This game tried to be Postal 2 so hard and it just failed.

The humor, gameplay, glitches, bugs... it goes on.

But it's still fun when everything works.

So uh, postal 4, since I played the first version of it and yeah it was terrible... Did my review changed? well yeah and now i'm coming with the full review after beating the game, let's start with some cons.

Endless bugs, performance issues.

Now let me explain, so if you ever finished postal 4 you know how many bugs this game has. I don't need to count them even RWS know about this issue and they are trying to fix it.
I encountered less bugs in postal 3 in the DRM update which is funny but yeah.

As for the performance... That gotta be the worst THING ever, why RWS switched to unreal? (again) my game crashed atleast 20 times after I loaded a new map, yet again this happened in postal 2 as well but not this often. And the framerate is very random, in some places it runs smooth and sometimes the game lags out of nowhere and it makes it unplayable. I was getting tired of the unreal engine report bug tool, so let's move to the story.

The story is simple, dude lost his trailer home and he ends up in edensin, there he takes jobs just like in postal 2 or 3.
You have new characters like kunny (the female version of krotchy) civvie11 as a boss for some reason lol and the final boss which i'm not gonna spoil it. But in the end is the classic postal story route.

Again, thank you RWS for releasing updates that heals this game, at the current moment this game is still pretty forgettable for the majority of people playing it. I might replay it after 3 years or so, had some major bugs in my playthrough and I HOPE it gets fixed.

Now for the final question... Is it worth to get this game in his current state? (11/17/2023) Hell no, trust me wait a bit and then give it a try. RWS is trying to fix this game with major updates so yeah wait until the game is right. The stars are there, might change this review when I will replay it one day.

Man, where to even start with this one. I have played Postal 4 since Alpha when it was first offered. A new Postal game?? Sign me up! I played through all the days and finished the game when the Friday update dropped. I know since then there have been tons of updates and optimizations, but it's just not worth going back to right this moment.

If you want the humor Postal 2 had, it's there however its more in your face. Which is one of my main gripes. Postal 2 was more subtle with its references, whereas Postal 4 is along the lines of "ZOMG go to the Game of Thrones Toilet store and install Bidets, but watch out for Peter Dinklage!" or with the return of the voting errand, but with WACKY BROKEN VOTING MACHINES, REMEMBER THE 2020 ELECTION?!?! At least in Postal 2, the political commentary was less ham-fisted.

I felt the design of some of the areas was severly lacking. Way too open and drawn out, with large expanses of empty map between areas. The layout of the map was also confusing, requiring me to pull out my map every 20 seconds. This is even WITH a minimap.

I don't mean this personally, but John St. John is the shittiest Postal dude VA. I'm serious. I would take Zack Ward over his performance any day. I am glad they included all VA's for the Dude that you can select from, Rick Hunter immediately.

I also felt the overall story/plot was missing something. Every errand felt disjointed, as well as the people you were doing errands for. The reveal at the end of Friday was also horrible, it retconns an entire sequence of Postal 2 that I adore playing through. It felt cheap. Same with the mall shootout, cheap arena fight that had an out-of-left-field payoff.

I would say play it, but its not worth multiple playthroughs

One of my beliefs of what makes Postal 2 so special is that it can't exactly be replicated or built upon in the same way, and after playing this on-and-off for a couple years and trying to complete a full playthrough, it seems I've been proven correct.

There's nothing exactly wrong with it, per se; if all you've come to expect from the Postal franchise is random murder sprees and topical humor, you'll get it here, though with it being somehow more dated than its predecessor due to the crowbar-like inclusion of it in the main errands rather than just things you can happen upon if you looked hard enough. The main issue is the development and how the game runs.

See, the development of Postal 4 is the embodiment of 2 steps forward, one step back. For every 10gb update that adds some creative mechanic or new weapons that are genuinely fun to mess around with, it also breaks a number of things that to this day haven't been fixed.

For example, one of the first new things that was shown off because RWS finally got their hands on UE4 is the ability to piss in toilets, have the toilet fill up, and be able to flush it. Not only did this break some time ago, instead of fixing it, they included an achievement for completing the action, which everyone can still get despite no part of the process working. Seriously, there are achievement guides on Steam that detail how to get everything else, and then just shrug their shoulders and go "i don't know how but you can still get it" when it comes to that one.

I expect a Postal game to be janky and buggy; RWS is known for things like that. As much as I like Postal 2, I'm not going to deny that it's held together with spit and tape. But at least everything in the core of Postal 2 functions correctly. I never had to stop playing it because a game breaking bug happened, unlike Postal 4 where I had to stop at Thursday because I couldn't complete the last errand cause my game kept crashing.

All in all, treat this game is if it were still in Early Access if you want to preserve your sanity. If you want a game that at the very least sets out to do what it's supposed to, give it another year or so when they release enough updates where they steal the dildo bat from Saints Row or whatever that they also actually manage to make the game playable.

edit: UPDATE 1.3.1 IS OUT AND IT'S AMAZING. IF YOU WERE DISAPPOINTED BY THE GAME ON RELEASE I HIGHLY RECOMMEND CHECKING IT OUT NOW.

The Backloggd rating and kneejerk fan reactions seem to indicate my initial response to Postal 4's release was the same as many others'. Disgust. So I absolutely get where y'all are coming from when you hate on Postal 4. So don't brush me off when I tell you that Postal 4 is a great game.

Let's get this out of the way: yes, most of my old complaints still apply to this game in the year of our Lord 2024. Postal 4 is a janky mess, riddled with bugs and horrid difficulty spikes. It's also an indie game with a massive scope. It's worth noting that many people complained about Postal 2 back in the day in much the same way people are complaining about Postal 4 now.

When I began my playthrough, I was trying to breeze through the days in much the same way I would in my optimized runs of Postal 2. However, I quickly ran into issues. Attempting to speed demon my way from point to point left me feeling worn out even after just an hour or two of play. When I started taking my time, seeing the sights, vibing with the silly cutscenes, dissecting people with the fantastic arsenal of new weapons, that's when Postal 4 clicked. This is a vibrant and dense game. Shitty jokes and side content are plastered just about everywhere a modern game engine would allow. It's arguably the best open world I've seen a game, where the copypasting is minimal and every space feels like it serves a purpose, not to pad out game size. It's certainly better than whatever Starfield has going on. And that game has a higher rating than this!

I don't mean to get hung up over the critical reception of Postal 4. If a RWS-developed game is ever universally beloved, something has gone terribly wrong. It just really sucks to see so many Postal 2 fans shit on something that was clearly a passion project for the team. Don't let its reputation or performance issues dissuade you from checking it out. Postal 4 is a worthwhile, chaotic jankfest. That's a good thing.

Had a rough launch and has a long way to go imo before it reaches the heights of Postal 2 or Paradise Lost, but I still like it a lot as a fan of RWS and the Postal series. I have fun running around its sandbox and causing trouble, love driving the vehicles. The weapons all feel really good, and the recent addition to dropkick people at 400 miles an hour is beautiful. Lotta moments made me laugh and gave me a big silly grin. I like how replayable each day seems to be and I love that the game is fully voiced by every actor who's played the Postal Dude so you can enjoy it with your favorite.

The bugginess is the main reason I deduct points though. They've patched it a lot and are continuing to clean and improve the game which is great, but it's still kinda frustrating to deal with broken progress triggers or crashes that were still there as of my most recent run.

I love it a lot though and it is a much more worthy sequel than Postal 3 ever was.

i have a lot to say on this one. i highly recommend it if you're obsessed with the postal series as i am, however, it is still very much unpolished. i really wish it were optimized better since frame rate and lag are big issues with this one.

the humor is a bit corny and outdated, as a lot of it references memes or events that happened between 2018-2022, and you know how things get uh... old quick, if that makes sense? an example of this is a huge billboard in edensin which advertises a satirization of that netflix show 'tiger king', this one was popular during quarantine but its not really something people care or remember today

i love the costumes and having to do side quests to get them, and my favourite part above all are the voice line options. they feature the voice actors of the previous dudes from the other games. epic.

i, however, do not like the plushie collecting. as i write this, its actually impossible to complete. trust me, i tried. 1-3 are stuck behind walls which you cant get through without cheats (and cheats disable achievements.. soooo...) i really hope rws fixes this because its honestly very frustrating, and getting around the map is so tedious, the bike helps but not by a long shot, i guess im just more used to the postal 2 map but i feel like this one needs a bit more work

The same as Postal 2 (which could be okay) but doesn't really do much. It's got some fun, some unfun side activities but most of the shooting is really eh, and a lot of the locations have potential (as absurd as they may be) but feel empty and quickly assembled. Also the horrible horrible decision to put an outline shader over everything, a bit like that one Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD. I think this might be a better sandbox game than Postal 2, but it really doesn't try anything new and gets lost in references to its own predecessor. You mostly play the game, see an interesting set piece and think: "I'd like to see this being used in an actually good game".