Postal III Review! Or: Oh, Look! They Made A Game About My Life!

The Gameplay

Despite an eight-year bridge between entries, Postal 3 plays pretty much the same as its predecessor. You spend your time walking in and around Catharsis looking for stuff to do. You’ll be constantly thwarted by homeless vagrants giving you a hard time, old people calling you names, and long lines at the convenience store, all of which contributes to your ever-growing need to… drumroll please… go POSTAL!

The game features a basic goal system that includes your typical fetch, escort, and way too many go-there-kill-THIS-many-of-these quests. In the spirit of openness, I should mention that I didn’t actually finish Postal 3’s main plotline before moving on to a more fulfilling game. I might have reached the end had I not become so distracted by popping the heads of random people with a sniper rifle. It’s like eating M&Ms, you can’t stop at just one.

Look at her! SHE WANTS TO DIE!

Shooting and melee combat is Postal 3 is far from rewarding. Tepid weapon damage and accuracy makes for lackluster shooting and the hit detection of melee fighting is so incredibly broken as to be unusable. Balancing this out somewhat is a fun arsenal of insane weaponry that should keep you smiling for a little while. The aforementioned badger is highlight. They are ravenous little balls of fur with an appetite for destruction and more games should include them.

The Presentation

If this were 2004, Postal 3 would still be an awful looking game, much like Postal 2 looked like a game from 1998. And yet, the gross, lifeless character models serve as a strange psychological aid: the NPCs fail to look anything close to resembling real human beings, therefore, you don’t feel quite as bad going on a rampage against them. Had the game sported a cutting-edge graphics engine, with realistic bullet wounds and decapitations, Postal 3 could have ended up a truly disturbing product. Thus, the poor graphics actually help sell Postal 3’s tongue-in-cheek humor.

And by that I mean there’s both a tongue and a cheek somewhere in this pile.

Audio-wise, both the soundtrack and environmental effects are bottom-barrel sounds that the composers scraped together from bits and pieces of MP3 files they found on a file-sharing network. Harsh? Yes. Accurate? You betcha! Faring somewhat better are the voice overs by the celebrity guests, who at least seem to be having fun milking their 15 minutes of fame.

The Verdict:

Postal 3 isn’t worth a purchase or a rental. Download this sucker or borrow a copy from a friend who was silly enough to spend his hard-earned cash on a game like Postal 3, play it for 15 minutes and voila! You’ve experience everything the game has to offer. Now go buy Skyrim!

Your faithful reviewer,
TheMatt!