It delivers a rip-roaring time, regardless of whether it’ll steal away your serotonin or overdose you on dopamine. It pales in comparisons to the titans that came before, but I don’t think Postal: Brain Damaged especially cares.
I felt throughout that it was a knock-off, Aldi own brand version of a Doom or Quake. It can feel cheap in places, but when it plays by its own rules the combat can hit that satisfying rhythm of dashing around, trading damage, nabbing a health pickup just before meeting your untimely end. Illuminati head figures can laser beam you from across the map and without fail, every time you pull a lever or interact with a key item, a mass of dickheads will instantly spawn all around to put you out of your misery. Some of this difficulty comes from rough design – the burger flinging, obese flying American mascots can seemingly hit you through walls. It’s frenetic and probably importantly, pretty damn tough even on normal difficulty. Enemies number the 100s for almost every mission, meaning you’ll be desperately scrambling across landscapes firing off rockets, bullets, shells and piss (yes, really) galore behind you as a veritable army of mis-mashed demons attempt to rip you apart. It never really tests your critical thinking abilities in the level design, but it absolutely will test both your trigger finger and your patience. Puzzles are straightforward and your path forward is usually clear, with a couple of odd bits stumping me for a moment. Each level is pretty well designed, with plenty of secret areas and collectible posters to hoover up. There’s 15 levels of this, with each taking anywhere between 10-30 minutes on your first go, so it can become tiring by the end. Every level is comprised of finding levers, keycards or some MuGuffin which progresses you through the next doorway or alley. Gameplay wise, it isn’t going to ask a great deal of your hippocampus nor your frontal cortex to navigate your way through its particular blend of gory action. It’s a wild ride and certainly not one for the faint-hearted, or those who care for offensive, unapologetic humour. Hell, you can even fire dildos as a makeshift sniper from a bow or propel cats at old, leftist-hating old dudes threatening you with a double-barreled shogun. You charge around purposely designed levels, blasting, exploding and peeing on everything in sight. It’s a first-person shooter, emulating the frantic and zippy speed of both Quake and the newer Doom entries. Postal: Brain Damaged is a pretty simple concept to grasp. Let’s dive into this rotten brain stem and see if there’s anything that can be salvaged from its grey matter. Gone is the open world structure and meta narrative of the insatiable desires of players to murder everything, in comes linear, structured level design, fast paced action-heavy gameplay and a stratosphere’s worth of awful humour. So along comes Postal: Brain Damaged, a spin-off of the original where Postal Dude is left, you guessed it, brain damaged. Which, in and of itself is never usually a good sign. I never played the previous entries myself, but I watched plenty of commentaries and deep-dives to know that 3 was universally despised, having been outsourced. So it kinda worked, on a weird, juvenile sort of level. Of course, everyone who played it would be a sociopath – but that’s because you chose to be.
The violence was entirely optional, offering a bit of insight into a player’s mindset conflict of real life vs fictional world. Collecting eggs from the store, standing in line at the bank, all the fun stuff. See, the objectives in Postal 2 were all menial odd jobs schmucks like you and me will find ourselves doing every day. Postal 2 introduced the first person perspective, but also had a bit of meta narrative to go along with its heinous action and pixelated orgy of brutal gore. Unlike the furor that faced say, Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto when they first journeyed their violent baby steps, Postal hit its frenzied controversy peak with its sequel.
#Postal 2 all weapons movie#
Somehow, not only did the original succeed, it spawned further sequels and even a movie tie-in. Such was the intensely negative press surrounding the original, it was actually banned in 14 countries and faced waves of anti video game violence protests at its mere existence. Courting a heap of controversy back in the day, it roused the attention of gamers, fearful parents and overbearing law-makers alike. Postal is one of the most easily recognisable names in video game history. A “Boomer Shooter” taking place in a “Dudescape” inspired by Doom and Quake, does Postal Dude’s mind make for a game? The Finger Guns Review of Postal: Brain Damaged.
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