"The sequel to one of my all time favorite games and it couldn't be much worse."

Introduction
I own all the Postal games and I love the first two. Postal 2 in my opinion was one of the more creative indie games of the 2000's. Some thirty or so guys in Arizona made an open world first person shooter with a lot of great ideas like your goals on a check list to do at your own pace and it even had first person platforming that wasn't god awful. Postal 3 in the other hand was nothing but problems. To start off, they wanted to work with a larger studio because 30+ guys in Arizona wouldn't be enough and they can't afford to expand their company. The solution was to out source development to an unknown Russian studio called Akella who had a larger staff and ideally should have been able to make a better game. After many years of waiting and waiting with very few updates, the game came out in November 2011... in Russia. A month later we got the US version and for a few days I was in denial about the quality of this game. Also after the reception this game got, Running With Scissors cut all ties with Akella, apologized to the fans, vowed to never outsource their games to anyone ever again, and in August 2012 they removed Postal 3 from their web store stating that their older games are "a far superior product for a lot less money"

Story - 5/10
Postal 3 did make an attempt of telling a story while the other games were very minimalistic. The story in Postal 3 was actually pretty good. They went back and tried to explain parts of Postal 2's story better and set it up for the story of this game. The Postal Dude is on his way out of Paradise, Arizona to the city Catharsis, Arizona. When he gets into the city, he runs out of gas and he needs to find employment to save enough money to get out of this town. There are two paths you can take after you play a few missions, a neutral good path and a chaotic evil path. I'll go more into the paths in the game play section. As far as the stories go, they are pretty funny and there are some twists that often have karmic twists of their own. You would actually have more fun just watching the cut scenes on YouTube than actually trying to beat the game, let alone beating the game twice for all the stories. But they did manage to make it work with all the offbeat "celebrity" cameos, everyone has their part in the story and gameplay. A big issue too was since the game took several years to make that the story is very out of date, to put perspective on it they put out a grindhouse style trailer and had to mention the real life death of Osama Bin Laden who is a major villain of the game's story.

Game play - 2/10
When Postal 3 first came out, it was a buggy mess to say the least. The bugs ranged from totally game breaking like getting trapped in an object with no way out to various annoyances like the shooting being very off and melee attacks being totally useless with terrible hit detection. They have patched the game quite a bit but and it did fix a lot of things but the game could never be made fun. A big issue all Postal fans took with this game is the story being totally linear and not having a free roam option. In a later patch they did add free roam in, you have to go into the level select option that all Source games have and there's a free roam file which is kind of fun. In free roam, there are no story missions, it's just run around and kill whoever you want. In later patches they did fix the aim and melee hit detection but plenty of weapons aren't much fun like the machete. In Postal 2's expansion pack they added a machete and you could throw it like a boomerang, a great feature was how precise it was but in Postal 3 the machete being thrown will probably never hit anyone and if it does, the damage is very low without limbs being hacked off.

The biggest thing to notice about Postal 3 is that it's no longer a first person shooter but now it's third person, this is made worse by the awful control and weapon mechanics. The idea was that it would be funnier when you can see your character do all of these actions as opposed to first person view. When you start up the game you get your cut scenes and the goal is to fight off hoards of zombies along this bridge which was a mission in the Postal 2 expansion. This mostly serves as a tutorial. After that you're the new town and the only job you can get is working at a sex shop. You get a vacuum and you need to clean up tissues from around the booths upstairs and dispose of them properly. It's similar to Half-Life 2's gravity gun only that it's not half as fun and the sucking/shooting just sucks. Next there are a bunch of hockey moms lead by a Sarah Palin lookalike who march in with guns so you have to fight them off and make sure the manager, played by Ron Jeremy survives. The AI in the game is horrendous all around so trying to keep Ron Jeremy alive is a nightmare. He just stands there cowering while soaking up hundreds of bullets. You end up having to babysit Ron while shooting up every hockey mom in sight until the mission is over. As you would expect, if Ron dies, the game ends and you have to do everything all over again.

I hope you love escort and protection missions because that is a good 80% of the game, if not more. It seems like the Russian studio Akella assume that gamers really love escort missions and making a game that is mostly escort missions would be the greatest game ever made. Another mission has you as a mall security guard who has to protect a Playboy Playmate and it's the same situation, everyone starts attacking and you are the only one who can defend her. The good path is by using a taser to stun enemies and then handcuff them. The evil path is by just murdering everyone, and like a lot of good or evil games, the evil path is easier and more fun. Eventually you get in the middle of a shoot out between the police and eco terrorists who are a parody of both P.E.T.A. and The Church Of Scientology. As a cop you don't want to kill too many people or it lowers your good guy meter and that can lead to you getting fired and joining the terrorists. The terrorist missions are more about doing chores for them and lots of escort missions.

There are a lot of obnoxious tasks in Postal 3. One of the worst is when you join the terrorist faction, they give you a mission to use the vacuum to suck up 100 apples and drop them in buckets. Since the vacuum is so badly programed, it's very hard to suck up apples and get them in the bucket so it counts. After that, you probably want to be a cop. There are some pure shoot outs which are simply clunky "I shoot you and you shoot me" type battles set in very annoying maze structures. The majority of the missions are to protect somebody or escort them. For example you get to protect Uwe Boll from angry nerds but if you kill him the police chief is indifferent because he is Uwe Boll. A tough one is where you have to escort the mayor around town on a Segway which is the only vehicle you can use in the game. What makes it bad is that the level is full of constantly spawning al-Qaeda terrorists with assault riffles who will always kill the mayor because he likes to get stuck on everything in the city or just stand there getting shot while the rest of his guards do nothing.

Another issue of trying to be good is the meter that shows your alignment. It starts as a smiley face and the more innocents you kill, the more it turns into a red devil face. The problem is that due to the terrible AI and controls, you can't help but to kill a few people by mistake when using a heavy machine gun or assault riffle. As of the last time I played Postal 3, I don't remember there being anything to regain good guy points. It feels like only a mater of time before you become a bad guy just because of bad game design. What you have is a very flawed morality system and two story paths that aren't fun. The weapons of the game do have a pretty good variety and like Postal they try to get wacky like a badger on a harness acts like a chainsaw, a laser pen to command a lab monkey, and a beehive to get bees to swarm people, but only the eco terrorist path gives you these weapons unless you use a cheat code.

A few shoot outs, many escort missions, a lot of protection missions, and cut scenes are the entire game in a nutshell. Even the basic shoot outs are plagued with bad AI that don't know anything beyond running at you and shooting. There is cover system in Postal 3 and even if there was, it would be bad. The escort and protection missions are some of the very worst which is saying a lot because how many escort missions can you honestly say were somewhat enjoyable in any game? Even the free roam save file is only fun for a very short period and then you've done it all. For a game that is currently $30, there isn't anything to make it worth the price.

Graphics - 4/10
The Source Engine has been showing it's age since it's launch in 2004 but some games like Portal 2 have really made it look good. Postal 3 does look like a large visual upgrade from Postal 2 which was made on the Unreal engine but for a game in 2011, even a indie game it just doesn't cut it. If you look at scree shots then it does look alright but in motion the flaws really show. The character animations are very basic and generic. You can leave bullet holes on the environment but it doesn't look as good as it did in Postal 2. The weapon design is very basic but the animal weapons do look alright, for example the badger saw is fun to watch but it only has that one attack animation. There is a lot of blood and gore but even that isn't anything special and the chance of dismemberment is fairly low in Postal 3. The outdoor areas of the game do look like wandering around a city but there isn't much else to say about it. The interiors are often very generic, as in you walk through a building where everything looks the same and it becomes hard to figure out where you're going. As for the non-playable characters, there are tons of clones and reskins. It's not as bad as Revolution X but it is bad when dozens of the same enemy all look the same.

Sound - 3/10
The music of the game is very easy to forget. There is some metal and a lot of music that sounds like elevator music. They did get some famous people to play themselves in the game so you will hear people like Ron Jeremy, Uwe Boll, Jennifer Walcott, and Randy Jones (the cowboy from The Village People.) The voice acting varies but for the most part the voices are passable. They did get a different voice actor for The Postal Dude and it's not as enjoyable. A lot of the one liners from the Dude are recycled from Postal 2 and lack any real context. There is a lot of gun fire that makes up most of the sounds of Postal 3, as you would expect. A big annoyance is the heavy machine gun which is the best gun in the game, this is something that I don't know if they ever fixed it in a patch but this gun makes the reloading sound constantly. There are quite a few sound related bugs like that in the game which makes things much more annoying.

Controls - 2/10
You can move around alright but when it comes to shooting and melee attacks the game becomes a big mess. Using a machine gun is ideal because accuracy isn't important so you can just spray bullets at everything. Friendly fire is going to cost you if you try to be a good guy though so you'd want to fire in short bursts and hope nobody good gets killed. The melee weapons were eventually fixed up so they could hit enemies but they are very under powered and with a low chance of hacking off limbs, there is very little reason to use them unless it's a non lethal weapon for being a cop. With no cover system, all you do is run around shooting everything and that's all it is. A lot of the weapons will seem very off and you'll mostly stick to what can do big damage because you don't want to be bothered taking way too much damage while trying to aim. In the many escort missions the poor controls are an absolute nightmare and will cause you to lose the mission way too often. One good thing is that they didn't use the platforming from Postal 2 just because they would have ruined it in Postal 3. When you ride around on a Segway, it's not much fun either. You do move faster but trying to shoot from a Segway is even more off balance and difficult to do. There isn't any action in Postal 3 that isn't a chore to control.

Replay value - 1/10
Regardless of which of the two moral paths you take, you aren't going to have any fun. You're going to do a dozen escort missions and lots of very obnoxious tasks that make sure you can't have any fun in them so once you get through it all, there is no way a sane person would try more than a couple missions of the other path. It's hard enough to play more than a few missions of the game to begin with, let alone trying to finish one path and try the other one.

Overall - 2/10
As much as I tried as hard as I could to like Postal 3, it just wasn't possible. Even after numerous patches there was very little to like about this game. There are mods for it but it would take a lot more than modding to make this game the slightest bit fun. There is very good reason why the creators of the series have disowned Postal 3 and apologized to everyone who bought it. There is no price that I could justify paying for Postal 3, I preordered the game for forty dollars and that was forty dollars too much. Take the advise of the creators of the series and buy the older Postal games.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10 | Originally Posted: 02/06/13

Game Release: Postal III (US, 02/17/12)

Liked this review? Click here to recommend this item to other users.