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.

Being developed by Running With Scissors means they pass the sniff test automatically. I never played 3 but I did know it stunk up the whole community's nostrils. Fortunately, with literal feces on every bathroom floor, the real sequel to POSTAL 2 is back.

I appreciate bringing back Rick Hunter, as well as letting you choose Jon St. John (the "intended" new VA for The Dude) or Corey Cruise (the POSTAL 3 Dude). Also they reintroduced the nice little stuff like the famous "petition", catnip being a strategic buff, health "pipes" which oh-so-cleverly skirted ESRB rules of old, and the fact you can literally walk into people's houses in the style of traditional RPGs.

POSTAL 4 is not so much an sequel on POSTAL 2 as it is a take on POSTAL 2 for the modern age. It was going to be a remake until they got enough creative ideas to just start new. That does not mean any kind of BS pandering or any of the offensiveness being toned down, but just the opposite. It does mean tons of COVID references, political hot takes and pop culture references, and accommodations for the 18 years that's passed, such as the Dude now having a smartphone. You can even see a screen protector on that sucker!

Some of the frustrations from POSTAL 2 return, too. These difficulties include: massive amounts of backtracking that stretch from sides of the area to sides of the map, loading zones like the old game (clearly marked), and a few opportunities to really screw yourself and softlock any further progression. There is an area northwest of the Chinese gazebo that if you fall into the canyon you'll be unable to get back up to Edensin.

The rampages are not bad, just poorly designed. Most of them are just "kill these [x] people in [y] seconds". It is a mistake that you can start them without having the necessary weapons equipped.

The game is technically "1.0", but even the developers know it is not fully cooked, it's just a way to say the game is no longer "Early Access". Hourly crashes (with default UE4 crash reporting, wow!) put a damper on the experience. The game is fairly unoptimized on higher settings, leading you to either reduce your resolution or some of the effects to get it to a more desirable 60fps or greater.

Despite these sizeable concerns, which would turn someone who did not like or play 2 into a "not recommend" review, there is still plenty of game to be found here and heart put into the project. And I am looking forward to seeing this game through to the end.

tl;dr: Currently 6/10. Worth $19.99, and buy it cheaper if possible.

I really enjoy the Postal series, with Postal 1 & 2 being so different to each other and yet both being iconic for their own reasons. Unfortunately, whilst this game is definitely not bad and I have enjoyed the modern take on the more offensive and humorous Postal 2 vibe of this game, to me, it just did not feel necessarily revolutionary. The availability of choosing Postal Dude's voice actor from a roster that includes Zack Ward from the live-action Postal movie, it felt like a nice touch to this game.

I'm beyond disappointed, the gameplay is cool, but the game's overall structure is beyond dogshit. The objectives lead the dude to them instead of being made by the dude making them feel more like a chore than the chores of P2.
The world itself feels empty unlike postal 2 where everyone seems insane but you, in postal 4 no one but the dude do crazy things. There's no moment where the objective surprise you with a twist (ex: postal2 piss on the grave and then you get kidnapped by hilly billies or the package blowing up in the postal service).
Nothing in postal 4 matches the marching band of P2. There's no event in P4 all days seem the same (except Friday because it's Friday and you know what happens on Friday. ) There's no "Oh its the day this specific event happens on this side of the map (example: the VR headset in P2 or the ED guy in the asylum or even Zombie Postal Dude Sr)" it's always "Wow I'm walking from this corner of the map to this one and the NPCs are all talking on their phones, standing still or walking".
I keep talking about P2 but even P3 had a better postal atmosphere with all its flaws.
There's no reason to do a pacific run, it doesn't change the outcome or introduce something new it just makes you play the game longer.
The jokes are one of the worst aspects of this game, it's like being on Reddit, I almost expected the Dude to say "kill it with fire" by the number of unfunny dogshit lines you get and the amount of "LOOK, IT LOOK LIKE A PENIS DUDE. ISNT IT FUNNY WE MADE THE ROCKS LOOK LIKE A PENIS? WE ALSO PUT PENIS STATUES LOL, LOOK THE MUMMY HAS A PENIS TOO". It's frustrating.

Just finish making Eternal Damnation like you had to
No DLC will save this game. I regret everything.,

Title: Postal 4: No Regerts
Genre: Action/Adventure, FPS, Shooter
Graphics: 3/5
Music: 4/5
Sound: 3/5

Strong Suits:
☠ Great gun models and sounds
☠ Classic Postal chaos
☠ Amazingly good cinematics (shockingly good in contrast to the rest)
☠ Good power-ups and items with some items returning from old games and some new
☠ Large map with lots of freedom of where you go

Weak Points:
☠ Visual bugs
☠ Near constant crashing
☠ Bosses not spawning or spawning in the wrong place
☠ Unexplainable bugs constantly
☠ Some weapon boxes will not return your gear, forcing you to get everything again
☠ Some doors will de-spawn or disappear forcing you to be trapped forever
☠ Some bugs can make the game unplayable forcing a total restart
☠ Most store and house interiors are totally barren

Comments: In its current state I cannot recommend this, not even as an early access title.
It has really good roots and definite potential but it is in a very poor state currently.

If you liked Postal 2, then what this game is supposed/going to be will be good for you, but in its current state, it's nearly unplayable. I couldn't even complete the game due to the door in the mall disappearing after I finished the errand there, even no clip and teleport cheats cannot get me out of the mall.

The map is huge and you can go into almost every house and business, which sounds cool till you realize that most of them are totally barren. Just a house asset that is totally empty. The ones that aren't empty are hit or miss if there will be stuff no clipping through walls, or if it will actually look like an interior.

Another side note, not a huge deal, but all the gun animations and reloads are great, but when you reload the shotgun, the shells just kinda spawn in your palm. Like I said, not a big deal, just lazy.

It honestly makes me pretty sad. I wish that I would have waited because I do believe that this will eventually be a good Postal game, but right now, it's nothing more than a pretty empty romp around that gets annoying and frustrating due to its bugs and lack of stability. My suggestion is to wait till it is more complete, I got this on sale and I am still disappointed.

The only way I recommend this is if you are a hardcore Postal fan who wants to support the devs despite progress. With that being said even then I would be wary seeing as they have OK'd another game to be made by another dev team.

Overall Score: 1.5/5

I remember first playing this game in early access back a couple of years ago and remember quite enjoying it. Upon further reflection, I played Postal III so maybe I was a bit biased when RWS was working on this one again.

Postal 4 is supposed to be the sequel to the "Worst Game Ever", that being Postal 2 since RWS doesn't want to mentioned Postal III (despite constantly mocking it every chance they get). Postal 2 is a very polarizing game. It's not really that funny in terms of writing, but I did find it completely engaging because of how self-aware the comedy was and plus because of the gameplay being so ridiculous that I couldn't help but love it. Postal 4 looked like it was going back to that style but now in a more "janky" and "glitchy" direction. The main problem with Postal 4 though is that it's boring. Nothing exciting ever happens from my knowledge. I only played the first two days (Monday and Tuesday) before uninstalling it from my computer.

The city of Edensin is bland. True there are peds walking around the streets and you can enter stores and buildings, but there's no peds inside the buildings leading to nothing but empty spaces. And getting around to it is so tiring. True there are fast travel but the time it takes for them to work due to the game's long and ridiculous loading times, is equal to how far you drive in those scooters, which are the only source of vehicles of transportation in the game. RWS did say they're gonna add in new vehicles in the game...which they should have done at the full release but whatever.

Performance was another issue people had with the game. I never really ran into that many problems though. The closest I got was when the game crashed when I was loading an autosave (which I was gonna close the game anyway and uninstall it around that time anyway). The AI is also sort rotten, mostly applying to enemies. I never encountered a bunch of glitches. I only got a sewer rat floating in mid air, an NPC having an issue just trying to sit down on a chair, and when riding my scooter I just clipped through some of the NPC's when trying to run them over.

Postal 4 doesn't feel like a proper sequel to Postal 2, rather more like a cheap bootleg ripoff of the game. It's not as bad as other gaming journalists make it out to be, but if we are comparing this game to Postal 2, it doesn't even come close to it. Just play Postal 2 instead.

Trash. There's a few moments that are good in concept but 96% of this game is absolute ass.

Play Postal: Brain Damaged instead

If you want a successor to Postal 2, perhaps Cruelty Squad is a better answer to that. This ain't it.

I don't think it's possible to make a "true" sequel to Postal 2 nowadays.

I'm not talking about the offensive humor or the minutiae of its small-scale sandbox and the chaos it lets you indulge in. What makes Postal 2 an exceedingly tricky game to follow up on is the era in which it was produced. Postal was created in the era of outrage. The finest example of this would be Grand Theft Auto and the numerous outrages it spawned at the time. But GTA never let you put a cat's ass on the barrel of your shotgun or go around peeing on people until they vomited. For all of its attempts at humor, Postal 2 was made in poor taste purely to get attention, and it worked wonders. Its content has slightly more historical merit in this medium than, 'hey, wasn't that the game that got banned in several countries?'—at least, if you're in America. It's thanks to Postal 2 that the M rating comes with two separate labels for violence outside of the Cartoon and Fantasy parameters, 'Violence' and 'Intense Violence.'

The problem now is that things don't "work" that way anymore. If there's any game in the past fifteen years that changed how Americans look at the way their games are rated, it's arguably Manhunt 2, and that's only because of how many politicians petitioned for it to get an Adults Only rating. Outside of that, which is small-beans compared to the irreversible change to the American rating system caused by Postal 2, there hasn't been much on offer. In the past ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find another game like that. The closest analog is Hatred, which caught fire for treating Mass Shootings with more leeway than Uwe Boll. In a sense, Hatred almost surpasses Postal 4 in terms of relevance, if only because it mirrors the hellscape many Americans have constantly lived in fear of for over two decades at this point. Making a game about a mass shooting on that scale and not marketing it to outright weirdos who get off to the sight of Japanese school uniforms is like a cheat code for making your game controversial. Twenty years ago, it was easy to assume that any game that let you kill droves of nameless, faceless NPCs was a straight ticket to hell, much, in the same way, D&D was for the greater part of the 80s' Satanic Panic kicked off by the detestable con-woman Beatrice Sparks. All you have to do now is go through a Post Malone phase and put on this façade of having to say something "important", even if the only words you're saying constitute little more than shock value printed on the half-price pulp that the National Economic Registry hastily rejects in secret, and people will try their damnedest to take you seriously. Jack Thompson is dead.

This is the precise predicament that Postal 4 finds itself in: after its developer sold its soul to the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts, an act only decried by ardent fans and the developers' post-mortem, the goalpost had moved. When your live-action adaptation only makes headlines because very few people find it funny, and the quotes you're cherry-picking from for marketing revert back to calling it a weaker version of South Park... what's the point? By the time Postal 4 was released in early access, it had been several years since a room full of critics applauded the Kevin Smith movie where Dante Hicks and Randal Graves argue about whether or not going ass-to-mouth is justified for minutes on end. Good Boys, a 2019 movie about children, had a trailer so perverse and explicit that I could see my dad physically recoiling in his seat whenever a trailer for it showed up in the theater we were at. To say that the shtick that worked in 2003 is something that would only spark protest from The Vegan Teacher in 2022 is being exceptionally polite.

On top of all of this... Postal 4's just not very fun. Okay, I'll admit that Postal 2 isn't exactly a high watermark for the medium as a whole. But to say that that's all it is is a reduction. It's dumb fun dry-aged in gold leaf. Once you crack through its shell, the center you're left is with is something that doesn't have much appeal outside of being a digital stress ball with piss-and-shit jokes and a cameo from Gary Coleman, but cutting right to the center is missing the point. It's fun to look around and find new weapons, find your way across the labyrinthine map to buy a Christmas tree in the middle of July, and play around with the surprisingly reactive world in front of you. Sure, it doesn't have the taste of something like Grand Theft Auto, and shivering behind all of the things that I like about it is just about the trashiest game I've ever played, but it's got replay value. What value does riding a mobility scooter across a map that's too large to entertain for more than a second have? "Grand Theft Auto had cars, and now so do we" is the exact mindset that Running With Scissors mocked in Postal 2, and it's something that's shamelessly regurgitated here without any of the wit or subversiveness seen previously; it's in here because Postal 2 had it, and if it's something they can reuse, self-awareness is off the fucking table. The combat's fun, but the AI somehow lags behind a game twenty years its senior. If you really, really want more Postal 2 to the point where you barely have any standards, look no further, but this is the exact kind of reduction that I warned against with nothing to dress it up.

It's not much of an Emperor's New Clothing for Running With Scissors to be met with derision, it's what they based their brand on. Hell, they're marketing this game right now with the 1/10 that GameSpot gave it. Here's where I suggest something completely different: Postal 4 is not only a weaker game than its predecessor; it's also a lazier one. Right down to flaunting the critical reception like a badge of honor! The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in this case, boy howdy have things not changed at all.

Want to make a proper sequel to Postal 2? Forget the apocalypse, forget a contemporary setting, forget mobility scooters and jokes about Karens and that one Tiger King guy and also COVID. None of that is relevant, and you might as well be making a game in another series if you believe it is. Postal built its brand of regression, and the funny thing is, it worked. Not one-hundred-percent, but I guarantee you that the first two games in this series are far more timeless than this will ever be. As I said, it was the era of outrage. 3D had only been a thing for one-and-a-half generations prior, and with video games only being readily available to the consumer for two to three decades, it's easy to argue that aspects of the medium were still in their infancy. Postal wasn't infamous for how good its gameplay was or how particularly shocking it was, it was part of a wave of digital entertainment that set a precedent. Decades apart, speaking about how regressive the series was is speaking about history.

If they wanted to make a true Postal 4, they had to embrace that. Set it back in the early 2000s, or, hell, late 90s. Make it a commentary on the crazed American politics that fueled both games with the stunning insight that such a large gap in time has caused, while also paying mind to the new wave of gaming it was a part of. You don't need a massive map or aspects that feel appropriated from other, much better contemporary titles. Fuck struggling to catch up, this should have been behind.

I know it comes off as pompous and arrogant to readily assume that you could do better than someone else when creativity is involved. Especially in game development, dick-swinging is what typically leads to developers slaving away for years and, in some cases, over a decade on something that might not work out in the end. But consider how fascinating it would have been if Postal 4 actually embraced its roots instead of chasing the bitter aftertaste that III left in everyone's mouth. I'm sure the developers would know; their CEO was unironically tweeting before the 2020 election about how Joe Biden should be thrown in Guantanamo Bay for crimes that haven't been proven.

At least I bought these games before discovering the developer's Twitter...

AUDIENCES LOVED POSTAL 4: NO REGERTS

CRITICS PUT OUT THE HIT

WHO WOULD YOU TRUST MORE? YOURSELF, OR A TROLL BEHIND A KEYBOARD?

POSTAL 4: OUT NOW