The objective in Mailstrom is to collect sacks of letters from post boxes and take them to the mail depot where there they are sorted. Letters can then be collected and these must be delivered to the appropriate houses.

The player, naturally, takes the role of postman Mike Nasty and has to overcome obstacles to complete this seemingly simple set of tasks. One of these obstacles is that the postman does not initially have any keys to open the post boxes and so must be use whatever comes to hand, grenades, rocket launcher, etc in order to collect the mail. In addition to this some of the locals are quite aggressive and attack on sight. Injuries sustained in these attacks can be healed by a visit to the hospital. The locals can be dealt with / killed off but killing either an innocent civilian too often gets the player arrested and ends the game, as does killing the policeman.

The key arrangement is a little tricky to get used to, Q - P moves the player up, A - L moves the player down, Z - > are alternately left and right, while the 1 - 0 keys are the equivalent of action keys in that they open up a sub menu of options that the aforementioned keys are used to select.

In a parody of the TV series 'Knightrider' the post van comes equipped with SKIT 2000, a computer that gives 'helpful' messages such as 'You've killed an innocent Mike' and 'You can't take much more of this Mike' while a local is beating up the postman.

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