Nearly 15 years ago Postal was released on the PC, causing a wave of outrage that you would go on virtual mass murder sprees. 15 years and Postal 3 has arrived with a new slab of pointless gore and murder. The game delivers the pointless gore and murder however that is all that is delivered. It seems as if the developers spent more time inventing crazy ways to kill people then actually fixing issues and the flawed gameplay.
Postal 3 begins with a cut scene showing you the postal man’s past, giving you some insight to why you are in this town. None of this is particularly necessary to watch as the plot to the game is not really needed or very good.
The game opens up in a tutorial, as you would expect. Unlike normal however the tutorial is not polished and gives you a very clear example of what is coming up throughout the game. The movement is nothing too bad in an open area; however you will get caught on many corners and environmental elements. If you try and attack someone with fists you will miss most of the time despite directly aiming at them. Then the worst park of the tutorial (I spent 20min trying to get past this part). Poring petrol on zombies stuck in a hole. As simple as this sounds the controls are so inconsistent and hard to use, that many people I have talked to have had issues with this.
Once you have found the knack of controlling the postal man then it is time to learn the problems of the AI. Enemies, allies and passing civilians act the same despite what is happening around them. They run around the conflict zone stopping to shoot you or just to watch before running around like headless chickens again. The weapons are often so accurate that you can often run around head shooting people with ease. This makes switching weapons to more interesting ones such as psychotic cats or the flamethrower unnecessary, in addition to this the more interesting weapons are stupidly easy to cause harm to yourself.
The first few jobs give you a very clear view of what is to come and be expected of the game. To begin with you have to clean up soiled tissues from a porn shop only to shoot these tissues at protesting parents that have invaded the shop. Upon completing this, the shop owner fails to pay for your work. This means you need to find other work, such as gathering up murderous cats with AIDS. You will also find out that these cats are used as meat in the local restaurant. As you can see the plot and quests to this game are more bizarre than humorous.
The various people you meet though out the game are just as ridiculous as the mission with some rather un-tasteful stereotypes. This includes gay cowboys, angry Asians and smelly hippies to name a few. This does cause quite a few ‘OMG what did he just say?’ at first, after the 100th time it just gets annoying though.
The story that links these crazy events are portrayed though the use of cut scenes, narrated by the postal man. Nearly everything between the cut scenes can be ignored as the plot goes, causing the story to feel rather scattered. What happens between the cut scenes is just a collection of humorous pointless missions randomly scattered across the game.
The voice acting throughout these cut scenes and the game is rather bad, not even funny bad just plain bad. The number of lines the civilians can say is extremely small and annoying and the music is nothing great. The graphics of Postal 3 as expected by the rest of the game are terrible. The Valve source engine has been around since 2004 and though updates even the old games look reasonable these days. Postal 3 has somehow used this engine and made a game that looks worse than the original steam engine games. It also lacks many of the supported features like lip-sync.
Over all I would not willingly purchase this game, there are just too any bugs to point out in a single review, I am sure you could ask every player of this game and they will have a different list of bugs or issues with this game. That does not include the crashes.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
