Postal

The Good
There's really not much to like about "Postal." The weird little blurbs between levels are cool.

The Bad
As a game, "Postal" is more or less a joke. Basically a side-scrolling shooter, the game play is boring and uninteresting. Graphics and sound are unimpressive. The game is slow and jerky, even on good systems. Even the whole "slaughter the innocents" bit turns out to be a cop-out. "Postal" isn't really a good enough game to be sold in stores; it's got a definite freeware feel to it.

The Bottom Line
A waste of time; there's nothing to recommend this game.

The Good
Everybody gets to have one game that they absolutely love despite the fact that it's puerile, mindless, technically unimpressive, and overall just not very good. Postal is mine.

The premise is very simple: You have a gun. You run around shooting people with it. Along the way you acquire better guns to shoot more people and cause greater mayhem. Oh, sometimes there's a voice in your head, too, that talks to you. ("He never liked you." "Let's blow something up!" "Only my weapon understands me.") Postal is an equal-opportunity employer: You murder both men and women (never children); whites and blacks; cops, military personnel, and civilians; and even the flightless, non-human residents of an ostrich farm.

The game is so ridiculously violent it's funny. Launch an incendiary weapon into the ranks of a marching band or a group of protestors, and watch them all scatter, waving their instruments and picket signs, screaming while on fire, until they collapse as charred corpses. Twisted, depraved fun. If your bathrobe-clad postal dude catches on fire himself he'll run around screaming too, unable to shoot, but you can attempt to run him into other people and engulf them in flames as well. The game also seems to have an uncanny sense of comic timing. At one point I was in the middle of a huge shootout, gunfire ringing all over, explosions, people screaming and dying... then it all goes silent, and after a perfect one-second pause, you hear this total redneck voice call out: "Whut'n the hell's goin' on here?" I almost asphyxiated from laughing so hard.

The Bad
Well, like I said above... It's puerile, mindless, technically unimpressive, and overall just not very good. The graphics are dated (even for the time) and the gameplay behaves like what you might expect from a typical shareware title. The AI is particularly lame at times. Sometimes a guy will just stand still and not even react while you pound him with bullets. Aside from a few standouts (truck stop, parade, protestors, ostrich farm, military base), there's a bland sameness to most of the levels.

I didn't care for the expansion pack at all. The additional levels were entertaining, but the new screams of anguish from your victims come across as too forced, trying too hard to be funny. And what's worse, it overwrites the original sounds, so you have to reinstall the game to get them back.

The Bottom Line
While not a particularlly well-made game by any standard, Postal is an excellent stress reliever. How many times have you wanted to do something like this, but your conscience got in the way? Postal is a unique simulation of the experience of being a mass-murderer. And isn't that the whole point of computer gaming, to be able to experience something you never could in real life?

P.S. I understand there's a 3D-based sequel in the works.

The Good
Okay it might sound a little disturbed, but I really did enjoy the shooting of innocent people and when they fell on the ground running up to them and finishing them off. The sounds in this game where really....well....quite disturbing actually but that is what they are meant to be and so this game does its job well. Like when you shoot one of the female cops and she is crawling around on the ground saying "help me" and "I cant breathe" and then you have your character having a good old laugh about it, this is the stuff that makes up a really good atmosphere for a psycho killer game. Even though the game can get repetitive at times and you might even get sick of shooting rockets at civilians or throwing moltov cocktails at cops, it is still fun to every now and then to go around your home town spilling blood (in the game.) The arsenal you get in the game is not that extensive, but there are weapons that get the job done and they are also fun to use (especially the mines). The difficulty of Postal can get very hard. If I remember correctly the last level is a military base and saying that in itself should make you realize how hard that damn level can be. Running around with your little machine gun while all these military boys have ago at you can get pretty hard at times. The levels in Postal are great, they range from your hometown, to truckstops to as I said before military bases so there is allot of variety in the levels which the "missions" take place. There are also little mini-games that you can play if you get bored of the real game. In most of them you do things like see how many ostriches you can kill in a certain time limit etc.

The Bad
Even though the levels vary allot there is still only one thing to do..kill. This gets a bit boring after awhile and even though the levels do get very hard the only thing that makes them harder is because there are more enemy's.

The Bottom Line
If you like games that have mindless violence which I think all of us do =) then you will like this game. And even though the game says that it should only be played by 18 and over I think that the game should really only be 15+.