You know, for the big, bad black sheep of the Postal franchise I was expecting something a whole lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some deluded apologist fan trying to convince you this is actually a misunderstood masterpiece or even a good game at all. I'm just saying it's more a cheap and disappointing product than the unplayable affront it's known as. Honestly, I've played a little over half the property's entries and expansions at this point, and PIII is about par for the course in terms of quality. Sorry, not sorry.

Its biggest problem is budgetary, which has continuously proved to be the only thing that has been more detrimental to the series' reputation and reception than even its controversial content. Running with Scissors passed development of the project off to Akella, the company responsible for publishing their works in Russia, and one of its internal studios fittingly named "Trashmasters" because those guys had deeper pockets. Unfortunately, the country's Great Recession from 08-09 completely mucked up any chances for the potential greatness that you can still catch the occasional glimpses of while playing.

The whole package was built around the idea of replayability, featuring a branching storyline that will lead you to one of three possible endings depending on your choices and behavior. The notion of getting to see entirely new content in the form of different missions and cutscenes is as compelling in this format as it is in your typical Western narrative RPG, although it's more than a bit weird that they decided for outcomes to be determined by a morality system. I mean, actively encouraging players to be upstanding, law-abiding citizens in a Postal game?! What sense does that make?

Ultimately however, I didn't find the gameplay enticing enough to pull me back in to go for another ending, and not simply because I feel I happened to pick the most interesting path of the bunch on that first playthrough either. The financial struggles behind the scenes led to this being nothing more than a generic, linear third-person shooter. Admittedly one that can be mindlessly entertaining due to the fun gore and silly guns, even if some weapons don't seem to work (I'm convinced it's impossible to hit anyone with the fire axe). Might have earned a cautious recommendation were it not for the plethora of technical issues. As if long levels without checkpoints weren't enough, I experienced multiple crashes to desktop and repeated instances of critical doors inexplicably failing to open that forced regular mission restarts.

Never knowing if something was about to go wrong and cause me to have to replay possibly lengthy stretches of a stage if I didn't remember to manually save every few minutes is what really kills this for me. I legitimately enjoyed the return to a more grounded style and tone after Apocalypse Weekend, and found the writing fitfully amusing by virtue of how nasty and vulgar they were willing to be with the shock humor in their blatant efforts to offend. It is perhaps worthier of the Postal name than the vast majority give it credit for. Regardless, while I believe the overall general vitriol this has received over the years is a tad overblown, I wouldn't recommend the curious members of the fanbase check it out. The dev's lack of proper funds led to this being too unstable and lackluster to be a fulfilling use of your time. It may be too early to tell for sure as I've still got quite a few releases left to try, but based on all I've gotten to thus far I'm beginning to suspect this property doesn't have anything consequential to offer after its second outing.

5/10

People often make fun of me for being a loser who “only plays bad games” and has “very questionable taste.” To everyone who says this, I’m gonna bluntly say with 100% certainty that these heinous allegations and scathing remarks are entirely correct and I’ve now completed Postal 3.

It goes without saying that Postal 3 is an awful game on just about every conceivable level. I tend to be pretty forgiving of games that have either gone through development hell or just have their fair share of jank in them. But Postal 3 doesn’t simply cross over the line of jank. It goes beyond the line of bad and into the realm of just being terrible at literally everything it tries to do even when it isn’t broken. The shooting is horrible, the tasks are borderline unplayable, the game looks atrocious, the story is an unconnected series of occurrences, the AI barely works, and some of the cutscenes don’t even trigger correctly. I could do a full dissection of how every mechanic, system, and aspect of Postal 3 is poorly constructed in some way– and I would if enough people wanted me to for some reason– but that would only scratch the surface of why the game is so astoundingly bad. Postal 3 isn’t bad simply because it’s poorly developed, but rather because of the failure of its design.

Before we get into Postal 3’s gameplay, I first want to quickly compare it with some of the aspects that make Postal 2’s work. One of the reasons why that game is so unique is because, despite what some people claim, it isn’t designed to be immoral, but amoral. It doesn’t have a morality system because it’s up to you to approach the world and accomplish the tasks however you see fit. You are the morality system, and regardless of the approach you take, the world still treats you the exact same way.

Postal 3, however, has a morality system in it where you are either good or evil. Depending on how many people you kill and how many of the mission objectives you accomplish, you’ll get a different ending and some slight alterations in some of the levels. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this in concept, but the morality system in Postal 3 neither serves to expand nor refine the experience offered by Postal 2. It essentially reduces your playstyle to a matter of ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ depending on the ending you’re aiming for. Since the game is effectively structured around this half baked system, the moment to moment gameplay is not so much a test of mechanical skill or tactical decision making and more a test of patience and endurance. It’s about completing repetitive tasks to reach a predictable ending rather than using your tools to respond to specific scenarios.

But even without the morality system, Postal 3 doesn’t allow the player to experiment with any of its potentially emergent systems and mechanics. Pretty much every action you perform in the game is either blatantly revealed in a tutorial or assigned to you in a mission. The few exceptions to this are simply taken and bastardised from Postal 2 and, frankly, don’t really contribute much of anything to the gameplay.

Comparatively, Postal 2 only teaches the basics of how your tools work and lets you figure out the rest. The different ways they can be combined together to affect both yourself and the surrounding world are left for the player to organically uncover. And the manner in which the world responds to your actions are just as surprising as the actions themselves. It’s a game about discovery through and through.

It would be one thing if Postal 3 was trying to take the series in a new direction based more around the consequences of the player’s choices instead of mechanical discovery. But it does so by reducing the number of gameplay choices from the previous entries while simultaneously maintaining the same expansive arsenal. As such, most of the weapons are completely redundant and useless unless you’re told to use them for whatever objective you’re railroaded through. And since there aren’t any dialogue trees or RPG elements to speak of, the only way to make any choice in the game is directly through the gameplay itself. So the fact that literally every mechanic and system is poorly constructed and barely functional means that Postal 3 doesn’t work as a standalone package, let alone as a follow-up to Postal 2.

However the thing that puts Postal 3 one tier lower than just ‘bad’ is that, despite its blatant nostalgia for Postal 2, it fundamentally doesn’t understand what made its tone/comedy successful either.

Comedy is the art of manipulating and subverting expectations with the intent of reaching a punchline. Succeeding at that requires a background or context for those expectations, whether it be our understanding of a subject or the broader world. Postal 2 presents a twisted perversion of an average American town in the early 2000s, complete with all the mundanity you’d find in such a place. There are houses, grocery stores, office buildings, parks, restaurants, a police station, a post office, a church, a mall, and more; all of which you can enter and explore to your heart’s desire. When you take all the characters and personality out of the city of Paradise, it is a totally regular town just like any other you’d find scattered across the US, and that serves as the context for all the ridiculous things that happen in the game.

Postal 3, on the other hand, is just absurd, and not in a way that expresses anything of substance. The game isn’t exaggerating or manipulating something to make you laugh, it’s instead retelling jokes and memes you’ve already heard before with none of the context or delivery to earn your laughter. It’s a compilation of references and random punchlines without anything in the way of buildup or subversion. Uwe Boll boxing film critics in real life is funny because it’s completely antithetical to how an artist is expected to respond to criticism. Comparatively, Uwe Boll boxing the nerds in Postal 3 is not funny at all because that’s the expected behaviour of a caricature of Uwe Boll. There is no attempt to adapt it into its world or put a unique spin on the story, it’s essentially just a shoehorned reference that you’re expected to laugh at. This is how the vast majority of the “comedy” in the game functions.

When there isn’t a lazy pop culture reference to ruin, the “jokes” devolve into base-level insults and shock content directed at anyone the writers see fit. Whether it’s women, gay people, animal activists, cops, women, the player, or women, Postal 3 will portray them in the most negative, stereotypically 4Chan-tier light they can. While Postal 2 also makes fun of groups of people (with varying degrees of success), it’s generally entertaining because their goals, beliefs, and protests are made to be as blatantly absurd as possible so that their actions are cartoonishly funny. Postal 3, however, just makes the actual beliefs and people the punchline in all of its shock comedy. The hockey moms attack the strip club at the beginning of the game because they’re against the objectification of women for religious reasons. The cops are revealed to be gay (or something like that) because Randy Jones is the gay cop in the Village People. The nerds attack Uwe Boll because they don’t like his movies. Nearly all of the factions in the game are presented as unreasonable people represented by extremely surface-level stereotypes, and that’s the entire punchline. Most of these jokes come off like they’re written with the intent to “trigger the cucks” rather than actually say something funny or interesting. By attempting to spark outrage, it ultimately elicits eyerolls and sighs. When combined with the poor delivery and hamfisted references, the comedy becomes grating very quickly, which is a fatal flaw for a game based around comedy.

Perhaps this a controversial opinion, and I apologise to the many passionate fans of Postal 3 if it is, but even The Postal Dude has been botched in this game. The vast majority of his one liners and jokes are directly lifted from Postal 2, except they sound a little…uncanny because his performance in 3 is very different.

In previous games, The Dude never tells any jokes to anyone in the world. The things he says are ridiculous and comical, but he is completely self-assured and serious about everything he says and does. No matter how absurd things get, I think the Dude genuinely tries to do the right thing and his quips and one liners are exactly what he’s thinking. For example, when he says: “I suppose it would be more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first,”

Even though the context of this statement is completely immoral and insane, The Dude is framing it as a reflection on his actions. He’s trying to be courteous of the victims he shoots and ponder the most socially acceptable order in which to shoot them. Of course, the irony of applying rules of social etiquette to the context of mass murder makes this a funny joke outside of the game’s world. However, because depravity is the norm in Postal 2, The Dude is not actually saying a joke at all. He’s saying this to himself as a means of looking out for his fellow man. The Postal Dude isn’t funny because he’s evil or deranged, but rather because he is completely ambivalent to the broader morals of both his own actions and everything around him. No matter how crazy things get, it’s all just an average day for the Postal Dude and the residents of Paradise.

In 3, though, all of The Dude’s lines are very blatantly written as jokes for an audience. Everything he says has this air of superiority that feels almost entirely unearned, and he has this uncaring, snarky attitude that is very much antithetical to previous entries. He’s performing for an audience both in the game and outside of it. However most of his jokes are butchered from other sources, so he just comes across as a cocky idiot who is trying too hard to be witty. Take that aforementioned line from Postal 2– in Postal 3, it is changed to:

“Wait, is it more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first?”

By posing this as a question, it is framed as something for the audience to respond to. Instead of focusing on the irony of rationalising cartoonish actions based on social norms, the joke is just a crude attempt at making fun of political correctness. The Dude is very obviously saying this as a joke, which is evident by both his sarcastic delivery and the fact that he doesn’t say anything serious for the entirety of the game. And frankly, it’s a bad joke. Regardless of your chosen path, you spend most of the game shooting women and minorities, so it doesn’t even make sense in context. It is either completely tone deaf or just plain hateful. Given the rest of the game, I’ll hazard a guess that it’s probably a mix of the two, with a slightly higher concentration of the former. To put it simply, the Postal Dude in 2 is just like you and me, whereas the Postal Dude in 3 thinks he’s better than everyone else.

If 3’s Dude is meant to be the same one that’s in the previous games, he’s a pitiful shadow of his former self. If he’s meant to be a different interpretation of the character, he doesn’t have enough original material to make him feel distinct. Perhaps in a different game that’s unconnected to the existing world/story of Postal, 3’s Dude would be a good character. But since he’s in a game with an identity crisis, he comes across as a confused– albeit well-performed– attempt to be two different characters at the same time. Overall, he is not a cohesive enough character to be a successful figurehead of a game, which ironically makes him the perfect mascot for Postal 3.

Before I finish this review, there’s something I want to address that’s been bothering me. For some reason, I’ve seen a lot of people around the internet say that Postal 3 was not developed by RWS. Some even stated that Postal 3 is bad because they didn’t make it. This is literally not true. RWS wrote, designed, and directed Postal 3. The story, setting, voice acting, much of the visuals, and - yes - even the comedy was all created or overseen by them at the very least. It was co-developed by RWS and Trashmasters. Their name and logo are both in the game, and the store description literally lists “RWS-style humour” as one of its main features. Although the technical implementation and general construction weren’t done by them, and many production mishaps were out of their control, Postal 3 was designed by much of the original team for Postal 1 and 2 (I might talk about this in a future review).

Yes, Akella’s financial problems might have influenced the physical development of the game. Yes, Trashmasters might’ve been an inexperienced team thrown into a project way too ambitious for them. But to say that Postal 3 is bad because RWS didn’t make it is objectively false. Even though they removed their name from part of its Steam Page, RWS is just as much to blame for Postal 3’s shortcomings as Trashmasters and Akella are. To quote the exact words of a wise Mafia 2 fan:

“If the creators get the credit when the game is good, they also get the criticism when the game is bad. You better believe I know what I’m talking about, as I love Persona 5 and I’m a gameplay guy at heart! Also you’d be lucky to own a house!”

The only thing Postal 3 succeeds at is being a faithful follow up to Apocalypse Weekend, which was solely developed by RWS right after Postal 2. If you read my Apocalypse Weekend review, you might’ve noticed that just about all of the issues I have with that game are amplified in this one. In fact, Postal 3 not only takes place directly after it, it makes the police outfit from the beginning of that game a central part of its gameplay. Even if it wasn’t originally supposed to turn out the way it did, I’m almost 97% sure that the morality system that’s so antithetical to Postal’s identity was also RWS’s design.

But you wanna know the worst part of all? I’m even more certain that Postal 3 was developed to curse anyone who dares to attempt to review it. Maybe it’s just my copy of the game that’s cursed, but over the course of writing this review, I’ve had a nearly unbroken chain of bad luck and misfortune. Ever since the day I finished Postal 3 for the first time, I caught a bad case of Covid that put me outta commission for 2 weeks, missed an event I was excited to attend for over a month, had a vacation go horribly wrong, had the worst travel experience in my life, got rejected from at least 5 jobs, had a medication mishap, and recorded footage of the game with no audio. The ultimate fuck you, though, was that after I finished over half of this review, Postal 3 got a giant patch for the first time since its release in 2011 which fixed a bunch of the broken mechanics and cutscenes I had to go through, and even added official fucking mod support. This game cursed me, and I still played the damn thing twice for this review.

And yet, regardless of the physical or mental price I must pay for saying such a thing, I still hold the firm position that Postal 3 is one of the very worst games I’ve ever played and likely among the worst ever made. I hated writing about it and I hate how long it has been a thorn in my side. I hope I never play or look at this game again.

I have no reason to continue playing this series but I must persist, if only to see it through. Somehow, there are 3 more postal games to go. How could they follow up a travesty of this scale? Well, there’s only one way to find out…

I'm starting to think that everyone is being paid to say shit about this game endlessly, to be honest I got it for one euro because as of now it's a sale on steam (11/1/2023) and I finished it within 7.2 hours, look they fixed some of the problems about it and I will tell you what problems I had with it. Alt+tab crash, random crashes in-game but not that frequent, encountered 2 bugs in only 2 missions the rest were okay.

Look it's postal, at this point I played every postal game and I finished this one without taking mods or anything and it was okay. This game was not meant to be serious, it's a fun shooting game with objectives. Yes, it's not that open world like postal 2 and it's pretty straight forward when it comes to missions because you are being teleported to the location after the cutscene so yeah. After you beat it you get atleast a free roam mode in the new game, if you boot this game up only to take it serious then I don't know what's your problem pal it's just a clunky game with edgy jokes.

So yeah, postal 3 will never be like the others in the franchise, and I think that's why it was hated besides the awful launch that it had. Overall akella might left it unfinished when it come to some stuff but even some older games have problems but they have a positive fandom so yeah people.

Ah yes, the Postal timeline where the Postal Dude becomes a Tumblr sexyman...

Postal III is an "uncanon" sequel to Postal² developed by a Russian studio named Akella with the support of RWS. This game is infamously bad, it's hated for a reason, multiple reasons even. The complaints are mostly about the humor being more on the Edgy and Cool side rather than the more cynical personality of the Postal Dude in 2, the gameplay being mostly just a poorly made cover shooter, and the lack of freedom that made the fun in Postal 2.

Personally, I totally understand the hate on the humor of the game, it mostly just rely on porn and racist joke and some are obviously funny but most just lands without context, it's just the postal dude or whatever character just saying a goof.

The gameplay itself is janky but in a fine way, the melee gameplay is awful but the gunplay is really fun for dumb reasons, the headshots are satisfying and we got the goofy source ragdoll. But the gameplay gets really tiresome after a bit because the game solely relies on it since every mission of this game is just "Kill X amount of Y", gone are the diverse and quirky quests of Postal 2, this game is just a linear boring TPS.

And here's the part about the world, there's no open world. You can play in a free roam mode I believe but it does nothing, there's nothing to do, you can just goof around and kill people but that's it, it's not even fun in a Postal 2 way, hell Postal 2 even have mods to enhance the fun but this game has nothing, it's just boring.

Though this game isn't all bad, the soundtrack is pretty awesome and the game looks super sweet, it's a shame this art style couldn't be used for a proper Postal sequel... Yuck, Postal 4 art style...

I obviously don't recommend this game but you might as well try it for the kek it's not long to beat.

Without any patches, this game would be 1 star worthy.

But when it's kind of patched and the crashes and bugs arent that often...? It's mediocre.

Most things are a downgrade from Postal 2, but it still has it's fun moments.

instead of playing the game, I think I'd prefer breaking it into pieces. It's just more fun to do then any of the boring stuff the game thows at you.Thats also an issue i have with the game.The fact that it throws eveything at the wall and hopeing it sitcks and the worst part is that no matter wich path you go down the just gets worse with each playthough to the point were even breaking the game pieces isint even fun anymore overall this game pisses on eventhing that postal 2 was about.Fuck this game