Postal 2: 7.9/10
So far, a very fun game though not for the easily offended or squeemish. Postal 2 is considered one of the most violent games ever made, right behind manhunt in it's violence, it was banned world wide under initial release but as the graphics have become dated and times have changed, it's now purchasable on steam! This game has you, as the creatively named "Postal Dude" who goes around and does mundane errands around a small town. However, if you don't feel like waiting in long lines or taking abuse by hundreds of different people, perhaps you might "get postal" and do one of the many intensely violent and creative things that the game entices you into doing. Although the game [claims] that you "don't have to do anything violent" there are numerous sections of the game where it's almost impossible not to, such as a level where anti-game activists run into a building and start shooting up the place, or a level where book burners burn down a library. In either case, it becomes more like a generic first person shooter, where the enemies stands in your way and there's no way around them, so whether or not that's "choice to kill" is up to question, though I believe the game essentially forces you to kill on some missions.
But that's not the interest of postal 2, Postal 2's interest comes from the sheer amount of unquestionable, unrelenting and merciless violence that's involved in the game. Things like animal cruelty, public urination, random killings, decapitations, knife stabs and various other means of cruelty from the obscene to the absolute goofy (such as using a cat a silencer) the game will surely make you laugh, or cringe, as you move through the city states causing havoc. One of my favourite things I did was go to a nightclub called "The Fire House", staying true to it's name I poured some Gasoline over the only entrance, shot a gun in the nightclub to make everyone panic and then lit the gasoline on fire and left the building. Everything was calm for a while until eventually, hundreds of people left the building in a blazing inferno. It's admittingly cruel, perhaps sadistic but undeniably fun.
In terms of the actual gameplay, there could be some improvements. Shooting mechanics are rather odd, enemy AI don't seem to move AND shoot at the same time and some AI such as police officers can survive multiple shotgun blasts to the head, and that's only on "hard" (There are 9 difficulty levels and hard is number 5). Weapon damage is generally inconsistent, you'll find the shotgun is pretty useless for any distance that isn't melee distance away, in which case using a switchblade or some other melee weapon will probably best take an enemy down. You'll find you can quickly be overrun by lots of enemies and if you light a fire an enemy may catch a light and run around setting other enemies alight, killing all the enemies AND causing a great hazard to the player who may too become entangled into the inferno. Weapon switching isn't intuitive, you can carry many weapons at a time but you are forced to cycle through them using a mouse wheel, or cycle through them using 1 of 6 catagories. Considering I currently have 5 melee weapons, most are crap, it becomes very daunting in the middle of a firefight to cycle through your weapons to get just the exact one you want. AI is also extremely dumb and they don't usually react to environmental hazards like fire, for example I lit a wall of fire in front of a marching band and all people in the band just randomly walked into it. You'll also find that the game has glitches, most of these glitches are small things that are hilarious like floating people and cops shooting nothing, but occasionally you'll run into game crashes, I've run into a few every hour or so. Saving can also be a bit of a drag as the autosave feature is very limited so you'll need to quick save a lot lest you forget and lose a lot of data.
Overall, the game is fun. It's a good game to unleash the more sadistic side of you, but it's not a "main game", it's one of those games you'll play for an hour, have heaps of fun and then not play it again for another day.
Topic: Rate The Last Game You Played (Read 33703 times)