"A very horrible and embarrasing game..."

Postal is a game that aims to emulate a mass murderer's insane killing spree. As the Postal Dude, you bath yourself in massive amounts of bloodshed. There's lots of killing, but there's not much else.

Story:
Postal Dude is your average tinfoil-antenna-hat wearing nutjob. His house gets repossessed by the bank and he snaps. Now it's time to bust out the hardware and shoot anything that moves.
1/10

Graphics:
Really, really muddy and poor. The game is basically 2D with some fake 3D elements thrown in. The backgrounds are all hand-drawn and all the characters and weapons look like little moving colour blocks pasted together. The blood effects are the only impressive things here. Blood flows freely and splatters on anything in the environment.
4/10

Sound:
The sound is really creepy in Postal. You'll hear the taunts of your enemies, and their screams as they beg for mercy when you shoot out their kneecaps. Postal Dude also says a variety of one-liners, but they're mostly lame.
7/10

Gameplay:
The gameplay is pretty one dimensional: KILL KILL KILL!!! Your task as a homicidal maniac is to bust out your guns and shoot anything that moves. Every level is filled with a certain amount of "hostiles" armed to the teeth with machine-guns, shotguns, explosives and even portable shoulder-mounted missile launchers. Also filling some of these levels are innocents. You're neither rewarded or punished for killing them; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even for kill-hungry freaks, this game doesn't offer very much. The controls are pretty bad. Postal falls into the same bad control scheme as GTA. In a game where combat plays such a vital role, you can't circle-strafe. There are no strafe left/right keys; you'll have to sacrifice turning for strafing. Also, sometimes when you've shot someone til they're on the ground, they won't die. They'll lie there and crawl around until you press the "execute" key. While it might be cool to some of us sicker people out there, it's actually quite annoying when you have to die it over and over. The difficulty is insane, even on easy. Right off the bat enemies will have missiles and napalm launchers, whereas you'll get your pea-shooter infinite ammo machine gun. Aiming is also pretty bad, especially with any gun except your machine gun. You can't save mid-level either; all saves are at the beginning of the game. Lastly, the game doesn't even progress levels for you -- you have to press F1 to transport yourself to the next level.
4/10

Multiplayer:
Not tested, but I'd expect it to be pretty bad as well.
N/A

Summary:
A horrible sham of a game. Maybe good for a whirl if you're totally bored out of your mind or need to vent. Please, play the sequel and just pretend this game never existed. It's just plain bad.

Summary of the Summary:
PROS
+ Killing stuff
+ Creepy audio
CONS
- Bad controls
- Lame story, even for a game such as this
- Insane difficulty
- Gameplay mechanics need more work

Final Score: 1/10 (Not an average)

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/05