Postal 4: No Regerts

My first impression of Postal 4: No Regerts was that Running With Scissors genuinely wanted to make a worthy follow-up to Postal 2, and the bones of that ambition are visible. The Postal Dude and his pitbull Champ roll into the fictional Arizona town of Edensin after their trailer gets stolen, and what follows is a week-long structure of daily errands that mirror Postal 2's day-by-day loop. Monday has you working as a prison guard, sewer cleaner, and animal catcher. Tuesday pulls you into border-smuggling jobs for a local gang. By Friday you are plugging a dam to stop a doomsday cult from poisoning the water supply. On paper, that variety sounds like it could sustain a playthrough. In practice, the errands feel like busywork, and the game does very little to make the act of completing them feel rewarding in itself. The open world of Edensin is split into interconnected sections separated by long loading corridors, and the map system breaks without warning. Navigation defaults to a scooter that moves at a pace that would frustrate a reasonable person, and the cars scattered around the map are purely decorative. Combat has a roster of weapons, pistols, shotguns, rifles, a revolver, a boomerang machete, a pigeon mine, and the returning cat-silencer from past entries, but almost none of them feel satisfying to fire. Enemy AI runs in a straight line toward you, clusters up, and occasionally forgets you exist entirely. Dying carries no penalty since the game respawns you immediately on the spot, which removes any tension the combat might have produced. Side activities, like scooter racing and firefighting, pad the runtime, but they share the same mechanical flatness as the main missions. The humor is where Postal 4 loses most players outside its core audience. The series built its reputation on transgressive comedy that felt genuinely provocative in 2003. Two decades later, the shock-value jokes, the dated political references, the riff on Joe Exotic, the catapulting people over the border gag, land closer to nostalgia cosplay than satire. A handful of moments, a VR level with a Pac-Man style enemy, a voting machine that forces a specific choice, a chaotic final sequence where Edensin descends into full anarchy, show the team can still find funny angles. Those flickers are just too spread out across an otherwise flat script. The voice options are a genuine bright spot: players can choose between multiple actors who have voiced the Postal Dude across the franchise's history, which is a nice touch for longtime fans. Then there are the technical problems, and they are not small. Even after years in Early Access and multiple post-launch patches, Postal 4 still crashes, stutters, and occasionally breaks its own objectives mid-mission. The minimap waypoint system stops working without explanation. Performance on mid-range hardware can require dropping to minimum settings just to stay playable. The cell-shaded comic-book aesthetic in cutscenes is a decent visual choice, but the in-world environments are repetitive and low-detail, with recycled NPC models appearing in clusters throughout every district. None of this has been fully resolved since the April 2022 launch, which is a fair measure of where Running With Scissors' priorities sat. Who is Postal 4 actually for? Hardcore fans of Postal 2 who want more of the same structure in a new setting, bugs included, will find enough here to spend a few evenings with. That audience exists, and the 66% positive Steam rating reflects their presence. For anyone without Postal nostalgia, or for anyone who needs a game to work reliably, the case is much harder to make. The ideas are there. The execution is not.

Alex · Scout Team

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