Postal 4: No Regerts

When I reviewed Postal Redux a couple years ago, I was surprised by what I found. After all, I had spent the better part of two decades being told that Postal was one of the most violent, extreme and offensive games ever made. Yet, two dozen years after first hitting PC, I found the remake to be surprisingly tame and maybe even a bit toothless. That’s why I was so excited to dive into the newest sequel, Postal 4: No Regerts. I figured that if the first Postal was controversial for the mid-1990s, I can only imagine how over-the-top offensive the new game would be. And yet again, what I found was an action game that was nowhere near as edgy or extreme as I was led to believe. But who cares about that, is it fun? That’s what we’re going to find out when I review Postal 4: No Regerts, out now on both PlayStation 4 and 5.

It’s probably worth mentioning right off the top that my experience with the Postal franchise is a bit limited. I’ve seen the Uwe Boll movie and am generally familiar with the franchise, but have really only played Postal Redux and the just-released console port of Postal 4: No Regerts. This certainly doesn’t make me an expert on the series, but I feel like I have a better understanding of the franchise now that I’ve seen it as both an overhead 2D action game and the more familiar first-person shooter.

You once again play the Postal Dude, a constantly-annoyed and foul-mouthed hero who moves to the hellish Arizona border town Edensin with his trusty dog, Champ. Of course, as luck would have it, the Dude’s car is immediately stolen, forcing the hard-working grump to take on a bunch of side jobs from the colorful cast of characters in town. It won’t take long before we’re knee deep in action, excitement and cow shit on both sides of the border.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, Postal 4 isn’t so much about a coherent story as it is a setup for a bunch of wacky missions that poke fun at current events, pop culture and whiny people on Twitter. This is the kind of game where you’ll be sling-shotting immigrants across the border in one mission and then trying to shut down a feminist theme park in the next. These quests don’t really connect or have anything to do with each other, outside of purposely trying to outrage a certain part of the internet.

On one hand, I think this structure actually works well for a game like Postal 4. There’s a lot of variety to the mission types and we’re taught early on that just about anything can happen. There’s literally a moment where the Postal Dude is turned into a cat, and it never once felt strange or out of place. This is just one of those games where the developer is going to throw every idea at the wall to see what sticks, no matter how dated or simplistic the premise is. That shotgun approach leads to a lot of random moments (including a few missions that are genuinely fun), but there’s not a lot of consistency here.

I had the most fun when I was tasked with completing wacky missions that involved exploring Edensin and the surrounding areas. The open world is appropriately cartoony, filled with funny details and braindead characters with a three-word vocabulary. The map is surprisingly large, too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nowhere near the size of San Andreas, but there’s a lot going on and locations that feel genuinely unique and separate. And I like that you can motor around the medium-sized sprawl in one of those electric scooters. The open world and attention to detail is easily my favorite part of Postal 4.

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Unfortunately, the worst parts often involve the combat. The first-person gunplay simply isn’t much fun, and the missions that emphasize the firefights tend to be a slog to get through. It’s fine when the combat is a secondary part of the open-world, but too many of the missions have you gunning down bad guys in a series of boring corridors. There’s a whole Game of Thrones section that is long and repetitive, all because the game needed to set up a not-very-clever toilet joke.

The problem is that these mindless shoot ‘em up missions often conclude with an even worse boss fight. It’s here where you’ll get a taste of the frustrating computer A.I. And to make matters worse, you’ll quickly run out of ammo if you lose to the boss more than three or four times. And here’s hoping that you brought enough health items to survive the onslaught, because it’s easy to trigger a checkpoint with not enough life to get the job done. In other words, these boss battles are a real pain.

If this game does anything particularly well, it’s not letting you dwell in those negative feelings for too long. Almost immediately after beating an especially frustrating boss, you’re whisked away to a creepy part of the map that feels like it came straight out of that movie The Witch. This is a fun mission with a genuinely spooky atmosphere that is unlike any other part of the game. The combat is exciting and the horror references are fun to spot. This is the game living up to its promise, giving us random moments that poke fun at pop culture. Too bad the rest of the missions are so damn inconsistent.

Speaking of inconsistent, I guess it’s time to talk about the comedy. Like I said earlier, this is a game that is trying to offend you. It’s purposely pushing button and riling up the more sensitive side of social media. At least, I think that’s what it’s trying to do. I would argue that very few of the jokes actually land. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely some funny bits, but too much of the humor feels like it’s trying too hard to be edgy. I didn’t find it offensive, but rather exhausting.

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It doesn’t help that everything from the comedy to the gameplay to the pop culture references feel dated. Your dude is dressed like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, you visit Breaking Bad’s super lab and ... is that the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? Even the social commentary and edgy jokes feel like they were thawed out from 2008. Worst of all, this is yet another Postal game that tackles satire in the most toothless way possible. That’s disappointing.

Sadly, what’s truly offensive about this game has nothing to do with the jokes. This game is busted, and not just in one or two simple ways. There are whole sections of this game that run at maybe one or two frames-per-second, which makes the already crummy combat so much worse. And if you think that’s bad, just wait until you hear about the time I somehow died while watching a cinema scene. When the talking ended and I could control my character, I found that I would spawn outside of the map, trapping me from completing the game. Even after shutting it down and reloading, I simply couldn’t escape this glitch. Thankfully, I had an older save file, because without that, I would still be stuck on the side of a mountain.

What’s especially annoying about Postal 4 is that there are a lot of missions and moments that I genuinely enjoyed, only to have most of the good elements completely undermined by the dated jokes, bad combat and unacceptable technical problems. I genuinely like the world they’ve constructed and a lot of the colorful cast of characters that live in Edensin, even if many of them are trying too hard to seem edgy. There’s a randomness to the tasks and story that I wish we saw in more games. Unfortunately, the randomness in this particular game is too inconsistent for me to recommend Postal 4: No Regerts.