“Postal 2” is a bad game. It’s nothing short of the truth. In the gaming industry, “Postal 2” is known by many different titles, most commonly “the worst game ever made.” Even the developer, Running With Scissors, jokingly calls it that. That’s why there are people still playing it. Every video game is different, and “Postal 2” is basically the greatest “bad game” ever made.
You play as the Postal Dude, a guy who lives in a trailer and spends the week doing ordinary tasks across the town of Paradise, Arizona. They’re simple, like buying milk or retrieving a package. However, there’s always a catch.
The tainted glory of “Postal 2” is how the game always finds a way to take normal tasks and shove them into a wringer. One objective is to get an autograph from former child-actor Gary Coleman. However, after doing so, the police show up to arrest him, and then the area turns into a huge shootout. Another task is to return a library book, but when done, environmental conservationists try to burn the library down as a protest.
This is partially where the game gets a controversial reputation. No subject is safe in “Postal 2,” so it’s not for everybody. The game satirizes topics like the Global War on Terrorism, violence in video games, and notorious stereotypes. Running With Scissors has outdone themselves in this department.
Funnily enough, Running With Scissors expressed their lack of concern by putting themselves in an objective where you get your paycheck from their office and then defend yourself from violent video game protesters. Somehow, this content is not totally sour. If you watch “South Park” or Adult Swim shows, this game is for you. Regardless, the kind of humor that “Postal 2” presents is some that makes you facepalm or cringe.
The other portion of how “Postal 2” received its share of controversy is its violent content. It’s an open-world sandbox that subtly demands exploration but isn’t stopping you from killing everyone. There are multiple ways for someone to die in “Postal 2,” with your arsenal consisting of a variety of melee weapons, firearms, and questionable items like a throwable diseased cow head.
The game gets chaotic and bloody quickly, but even so, combat in “Postal 2” is mediocre. Firearms shoot too straight, don’t have realistic impact, and don’t need to be reloaded. The A.I. isn’t threatening, either. They turn robotically, use political insults, and have questionably great yet redundant accuracy because you only need to worry about what kind of gun they have.
Surprisingly, there’s irony here. A promotional tagline for “Postal 2” is “Remember, it’s only as violent as you are!” This is actually not a joke. For a game that’s chock-full of blood and gore, you can actually beat the game without killing anyone, but the game’s structure insists otherwise.
“Postal 2” is its own brand of stupid fun from a gameplay perspective. After being out for 20 years, terrible voice acting, erratic A.I., and dumb humor are all part of the joke. Running With Scissors even released a DLC for “Postal 2” after “Postal 3” disappointed fans. Its very existence is a crucial plot point, as the Postal Dude from “Postal 3” makes appearances as a hallucination or a disembodied voice.
Even though this game is arguably bad, it actually functions well. The only technological problem noticeable with “Postal 2” are crashes after you load or die several times or when there are loads of explosions. Luckily, this only happens so often to the point where it disguises itself as part of the experience.
However, in a game so bad it’s good, there is one irredeemable quality: Zombies. You seldom encounter zombies, but what makes them frustrating is how they die. “Postal 2” slaps George Romero across the face by requiring zombies’ entire heads be destroyed rather than a gunshot in the head to kill them. It’s a unique spin on the “remove the head and/or destroy the brain” motto in zombie media but only on paper.
With all of this being said, “Postal 2” has accomplished a feat that is extremely difficult to obtain: Being so bad that it’s good. You know that a video game is some kind of special when being terrible is its redeeming quality. By making fun of everything (including itself), and not trying to fix any of its own mistakes, “Postal 2” is what people would call a “disasterpiece.”
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