Postal 4 - No Regerts

Running with Scissors' berserk walking simulators have never drawn any praise from critics. Rather, it is that the Postal series has been so brutally sawn off at the knees that it continues to get worse and worse over time, where especially the third installation is often mentioned in discussions about "the worst game of all time," which the developers are keen to use for marketing purposes.

However, it's no secret that critic ratings and player ratings can differ significantly, as shown by the crown jewel of the series, Postal 2. Discussed and criticized, not least by the media which managed to get the game banned in several countries, including Sweden for a period of time, and cause the sales figures to skyrocket, Postal 2 was a dirty diamond pressed into the ground but then, as I said, the fun was over because when it comes to Postal 3, critics and players are in touching agreement, it was unusually bad.

Postal has always been "freedom of speech" in game form. It has never taken itself seriously and that has been the appeal of it. After all, there is something refreshing about letting go of all inhibitions and taboos and going berserk on civilization. But cocky and edgy is one thing, broken and silly is something else entirely. When games are buggy beyond all reason and infantile in a most embarrassing way, it's impossible to turn a blind eye, and now that Postal 4: No Regerts has been released, it's clear it continue on the same path. It's not quite as deplorable as dumpster fire three, but it's not too far off either. It's pure catastrophe.

I, as the Postal Dude, have just had my trailer stolen after a roadside restroom visit and am now stranded, with no home and no money. However, I'm ready to work for my livelihood and so I head to the fictional town of Edensin to look for work and after a particularly frustrating search for an employment agency, I finally find the right place and come across a real-life arch-villain behind the desk. But at least he's ready to give me various crappy jobs for a 50% fee, so I go for it. The deal is a pure insult, of course, and something I really didn't expect the normally inflamed and easily offended dude to take without a fight, but it happens anyway and I now have a number of choices in front of me, where I can change light bulbs down in the sewers, stop a riot in prison or lie around for money. One choice is even more boring than the other, and this is also how the rest of the game looks. Weekly missions, Monday to Friday. Patching parked cars, catching stray animals, shovelling shit. No point to any of it really. No deeper meaning, no political catapults or social commentary. No satirical criticism of society, just boring gainful employment interspersed with jokes that usually involve the surrounding area or the sphincter itself.

In terms of gameplay, the Postal games are about as far from originality as you can get, but they have compensated for it with a really sick sense of humor and a good portion of no fucks given. You can use cats as silencers, for example. This shtick doesn't land with everyone, of course, but for the right audience it can absolutely work. But it's also a difficult balancing act. When does it simply become too much? When does it stop being fun to go around peeing on people? Without having a concrete answer to that question, that line has at least been crossed for me. Postal 4: No Regert is a numbingly boring game; it has some of the worst gameplay I've ever experienced, the combat is horribly stiff, the humour is brain dead and it's so insanely buggy and defective that at times I just want to go full postal and throw the console and TV out the window.

When I end up in combat with someone, I immediately wish I had chosen to walk the path of the pacifist instead as I encounter the kind of shitty combat I have seldom experienced. The AI here is laughably bad and every enemy runs straight towards me and immediately gets parts of the skull blown off. Sometimes they get stuck in the surroundings or in each other, in large clusters and pose zero threat. They just get picked off, like low-hanging fruit. As usual, I have lots of weapons in my possession but none feel particularly good to use. Everything lacks that feeling of genuine weight and dynamics. In the end, I almost only used the pistol, which still felt decent but still far too weak. It didn't help that the enemies further into the game could withstand so much lead that it became ridiculous after a while. Half a magazine right in the temple should sink even the strongest of men, you might think, but no! On the other hand, it makes absolutely no difference if I die. I get to start over in the same place and I lose nothing, except possibly my honour. Every encounter is a monotonous and spiritless process that just has to be ticked off in order to move on.

Exploring Edensin is equally boring. Trying to find somewhere using perhaps the worst map of all time is a challenge, but not a fun one. Eventually I got tired of wandering around in uncertainty and getting stuck in graphics bugs, which forced me to restart the game, so I decided to rent a vehicle with my hard-earned money and judge my surprise when it got even worse. Trying to maneuver this stiff, slow and clumsy creature was by far my worst gaming experience in years and if there were plenty of bugs before, it didn't get any better now. The flat game world does not lack places to get stuck in and when that happens, well then it's sayonara motherfucker to that game session. Another "fun" thing was that if I rented a vehicle and left it standing for a while, it was suddenly gone. Gone, just like that.

Something I really hate in games is when it has to be platformed to hell, even though the game mechanics can't be described as anything other than one big breakdown and are thus basically not adapted to such undertakings. The hardest part of a game should never be climbing down a ladder and adding more salt to the wide open wounds. When it's 2023 and the developer hasn't even bothered to make a climbing animation for said activity, instead letting the player "float" down the ladder, you know it's sloppy beyond belief. Now, graphics aren't everything in this world, but Postal 4: No Regerts is truly atrocious in that regard. It's so angular, lifeless and downright hopelessly dated that the only way to distinguish it from the games released early in the sixth console generation is by the year. The character models are among the worst I've seen in modern times and the sound effects really aren't much better. Often without proper sync and with firearms lacking any kind of real pressure, honestly sounding mostly like fireworks.

In combination Postal 4's shortcomings are downright soul-killing and should deter any sane person from spending a single penny on the game but the fact is that even if it had been completely free it would still have been far too expensive.