Postal 4: No Regerts Review (empt)
I'll start by saying that I really, REALLY wanted to like this game. I loved Postal 2, I loved Brain Damaged, and like anyone with sense, I never played Postal 3, and I have kept high hopes for this game to live up to at least a shred of The Dude's legacy. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. I can tell that this has been a huge labour of love from RWS, and I have spent a solid 30 hours across all different versions of the game, which may not be enough time to 100% everything, but unfortunately, it is definitely enough time to get a solid understanding of how flawed this game is.
I have owned it practically since it came out, in it's very early stages, and I've tried it in multiple different stages of development, all of which have had glaring flaws with performance, bugs, and more. I've always gone into the various attempts to play with an open mind, and always left disappointed.
However, for this review, I will focus on my most recent play-through, which is the first in which I have completed the story in its entirety, and I now feel ready to leave an honest review.
First of all, the story, writing, dialogue is the at least very similar to the kind of Postal that we love and adore, no issues there, I went in with low expectations and got exactly what I expected, I thought Friday was by far the weakest in terms of storyline, however. I was very on-board with Rick Hunter being brought back as well.
I also thought that the bonus objectives such as seeking out all the toys and completing challenges were a fun break from errands, but half of the time I had issues with those bugging out and not functioning anyway.
Also, it's been good to see performance fixes coming through from RWS piece by piece. I had solid 144 FPS throughout my run through on relatively high settings, which is something I definitely couldn't have said before.
Sadly, this is more or less the end of the praise I have for this game.
I have encountered many, many, many, horrendous bugs, one of which basically broke my entire save, which had tons of money, ammo, pickups collected, and I had little choice but to start from that day again on a new save with my stuff gone, which was pretty disheartening. I also then learned to have backup saves for practically everything that happens. Going through a zap zone? Better create a new save. Starting a new errand? Better create a new save. You get the idea, it just felt safer, since the autosave function screwed me over more times than I care to count.
As for other issues, I had a really annoying bug that persisted through my entire playthrough, in that whenever I would press M to open my map, it would immediately default to my LifePeeper page, and I would have to then manually open the map. Every. Single. Time. I tried restarting, reloading the game, interacting with the LifePeeper page, but it was stuck like that. Nothing major and far from game breaking, but annoying enough to be noticeable. Also, for some reason, my fast travel system just refused to work, no matter what I tried, so I had to run/scoot everywhere, which was insanely tedious, especially since my scooter would despawn if I looked away for too long whilst doing something else quickly, and I'd have to shell out for another one. Just make the standard one free, and pay for the nitrous version if you can't have the scooters stay persistent.
Otherwise, I experienced heaps of standard half-baked game jank, such as falling through the map, soft-locks, crashes, etc, all of which detracted massively from the experience, but others here have talked about these issues at length.
NPC interactions were incredibly delayed and felt like one of the jankiest parts of the game to me. I could do something to invoke chaos, and watch the cogs turn in their brains before they take out their gun to shoot at me, it felt incredibly unsatisfying, and honestly just sort of something I began to not even bother with, and began to ignore most NPCs as it just felt so.. lacklustre. Of course, causing chaos is still fun and all, but when the NPCs have the intelligence of a brick, what's the point?
Gunplay is.. okay. Some weapons are super fun to use, but others are just frustrating and awful. The P350, even in the earlier parts of the game would take 4 headshots to kill a man in my experience, which sucked, but blowing someone to pieces with a shotgun was very satisfying.
Brief spoiler section for the end of the game (don't read if you haven't beat the game, or do, I don't care):
The fight against The Dude's dad on Friday was one of the worst boss fights I have ever experienced. I made a mistake and died the first time around, so I went back up into the penthouse, and it then proceeded to spawn two of him, and when I managed to kill both, errand completion and the cutscene didn't trigger so I had to do it all over again, by reloading a previous save. It was also pretty much the exact same as the other boss fights, unload guns into sponge enemy from cover until they keel over, nothing new or imaginative for such a pivotal boss fight. At least the Mike J fight had the whole elevation gimmick with the rocket launchers.
Bottom line is.. if you're wanting more Postal, just go play through Postal 2 + DLCs, and play Brain Damaged. It seems to me that they're gearing up for a console release, which doesn't bode well for the future version on PC. Honestly, don't waste your time with this. Chances are, you'll just leave feeling let down. Maybe come back in a couple years and try it then.