Postal 2 Review - IGN (2025)

After peeling into the IGN parking lot at about 10 in the morning (woke up early), I stumbled out of my car and directly into the women's restroom where I promptly extinguished my cigarette in the sink and unzipped my already unzipped pants to enjoy nature's most pleasing kind of relief. But something was amiss. While staring at the mass of terrified female coworkers scurrying around me, I suddenly and quite unexpectedly felt strangely compelled to urinate on the walls and ceiling. The urge was even more powerful than usual, anyway. Willpower overcame the desire to be evil in plain sight of others and I continued on with my day.

My next task was to request Tal's signature on a petition I was floating around to get Tal fired. He declined. Murderous rage overcame me when I was unkindly referred to as a "pinko," but before I could unsheathe my taser and swing my shovel at his head, he wandered off. Something is definitely amiss.

I've been playing Postal 2 nonstop since yesterday morning and I am now tainted and infected. F***. Sticks and stones, Ivan. Regardless, disturbing imagery and content will still be disturbing to some. If you find fault in lighting Gary Coleman's corpse on fire or expelling an unholy amount of greenish liquid from your diseased trailer park penis onto the hapless, pistol toting citizens of Paradise, Arizona, you'll likely find fault in Postal 2. If such activities bother you not, you'll still find serious fault in Postal 2. Thought I'd say it was cool for the action, didn't you?

Interestingly, Postal Dude can't simply dash about from craphole of a poorly constructed environment to craphole of a poorly constructed environment running amok and slaughtering everyone. Daily chores must be completed for the game to progress. Sometimes they originate from Postal Dude's sick mind, sometimes they're a necessity, and sometimes they're orders dished out by the woman who dwells in his shanty home (now air-conditioning free). Each objective seems clever when it's written on a clipboard, but as soon as Postal Dude attempts to accomplish his tasks, a multitude of problems arise.

Most situations can be approached in a number of different ways. A number of ways in this case means two: violent and non-violent. I don't want to spoil anything like what happens after you meet Gary Coleman or the not so hilarious aftermath of peeing on Daddy's grave, but at one early point in the game Postal Dude has to take a trip down to the bank. His assumedly low-level job at Running With Scissors has been terminated and the last paycheck needs a solid cashing.

Getting to the bank involves a few loads. On my Pentium 4 2GHz, 768MB RAM, Radeon 9700, and 58x CD-ROM drive equipped machine, it takes literally one and a half to two and a half minutes to load. Yes, my hard drive is clean. Yes, I have defragged. Yes, I am serious. No, it is not tolerable.

F***, you'll be loading a lot, too. Assuming Postal Dude doesn't bite it on his way to the bank, he's still going to hit the initial level load, the load after the cutscene, and the load into where he needs to be. Try and explore the world that's not worth exploring and you're looking at way more loading. There's quick saving, but quick loading is more accurately called exceedingly f***ing long loading, just like everything else. Some areas later into the game get so difficult and are so trial and error intensive that you'll find yourself sitting down for an hour to play and actually spending 45 minutes of that allocated hour loading. It's ridiculous.

But we're not later into the game yet; we're still on our way to the damn bank. Since we're in the shoes of Postal Dude and playing Postal, we might as well whip out the wang and let a little urine fly on the street, no? After that, we'll spread some gas, light some chumps on fire, and generally be evil. Then we'll die fourteen seconds later! It'll be so f***ing cool.

It's hard not to die in Postal 2, unless the difficulty is set to one of the cleverly named sissy settings, Postal Dude getting his ass killed by pretty much everyone will be all that's seen for a quite a while. Apparently, in addition to being able to withstand three shotgun blasts or twenty rounds from an assault rifle (when it takes less swings with a shovel to bring a man down, you know you have problems), the people of Paradise are also sharpshooters. They shoot and Postal Dude gets hit. Don't even bother strafing or crouching behind stuff, bullets will still impact flesh. Sure, it's possible to ditch the cops by letting their awareness meter run dry, and it's possible to lose people on your tail, but that stuff takes a long time. F***! We don't have time for avoidance, we still have to waste six hours of our lives loading.
After dying four times and enjoying a periodical during the many loads, Postal Dude is finally walking into the bank... A line? What the nuts? Right, just shoot the lot of them and pee like crazy. Ooh, ain't it fun dying? Alright, reload... This time just stand there like a goob and wait. See, being cleverer than the game isn't too clever. Cutting in line results in the teller either informing Postal Dude to carry his ass to the f***ing end or just staring at him blankly wondering why the game's script broke. This happens everywhere. Just stand in line and it'll be over relatively soon. Whee.

Don't want to do any of this, do you? Not present everywhere, a third option is occasionally allowed for. In the case of the bank, it's possible to circumvent the entire line/dying/having no fun thing by strolling on down to the vault and swiping some loot. Of course, that whole dying thing will still happen shortly thereafter. Someone sees: Postal Dude gets shot. Money gets lifted from the floor: Postal Dude gets shot. It's also possible to get arrested by refusing to fight back. A few loads later prison will be far behind you -- the matches you used to ignite the sprinkler system and unlock the doors still smoldering on the floor. You're free to do more nothing once you're free from prison. Joy.

Seriously, really going postal and trying to be as ruthless and bastardly as you can possibly be results in death or imprisonment. You are going to die and you are going to load. Get used to it. Going "kind of sort of" postal is possible (selectively and pointlessly offing a few isolated people here and there or lighting a cat on fire and using its brother as a suppressor for the shotgun), but going totally postal just isn't going to happen. Remember, playing with the intent of not being repeatedly arrested or killed doesn't necessarily mean having fun. Unless, of course, walking about, standing about, and subjecting yourself to jokes that just aren't funny is enjoyable.

    Oh man! Swear words and vulgar material is f***ing funny if it's just there! Turds all over the place and picket signs that say things and people that call you pinko is also funny! Hahaha! It'll be great.

These jokes were told in secrecy behind the jungle gym to prevent the prying eyes of yard duties from witnessing and sending the children who told them off to detention. Christ, I'm even funnier than this tripe and I work at an online games publication where I'm the subject of constant office ridicule. I haven't had intimate relations with a woman since last fall and I still pull comedy out of my crotch that's better than anything Postal has.

    Gays should be hunted and cats need shotgun barrels in their anuses! Wouldn't it be cool if I could take a machinegun to this church? Hahaha! Hi-freaking-larious. Maybe I'll just say f*** a whole lot? This is f***ing great!

Postal is ironically perfectly suited for twelve-year-olds caught up in spending their days trying to get shots of Chun-Li kicking just right so her panties show. So you know, they're exactly the audience that shouldn't be playing the game. How any other gamer who has body hair and hasn't been kicked in the head by a donkey could like this is beyond my comprehension.

Postal is an attempt at expressing a liberty often taken for granted and shoving it down the throats of any naysayer who's dumb enough to make himself the butt of the ongoing joke, but it's done poorly enough that it has no real effect or worth. Unfortunately, much like when Mortal Kombat was seen as the pinnacle of videogaming that every child was subjected to because it was cool, for it was violent and in the media, Postal will be exaggerated as being the height of modern PC gaming. How unfortunate it is when mediocre titles with only tired crudeness as a draw get unneeded attention.

I have no problem with dark humor. I am dark humor incarnate. If it's crippled, old, mentally deficient or not in anyway related to me, I'll tease the hell out of it until it curls up and cries. Even my mother warns me that I'm more offensive than special. It's Postal's delivery I despise, not its level of obscenity. Overflowing with bathroom humor taken to a level one million times beyond the worst Howard Stern clone, but without any of the wit that makes them even remotely interesting to their legions of foaming fans, Postal 2 is a game that has gross stuff simply for the sake of having gross stuff, because there just isn't much else.

If play were good, the horror of its delivery could be overlooked. Play is not good. Multiply everything you've read above by 28 and you're experiencing Postal. It's all the "did he say that?" flash of the original Duke Nukem without a shred of the staying power and all of the theoretical goodness of Deus Ex without an iota of the loving development. Postal is a jumble of a game. On the one hand, a lot of things can be done. On the other mutated hand, there's not a whole lot to do. It's maddening.
Hey, why don't I play some multiplayer that doesn't exist? Or maybe I can explore the brown environment littered with a thousand load spots and see nothing of interest? Perhaps I'll just carry on conversations with people by either walking away from them or hitting them with a shovel?

I'm harsh -- a side effect of the evil and taint I've been subjected to, I suppose. Postal isn't completely worthless. Occasionally I giggled and embarrassingly smirked. Occasionally I urged a sensitive coworker over to my desk to see how I could pee into the air and douse Postal Dude when he was ablaze. Gimmicks of the sort and the sheer brazenness of the title help it to retain some speck of value.

As a serious credit to the game, just walking about and not torturing men and women, as possible as that might be, is fun. "Only as violent as you are," says Running With Scissors. Actually, that's pretty much right. A few times I found myself getting shot when I shouldn't be getting shot, but for the most part I got through a bulk of the game by not do anything at all. If the bank gets robbed, just stand there and let the cops handle it. Don't move; just stand there. When the girl asks for money, pay her. I applaud Running With Scissors for that. It's pretty neat just being able to not do anything. Weird, huh? In some odd way, after the novelty of being able to mindlessly kill things wears off, just watching the events of Paradise unfold as you purchase milk and get petitions signed is rather enjoyable.

Take it away from the violent, grotesque setting, and it may be cool, but it's still lacking and a bit broken in so many different ways that it can't be anything better than barely average. Welcome to the land of mediocrity. It's not truly horrible, nor is it riddled with glaring bugs, but omissions in every aspect of Postal and the plain kind of stupidity that rolls eyes high to the ceiling will force the title to use the gore and the profanity and the lewdness to sell. Sound redundant, don't I? F*** yeah! You're playing Postal.

The entire allure of the game is based on being able to kill people who aren't immediately threatening, but that gets so boring so fast that I found myself just trying to move to each objective as quickly as possible, which still took for-f***ing-ever because of loads, an infuriating lack of a mini-map, and some level design right off the little bus. Once I got to the missions, I did something stupid and then fought bad guys that seemed to invade with some uncanny regularity, like once per day. The game gets harder because as each group of baddies is introduced in a script, they'll then be placed at random throughout Paradise. Randomly getting shot even when I don't kill folks, eh? Nice.

Postal 2 Review - IGN (1)
Are you going Postal?
Postal 2 Review - IGN (2)
At least it looks kind of good. Postal isn't quite as cluttered and crisp as Devastation, nor is it as polished as Unreal 2 or UT 2003, but it does run decently, considering how many characters are onscreen and populating nearby surroundings. Then again, maps are comparatively small, model detail is substandard, weapon models aren't particularly engaging, and animations are stiff and lacking. Praise physics! Chairs, boxes, other miscellaneous objects and people are all physically bounded to the world. Decapitating someone with a shovel and whacking their noggin around has some appeal, as does just toppling over a bunch of boxes. Then again, technology of the sort is becoming a standard -- it should have been since Hitman -- so while its implementation here is appreciated, it's nothing new, and indeed not the most polished representation we've seen.

Verdict

Vulgarity doesn't make Postal a particularly bad game. Postal makes Postal a bad game. Flawed from the start, being crude for the sake of being crude makes it lame, but playing it makes it a pain. Ten editors walked by to read the billboards and see the gags on my screen and simply frowned while letting out a unanimous, "Is that supposed to be funny?" We're talking about IGN here, kids. We're crappy. Hell, it even says so on my business card. That's not just on mine, is it?

Paradise is bland. Vaunted interaction is, in reality, largely limited to shoot or don't shoot situations. Missions are tedious for they involve far too much the way of wandering and far too little the way of excitement. Nicely, it is possible to approach some situations without sitting on your hands or whipping out the pistol, but they too are broken. Inevitably, dying or being arrested is pretty much what the game is all about. While you're playing Postal you're either shooting people at random or just walking around like a tool.

Look! The bathroom has turds on the floor! Oh God, this is the greatest horrible game ever.

Postal 2 Review - IGN (2025)
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