The test
In 1997, Postal offered us an isometric view. In 2003, Postal 2 adopted a subjective view. And in 2011, Postal III chose the path of TPS. In any case, low-brow humor responded to the call, and so did the poor ratings from the journalists. Even the 2008 film Postal failed to win membership, its Metacritic score peaking at 22/100. Since it was directed by Uwe Boll, it could hardly be otherwise. In short, this series is an authority on bad taste and critical failure. We will see that this fourth video game episode is no exception to the rule!
Presented by the developers as the true continuation of Postal 2, of which it also takes the subjective view, Postal 4 opens on a screen specifying that the game is “not recommended for children, streamers with family audiences, pious people, anyone suffering from psychosis and/or seeking a career in politics”. The tone is set, and confirmed by aloading screen featuring an inflatable doll recycled into a training dummy, and a drawn introduction featuring a pair of testicles armed with a bazooka, a big poo that makes a splash, and a dog that licks its gonads. Here, here… Do you want more? No worries, the adventure has kept some on hand. The inn in town is called Anu’s Inn, the hero can regain health by consuming crack pipes, dead dogs and piss bottles can be purchased from vending machines (sic), one key allows you to urinate on anything and everything (so you can pee on poop, do what you want with this information…), another to push a live cat on the barrel of the shotgun to make it quiet, and gameplay tips are distilled by Krotchy, the series’ “crotchless” mascot. As for the quests, they ask us, among other things, to crush stray dogs and cats, to clear piles of excrement with a shovel, to install bidets, or even to make a mess in the dedicated Kunny Island amusement park. to female anatomy. Dirty, scat, vulgar, violent, stupid and mean, the humor of Postal 4 remains faithful to that of previous episodes. Some will like it, others will hate it, and it’s a safe bet that you have already chosen your side after reading these few lines.
A GROUND OPEN WORLD
The pretext scenario puts us in the shoes of the Postal Dude who has gone in search of his stolen caravan. So here he is forced to evolve in the city of Edensin and meet the needs of its inhabitants, the structure of the game taking the form of a small open world. More parodic than believable, the city has a commercial area, a residential area, an industrial area, an area that remained blocked off during the days of the Wild West, and even a mini Mexico, with the border and the separation wall all going well. A few challenges and collectibles are scattered throughout the scenery to reinforce the sandbox aspect, but make no mistake, this open world is years behind from a technical point of view. Only one type of vehicle is available (a Walmart-style mobility scooter), passers-by wander aimlessly and are cloned beyond reason, some rooms are horribly empty, animations are generally stiff (or non-existent, such as when a character sits decides to get up), and loading times regularly interrupt travel. Not even hidden, they freeze the screen for a few seconds and display a stupid “loading” message… as Half-Life 2 did almost twenty years ago. And Valve’s game did not make its hero’s hand disappear while letting the weapon float on the screen as if by magic…
The tone is set, and confirmed by a loading screen featuring an inflatable doll recycled into a training dummy, and a drawn introduction featuring a pair of testicles armed with a bazooka, a big poo that splashes, and a dog. who licks his gonads. Here, here… Do you want more?
As for the graphics themselves, they oscillate between the acceptable and frankly dated. The cel-shading effect clearly serves as a cache-miserie and absolutely nothing suggests we are in 2022. On certain specific points, we would rather believe we are back in 2002. But beyond the aesthetic questions, the most astonishing thing comes from the little of interest from certain quests. These are also called “races” and actually do not have much thrilling. If some of them lead to shootouts that at least have the merit of bringing a little action, others are however desperately banal. Scrubbing sewers, changing light bulbs, fines badly parked cars or getting a dozen people to sign a petition, we have known more exciting things. These moments of hesitation are all the more regrettable since, when it pulls its finger out of its buttocks, the game sometimes knows how to hit the mark and be politically incorrect in a judicious way. The quest asking to throw immigrants over the border with a giant slingshot, the NPCs who mask themselves following an epidemic of pigenoavirus, or the Game of Thrones parody that favors the sanitary sense of the word throne, all of this works pretty well. In terms of positives, we can also mention an option rarely seen elsewhere: the possibility of choosing between three different voices for the Postal Dude. This can be embodied by actors Rick Hunter (Postal 1 and 2), Corey Cruise (Postal III) and Jon St. Jon, who will forever remain in our hearts as the interpreter of Duke Nukem.
WITHOUT FINISH
Alas, these rare moments of thinning are not enough to pull Postal 4 out of the quagmire in which it finds itself. It is thus necessary to do with very many bugs, which are all the less acceptable as the game has just come out of an early access of two and a half years. To play the game full screen, for example, we had to fight for almost twenty minutes in the options, the image constantly returning to windowed mode or to the wrong resolution. As for the activation of subtitles, we were completely forced to give up. None ever appeared, either in cutscenes or in-game dialogue. Worse still, we faced a blocking bug, which we managed to circumvent with a cheat code (thanks to the Steam forums). Without it, a quest completion script stubbornly refused to trigger. Heroes who take the ladder on the wrong side, NPCs who pass through the ground, screen that suddenly goes black except for the interface and objects that float in the scenery were also part of our daily life during this test. We also had to deal with several crashes, some random and others systematic (for example when trying to use the attractions at Kunny Island park). To believe that the dirty side of the game also concerns the code pissed by the developers!
