Postal III

An underrated gem

i came into it thinking maybe its not as bad as people say, but it definitely is. its like a slightly higher budget mobile game. everything feels pointless and its not funny. also peeing on people is useless 0/10

Oh shit, where to start?

I purchased this game on sale (oh Steam Holiday sale, thou art a fickle temptress), and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Except maybe having never purchased it at all, of course.

If you do a quick search of any other reviews of this game, you’re liable to find a whole lot of slander. And it’s sort of difficult to blame them. Rather than do the usual review format, I’m going to take you on a timeline breakdown of the shitstorm I endured to beat the game.

There’s a narrative string beginning at the start of the game with “Postal Dude” being interviewed by someone. This serves as a decent way to recap the previous game’s events in comic panel style, which also gives a bit of narration between missions. It actually comes across rather well, but can do little to save this game from itself, beginning with the tutorial mission.

The tutorial mission briefly introduces the new cover system, using grenades and using the gas can and match combo. The cover system is mildly important as Postal 3 has no health packs, but it does have auto-regenerating health. This takes away from some of the chaos as all you have to do to heal up is to duck out of combat for a little while, but since most of the enemies you’ll face in the game are quickly defeated with one or two shots to the face, you honestly shouldn’t ever have to use cover unless you have crap aim or find yourself up against a dozen enemies at once.

Somehow, the gas can has actually gotten worse from a tech standpoint from the previous game. Even in the tutorial level where three zombies are ambling around in a pit, it’s extremely difficult to see where the gas has landed and if any is sticking to the ground or enemies. Even after emptying half a tank and throwing a half dozen matches, nothing caught fire. I ended up dancing around the pit and trying over and over for almost five minutes, as you cannot move on until the zombies are dead. This was about as shitty a first impression as you could get.

After escaping the fallout of the town from Postal 2, you end up in the city of Catharsis, possibly the only clever thing this game does. Unfortunately, the bad tutorial turns into a worse first mission as you’re employed at a local sex shop and given a shop vac to clean up the patrons’ many discarded spunk rags around the place. The shop is raided by hockey moms, whose leader looks suspiciously like a failed vice presidential candidate, and since you’ve been given no weapons so far, your only means of recourse is to shoot spunk rags from your shop vac at the hockey moms to repel them. It’s a bit unfair as some of them have pistols, and you have to protect the shop owner from dying. There might be some cheap thrill here with polygon tits, but anything graphically sexual has been censored so the first mission is just a tease of a mundane game to come.

The mediocrity continues in mission two as you’re given a single can of “industrial strength” catnip to subdue a bunch of crazed, HIV-positive cats before picking them up. There’s more catnip to be found near the mission start area, but the game has no helpful arrows or glowing item locators to assist with any mission objectives. To make matters even worse, after you pick up three of the angry felines, “the guys from the mexi-sushi place” (literally, Asian guys wearing giant sombreros ) come at you with machetes, pistols and assault rifles for stealing their “stock”. It’s impossibly unfair, as all you have is your fists, the non-damage-dealing shop vac, and a handful of cats to throw at them. There’s no point in trying to run from them as they follow you everywhere the cats could be for collection, so it’s necessary to murder one to get his weapon and thus defend yourself from the rest.

This highlights one of the worst problems of the game: The AI is either too dumb to escape a single exit room, or they’re robotic bloodhounds tracking you down without any line of sight or noise giving you away. This becomes problematic during missions where you have to exterminate everyone to proceed, as there’s no indicator of where these moronic NPCs might be. Like the absent mission objective indicator, this serves as just another mechanism to wander aimlessly through the map until you find your goal by accident.

You soon encounter eco-terrorists, a pop culture menace that was looking pretty tired in the late 90s, and Osama bin Laden, showing pretty clearly that this game was conceived in the early 2000s. A strangely fat Al Gore also shows up, owner of a Segway dealership and repeat cameo appearance in a number of missions.

It’s all very rote. The game latches on to its two gimmicks (the shop vac and Segway driving) for a few missions throughout the game, and every other mission is a matter of either shooting or tasering everyone between you and the exit. You play bodyguard at a mall, do a delivery mission in the same mall, break out of dog obedience school, break out of an animal testing lab, break out of prison, break out of a theme park… It’s a series of flat textured office building interiors, small and poorly mapped towns, and the flimsiest of excuses to shoot people in the head.

Unlike the first and second games, there’s no sense of vengeance or even purpose to the objectives in this game. Each mission is either trying to earn some money, trying to find/free your dog or running away from the angry mob one of the previous two objectives riled up.

Most bizarrely, there’s a convoluted morality system to Postal 3. You can shoot, murder, and maim everyone you encounter like in previous games, or you can be a “good” guy by tasering and arresting people instead. Theoretically, this offers you slightly different missions and ultimately a different ending, but considering that using firearms is significantly faster than using the tazer and the whole notion of being a pacifist flies in the face of the entire franchise, it’s strange to even consider this as the preferred play style. And yet, after having finished this miserable game, I received “the bad ending” by not choosing the tazer path.

According to my Steam time played indicator, I finished off my first play-through of Postal 3 in a mere four hours, which I consider to be more appropriate for an Indie game than a full title, and yet this punchbowl full of turds is still priced at 30 bucks after being released in late 2011. Between multiple story paths and achievements which would be possible in a single play-through, Postal 3 presents itself as a full-fledged game but carries with it all the gimmicks of an XBLA game expecting multiple replays.

I can pretty safely say I won’t be revisiting Postal 3. I purchased it on sale and naively failed to check reviews, relying purely on fond memories of Postal 2.

It wouldn’t have taken very much to make this a much better game. Clear objective indicators, less use of gimmicks, a defined “one way or another” story path that you could choose in menus rather than a penalty for killing the wrong group of people, more determination from the main character… but instead we’re left with what feels like a half-finished effort, and the negatives simply drag this title down from being crude fun to being almost unplayable.

Final Score: Even if you got it for free, you’d regret wasting your time.

It's actually kind of playable now, after imbuing community patches, but it's still a mess - although Postal 4 is less of a mess.

bokgibioyun👏🏻

All i'm saying is Postal 4 has soft-locked me twice now making me restart the entire playthrough, but I was able to finish postal 3 with it only crashing two times. Just throwing that one out there.

Ever since they fixed the game the bugs were incredibly minor but yes still bugs but it's very very minor now less bugger than postal 2 imo they also got rid of the bugged/impossible achievements

god.... way better than half life 2

this game is shit

Well it's a game I guess

This game... sucks. The movement is wacky, the npcs are broken, the controls are confusing, I don't enjoy it.

Ohh yeah baby, I am the lizard king!

i wish there was a first person option but otherwise preeti good

I beat this game about a year or so ago on a pirated version, and finally bit the bullet and bought it. Gotta say, the game gets a ton of hate and I don't think it deserves THAT much hate, but this isn't the Postal 3 you want. Play Paradise Lost instead, everyone who bought this game already knows what they're in for anyway. The game imo is fine, nothing great, just fine. I'd say it's worth a play, but don't expect it to be Half Life levels of great.

I got all the achievements in this game, it's cool.

I regret purchasing this game for 99 cents :(

greatest game ever

I would rather drag my balls across broken glass than play this game again.

this game doesnt deserve a review, aryan but reddit classic

Cum Rag lol

Кротчи... Кротчи!. КРОТЧИ!!!

I was drunk when I bought this because I thought it would be funny.
It wasn't.

i really hope i die soon after playing this game'