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Please take you head out of your arse and admit that you liked it at least a wee bit."
He did say that he liked it - as I recall, "for all of five minutes". And I feel much the same. We aren't jumping on it because it's shocking and appalling, because, let's face it, we spend most of our lives wreaking havoc for reasons badly explained by talking animals, and murdering with impunity over and over again until we rack up enough sequential slaughter to advance to the next killing spree. Such is the life of a gamer.
No, we're disappointed on two levels. Firstly, because despite employing a bunch of self-proclaimed rights campaigners and using it as a mouthpiece to bang on about the injustice of the week, all we have here is the worst sort of shock value. It looks like the developer wanted attention, rather than kudos for producing a proper satire, something that frankly I doubt RWS has the imagination to do. They're hardly the games industry's Chris Morris.
And secondly we're disappointed because it's just such a crap game! The missions are boring, the design and scripting are both overly frustrating, the weapon balance is rubbish, the storyline is laughable yet not funny, the load times are ridiculous, the visuals manage to make the Unreal engine look feeble and there isn't even a multiplayer mode.
I doubt that anybody is going to stop the multi-billion-dollar games industry in its tracks at this stage - not with the sort of ill-conceived, witless arguments that idiotic politicians with no grasp on reality were coming out with a few years ago. But if somebody does want to, then that somebody probably paid to develop Postal 2, because it lives up to every stereotype they might want to parade in front of the world. It's like a student standing up at a press conference to heckle the Prime Minister. It helps the wrong cause.
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Secondly, goto the postal site and have a look at their mail in which people have written in claiming postal is the second coming. Me thinks its one guy writing in over and over again. If this ain't the case, i'm really worried, that the world is being taken over by rednecks (and they mainly hail from america, funny that!). If you want something sick and humourous go rent yourself a copy of Badtaste, that my friends is funny and twisted at the same time (and its australian, funny that!). This bag of shite is well, shite.
Oh yeah WWERAW2 SUXZ as well as ZOIDS.....
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Yeah, Gary Coleman. They've made a massive deal of his involvement in the game, and it's actually probably the best thing about it.
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This game ain't sounding too bad now.
I wonder what happened to his brother?
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Peej
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Actually, Bad Taste is from New Zealand. Incidentally, that movie is the directorial debut of one Peter Jackson, of LotR fame.
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Unlike that phrase, which is damna annoyinga
Amajiro, damn, I wanted that one!
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£20 as well or £18.99 at Gamestation.I might actually buy it.
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Wow! Your logic is incredible. Don't like Postal2 = don't like gaming.
Postal2 is not for you.
That'd probably be because he's not got the mentality of a 12 year old.
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Oh, and I did spell it cheque. How about you learn to read before telling me to learn how to spell?
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No, we do. We just don't think it's funny. 'Puerile' is the word most of us would use. Look it up if you don't understand.
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Actually, Bad Taste is from New Zealand. Incidentally, that movie is the directorial debut of one Peter Jackson, of LotR fame. "
"Mmm, I got a chunky bit!"
Peej
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Anyway, insulting the reviewer's ability to play games is a great way to engage in sensible discussion. It's almost on a par with the level of maturity in Postal 2. What's more, you're banging on about small things you disagreed with, then claiming that the game rocked in spite of them. What about the rest of the problems? And why are you rushing to defend Running With Scissors? If they didn't want people to lay into them then they shouldn't have made such a provocative game. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, "they".
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Still great logic. So if I struggle with Postal I'll struggle with every game on this planet? Does that include Civilisaton, C&C or Zelda? I hope you have some studies to back up this stupid theory of yours.
Aren't journalists supposed to be objective anymore? (and no a token, *fun for 5 minutes* doesn't cut it)
Considering quite a number of reviews on the internet agree that this game is shite, including quite a number of individuals here, perhaps you're in the minority.
And no, you can not be objective when reviewing a game. If that's how you feel about reviewers than you've missed the entire point of the industry.
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suck my FAT JEW cock
erm ... quite.
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I reckon you don't like them cos you suck at them and hence, using your formula, I can deduce you suck at all games.
First Person Shooters are the easiest mindless games around. You run around and shoot people, nothing to it.
Never played Vietcong, have you?
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Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Good point. 10/10 then.
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I kind of grew out of that many years ago.
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suck my FAT JEW cock
Hm, you learn something new every day... I for one was not aware of the fact that poultry was (or could be) of any particular faith. A tale to astonish, really... thank you for enlightening this seemingly undereducated specimen of the human race. I am truely glad that individuals so clearly my intellectual superior lower themselves to my level in order to share their wisdom... on a computer games forum, no less! I always thought that those were prone to visits from stupid teenagers... am I glad I was wrong!
I still don´t want to suck your rooster, though (jewish or otherwise)... I´m a vegetarian, you know. Thank you for the kind offer though.
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Mugwum hit the nail in the head, since all those posts seem quite similar (and also written within a short time span, although this could be a coincidence). The fact is all of those posts defending RWS/Postal 2 seem to replicate the same type of juvenile mediocre humour and flame the reviewer instead of giving any reasons that could stand in favour of this game.
Having played the demo I'd have to agree I'd never buy such a pile of worthless nonsense. It's not just the bad taste but the very limited and repetitive gameplay that make it worth 20p, not £20. To be honest I wouldn't play it even if I could (legally) download the full version from the net for free.
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I give you 1/10.
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ROFL!
Nah it's just a rehash of "Tea Coseieey 1 - WWF Rumpage"
Peej
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an interesting theological point given that, according to the myths, Satan is seeking redemption and is hence endeavouring to be good in that hope that his dad would forgive him (oops, sorry, I meant 'God' not 'dad', the ghost of Freud is on my shoulder). So, when you say 'Evil Satanic way' do you actually mean, "an empty and ultimately futile rebellion that is attempting to gain attention from negligent parents."?
Oh, and Postal 2 would appear to suck.
Which would appear to suit 'Fuck's request. Ideal match of game and gamer.
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Don't you mean dog?
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Have any of you heard of Steve Erwin. Hes like %90 of the reason australia is considered the home of bad taste. Ohh and maybe the old fat men that wear stubbies. Not to mention...
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Just checked it is a New Zealand Film - bit risky calling it Australian - you know how insulted and pissed off the kiwis get when you accidently call them Aussies.
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Either that or Evil Dead, that is such a funny film.
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yes. Yes I did. It should have read, "Satan is seeking redemption and is hence endeavouring to be good in that hope that his dog would forgive him."
Thanks for pointing this out!
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I'm sure the dog would, they are generally pretty forgiving creatures.
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Aussies also get pissed off when called kiwis. Couldnt you jusst tell by there accents that it was a new zealand movie???(there accent is the one where none of the vowels sound like they should. Try and make them say "ill smack you in the back of the head with my back pack while i eat fish and chips"
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!!I JUST DONT LIKE THE GAME!!
THATS IT no more to say.
i rate this game a
1outof5
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And the circle of life continues.
If there's one thing that would make my life complete it would be to kill an elephant. I dream about it all of the day all of night. I wake up in pools of sweat, my heart still beating after another night of thinking about how much of a better person I would be if I could shoot one of those grey giants. If only.
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