Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a follow-up to Apocalypse Weekend built on top of Postal 2 as an apology to fans for Postal 3. Postal fans often consider it to be tied with 2 as the best game in the series, with some even referring to it as the “real” Postal 3. I disagree with both of these sentiments. Paradise Lost is very much just more Postal 2. It reuses the entire map from the base game, has most of the same characters, and contains just about every system and mechanic in the base game. The few original mechanics it does have were added into the base game in one of the anniversary patches, which in turn makes it feel like even less of a standalone package. More than anything else, Paradise Lost is an unabashed work of fan service.

But unfortunately for me, even though I’ve played all of these Postal games, I am not a fan of the series. In fact, I’m getting pretty fucking sick of it. Postal 2 is the only one I enjoyed, and everything else ranges from horrendous to mediocre. Paradise Lost is in the mediocre category. It is Postal 2 with an Apocalypse Weekend skin and a reference to Postal 3 that doesn’t do anything interesting. I’ve put off writing about this game for nearly a month and a half because I genuinely cannot think of anything interesting to say about it (and frankly due to irl things too but whatever). I am putting minimum effort into this review because I was already exhausted from both this game and the franchise less than halfway through playing it. Since the game is based around a (rather terrible) story and each day begins at a different area of the map, the general pacing of the game is fucking terrible. It is exhausting to walk across the same ugly, retextured map over and over again for seemingly every chore. I just want to stop thinking about this game because I’ve already said most of my thoughts when I wrote about Postal 2 and 3. Maybe 4 and Brain Damaged will be different. I hope they are. I just want to stop thinking about Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost. They are neither good games, nor interesting to think about. I’m tired of RWS, and I don’t know how they aren’t tired of being known for nothing but Postal. It’s a shitty franchise with 1 game that is remotely engaging and another game that is so bad that it’s entertaining.

I’m sorry this is rushed and repetitive, but I just want to be done with this. I’m not even editing this tbh.

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…

This was clearly the victim of a very troubled development, and while I want to sympathise with RWS, it still doesn’t excuse how this expansion turned out. It honestly would’ve been much better if they just added small areas and normal weekend days to the base game rather than attempting to construct an entirely new town of a similar scale to Paradise.

Apocalypse Weekend is Postal 2 without any of the aspects that make it interesting or enjoyable. The strange A.I. interactions, the deadpan comedy, the sandbox-styled world, the emergent gameplay, all of it is either gone or bastardised. Instead, Apocalypse Weekend is a half-baked, linear corridor shooter with a virtually incomprehensible story and almost none of the charm of the base game.

The shooting is one of the weakest elements of Postal 2, yet for some reason, this expansion is almost entirely based around fighting hordes of boring foes in lacklustre combat arenas. When it’s not wasting time with its combat arenas, it’s wasting time with monotonous czechlist-based objectives (not like Postal 2’s tasks, more like Ubisoft side missions). The content is blatantly unfinished and padded out, and it attempts to cover up that fact by drenching the game in pitiful, edgy ‘comedy’ that it puts under a spotlight. And on the topic of the comedy, Apocalypse Weekend completely does away with anything resembling the sense of discovery and mundane absurdity found in both the gameplay and world of Postal 2. Instead, it utilises random, ‘wacky’ references and ‘craaaazy’ provocation to disguise its complete lack of vision, substance, and successful execution.

The only decent part is when it makes fun of Postal 2’s publisher, and even then, you engage with it in the exact same way as the rest of the game. By all points and metrics, Apocalypse Weekend is a bad game, and not even in a way that is funny or interesting to think or talk about. It’s not even enjoyable or satisfying to write this review.

That being said, I’m certain RWS’s following game will improve on all these flaws. Surely, it’ll be a truly great follow-up to Postal 2.