Every cutscene filled with awful film-damage filter tried to make it look like something from a Grindhouse trailer.Even Sonic '06 has faster loading screens than this game. Low-budget graphics, even when compared to its predecessor released eight years prior.And then there were the downright strange glitches, like the one that reversed my controls (backward = forward, etc) and turned my character into a glue-coated homing missile for the nearest corner - where he'd stay until I indiscriminately fired my guns to jiggle him loose. Frequent loading screens that regularly hit the 30-second mark only made each restart all the more painful. I eventually gave up trying to count the number of times the game crashed on me (after I smashed my abacus in a fit of rage). The festering, maggot-filled cherry atop Postal III's frustration sundae, however, is its writhing mass of technical issues. The end result, then, is that everyone - friend and foe alike - turns against you, making the murder-everything-that-moves path far less frustrating than the goodie-two-shoes approach. Trying to be the good guy, I found Postal III's friendly AI has a nasty habit of diving into your bullet stream as though it's suddenly remembered the idyllic childhood it spent picking daisies with your hyper-exaggerated terrorist foes. Of course, given the amount of frustration involved, however, I highly doubt that you'll want to replay it. So there's technically a decent amount of replayability to be found. But if you opt to merely knock your foes unconscious - say, with a taser or the rather self-explanitory fart gun - you end up on the slightly less psychotically homicidal side of the law, saving your dog through slightly sketchy police work as opposed to wanton murder. For instance, go lethal and you'll be a cackling demigod of decapitation in no time. So, what's actually new? Why, a good/evil morality system, of course! Because we're totally playing Postal because we want to be trenchcoat-wearing sweethearts! On the upside, the different alignments take you down fairly divergent story paths based on your weapon of choice. It's a far cry from Postal 2's ambitious, though incredibly flawed, focus on openness. Character interaction is basically non-existent, and there is (as of now) no functional free-roam option. Yet while Postal III's environments come in all manner of sizes - from tight-fitting to wide open - there's very little in the way of things to actually do in any of them. "Given the amount of frustration involved, I highly doubt that you'll want to replay it." A little level design mojo, however, could've gone quite a way toward remedying much of that. It crashes constantly, features enemies so dumb I feel dumber having fought them, and rewards the painstaking effort of completing its obnoxious, repetitive objectives with pain roughly equivalent to a stake in the eye. It looks, sounds, and performs like a bad Source engine mod, and it is without a doubt one of the most broken games I've ever played.
![postal 1 loading screens postal 1 loading screens](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/postal/images/b/b8/18_EZ.jpg)
So then, I'm forced to ask: Can a game be so hair-pullingly, gut-wrenchingly, face-palmingly bad it's good?Ī thousand times no.
![postal 1 loading screens postal 1 loading screens](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DA2E771-XU0/hqdefault.jpg)
"Hahahaha!" it adds, driving home that Running With Scissors is not only aware of how bad its game is, but thinks it's funny that we would pay for it and play it. "Good luck not hurting them in this AI clusterf***," said the intro text. One frustrating, friendly-fire-packed escort mission outright mocked me. "GTA's physics are better," its sunglasses-clad main character constantly quips, rotating through an annoyingly short list of one-liners as he scores kills. Here's the crazy thing about Postal III: it knows exactly what it is, and it really, really doesn't care.