Recently finished
Postal 2. I'll admit I missed this one back in the day, as it has a lot of things going for it...which it then proceeds to throw down the toilet.
Unlike most FPS games, Postal 2 opts for an open world approach, using several maps to portray the small town of Paradise in Arizona. The story is simple, Postal Dude is just trying to get through the week, running basic errands and dealing with an ever-growing list of psychos and nutjobs that are just ASKING to be a statistic in a killing spree.
The beauty of the game is in the details, the game is surprisingly deep in its portrayal of the town. There are factions which will react to one another (usually with violence), with a special mention going out to how they react to the player. Whip out a weapon in front of a civilian and he'll either run away scared, run off to call the cops, or pull out a weapon of his own and open fire. Exploration is rewarding as almost every house can be entered and is likely to contain at least a pop culture reference, and the humour is an acceptable mix of parody and potty humour.
The first sign of trouble for me were the storyline missions. Certain events force the player to complete a map that has no other purpose than to house that particular mission. Once that mission is done, that map is gone for good. It's during these sections that the game regresses into a crap corridor shooter, mostly because the enemy AI is shit. The level design is boring shit banal and most often involves going from the start to a certain point, then retracing your steps back to the beginning through a new wave of enemies. The saving grace of these sections is that they're short and quickly done with.
The game starts on a Monday and progresses through the week, with the town map usually expanding by a map or two every day, culminating in an Apocalypse-event on Friday where the skies look funny and it's raining cats and dogs (actually just cats, even the Apocalypse is
)
And then the game completely fucks itself up on the weekend. Saturday and Sunday do not use the open-world levels of Paradise. Instead you get linear levels, one after the other, as banal shit boring as one can imagine, using every overused FPS trope in the book. Need to get through a certain area? The path must be as complex and convulated as possible, and cover at least 90% of the area's geography. Oh, and almost every single map on the weekend levels is recycled (one of them 4 times) before the game culminates in a boss fight that does nothing but destroy what little goodwill the game had built up.
It does not surprise me that the game gets average reviews, the weekend levels are as bad as the weekday levels are good and fun.
I've yet to play the DLC, but I'll give it a go sometime later, as it promises to follow the weekday formula instead of the weekend one.
EDIT: Did a little reading up on Postal 2's history. The original game only ran from Monday to Friday, with a subsequent expansion pack, Apocalypse Weekend, adding in the Saturday and Sunday part of the game. Well, it's not everyday that an expansion pack drags a game down, but this one most certainly does.
EDIT 2: How could I miss this? The game gives you 3 options when starting a new game: Play Monday thru Friday, only the weekend, or the whole week. That amount of choice is rare to see in a game nowadays, and with that in mind I can heartily recommend Postal 2 to Codexers with the warning of "skip the weekend", or at best play it once and forget about it.
