Cycopl

Postal 2

Yep, I've been waiting a while for it to come out, and it's finally out and I played it for a few hours today. Overall it's a fun game that's worth playing, but it's definitely not the best FPS I have played, and it's not as good as I had hoped (mainly performance issues).

Good stuff:

Extremely violent. Moreso than any game I've ever played, basically because it's realistic violence and they take no shame in any of it.
Funny. Funny stuff happens in the game. Like at one part of the game, one of the "missions" is to go to the local church and confess your sins. Your guy says something like "Forgive me father, for I have sinned. A lot. No seriously, I've sinned a lot. Yep, lotsa sins." Then, the priest replies with, "Did you donate money to the collection box?", and the postal guy says "Yeah.", so the priest says, "Then all of your sins are forgiven. NEXT!" Immediately after that, it shows a guy in a turban outside the church run up to a group of priests and explode with fire and blood and guts and all of that. Then a whole bunch of guys in turbans start attacking the church with machine guns and stuff, yelling "I declare this holy land in the name of Allah!" and you have to shoot them and get out of the church alive. Fun stuff.
Semi non-linear. What I mean is, you don't HAVE to actually do the objectives to have fun playing the game. It's one of those games that could be compared to GTA3, where you can have more fun just running around killing people and running from/killing cops. Every review I've read on this game compares it to GTA3, but they need to realize that this is the sequel to POSTAL, which was out WAY before GTA3. It may have been out around the same time as GTA1, maybe. I remember playing the original postal over five years ago. It's just the style of the game, not a GTA3 ripoff. Faggots.
Other stuff. Some of the weapons are really cool and unique, like the gasoline can/matches. You can make a trail gasoline along the ground and then throw a lit match on it, and it will catch fire along the trail of gasoline you just poured out. You can pick up stray cats and use them as silencers for your guns. You can unzip your pants and urinate on people, cars, dogs, cats, etc. Or, you can just unzip your pants and not urinate. You can put out fires with your urine. Urine seems pretty important. Some other little stuff just makes me happy, like the way blood will flow downhill if somebody dies on a sloped surface, or the way people vomit when they see dead bodies. The game seems kind of sloppy, but there's a ton of great ideas buried in it.

Bad stuff:

There seems to be a lot of bad stuff about this game, but I really think the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff.

Unreal engine. Probably the worst engine ever created. I've expressed my feelings on the unreal engine in former posts. I don't like it, but I'll put up with it for this game.
Non-locational damage. Most modern FPS games feature locational damage, where headshots will do significantly more damage than anywhere else. This is not the case in Postal 2, where you can shoot them in the head 15 times and they'll still run around and shoot at you. It's really gay, because I'm used to aiming for the head. There's no point in aiming in this game, just make sure the bullet hits the guy. Also, the pistol seems to do way more damage than the automatic rifle (looks like an M4A1). This is wrong and should be fixed or something.
No reloading. This isn't really important, and some people may think this is a good thing, but every gun in reality requires reloading. Postal 2 doesn't have reloading, just a whole bunch of bullets and you shoot them until they're gone. If this game was like Quake or UT, this wouldn't matter. But this game prides itself on realistic violence, while the guns are unrealistic.
Difficulty. This game is HARD. There's a bunch of difficulty settings, but I refuse to play on anything lower than "normal", and "normal" is HARD. Funny thing though, the easiest difficulty is "Liebermode", and the hardest difficulty is "Hestonmode". I, personally, hate Lieberman with a passion, so I think any insult towards him is funny.
Loading times. This most likely ties into the Unreal Engine problem, but the loading times make you want to gouge your own eyes out sometimes. I yell "COME ON COM

Anyway, that's my little review on Postal 2, which is definitely worth downloading for free. I don't know if it's worth paying for, unless you are a fan of the original Postal or the GTA series (the gameplay style is vaguely similar).

Posted by at April 9, 2003 10:20 PM