Postal²

Moby ID: 8952
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Description official descriptions

Postal 2 is the sequel to Postal, the gritty, violent, over-the-top game that was the target of almost every politician's speech about violence in video games. Once again, the player takes on the role of Postal Dude, a normal (comparatively normal, anyway) guy living in Paradise, Arizona. The game is composed of a five day week, Monday to Friday, where the player must accomplish various errands. There is no time limit and errands can be done whenever the player feel like it. Errands range from getting a carton of milk (buying it or stealing it, player's choice) to cashing a cheque at the bank (either wait in line or kill everyone, again, player's choice). The game is as violent as you are, meaning the player can go through the majority of the game without killing someone or beating up someone, but can also go through it killing and decapitating every one the player comes across.

For killing needs, the player has a plethora of ways to dispatch people: kick them, urinate on them (making them vomit), shoot them, bash them with a shovel, throw gas on them and set them ablaze, leaving behind a charred corpse, and if the player wants to be stealthy, it is possible to pick up a cat and stick a shotgun into its rear end to use it as a silencer. One of the similarly over the top weapons is a decapitated cow's head filled with anthrax, which will cause everyone in the immediate area to gag, throw up, and eventually die.

The game uses the Unreal Warfare engine, and comes packed with the Warfare editor, allowing the player to create new people, levels, or even entire mods.

Spellings

  • Postal 2 - Alternative spelling
  • 喋血街头2 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

108 People (33 developers, 75 thanks) · View all

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Average score: 56% (based on 33 ratings)

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Average score: 3.2 out of 5 (based on 91 ratings with 5 reviews)

Catharsis in a box.

The Good
Controversy in video games is a rather dodgy subject. I stand on both ends, I believe that we need to crack down on the sales of violent video games to the youths and that a little censorship at times isn't such a bad idea. Yet on the other end, the idea of banning games seems stupid and the lengths some of the people go to to fight violent video games is ridiculous. Postal 2 is highly controversial and with good reason. There's a phrase being slung around by politicians, and that is "Murder Simulator." I normally don't agree with this word, but Postal 2 is just that: A murder simulator. That means the game is something of a black sheep. Politicians assault it as if it came from the bowels of Hades, and gamers often avoid it like a plague because the games sick concept often makes one look bad. Even I'll admit I have a hard time admitting to liking the game because for once questioning the morality of someone who plays a game like this is warranted.

Yet if you can beat your way through the controversy, and you are mature enough to handle the concept and remember that there is a difference between human flesh and pixels, Postal 2 is pure catharsis in a box. In a strange way, being a murder simulator makes Postal 2 a game to play if you want to prevent violence. There have been times I've been so pissed at someone I've wanted to shove my boot up their arse, but instead gone home, played Postal 2, and let all the hate go away. As strange as it sounds, as hateful and sick as the game is, its perfect for taking away your stress.

The game has a variety of weapons, some realistic some very strange. The games perception of reality is very skewed, and its acidic and spiteful take on Suburbia is interesting in some ways even if its not seen to its full potential. The various tools you will find range from your standard guns, to anthrax. With the help of the expansion pack and the AWP mod, the game has much more variety and is a bit more fun as it expands the arsenal and other elements. You will always find a tool that tickles your darkest fantasy somewhere in this game.

Although not exactly a 'likable' character for obvious reasons, The Postal Dude has a good voice actor and he does have some funny lines. The game isn't particularly funny (more on that later) but it does have some funny moments, and even if its not as realized as it should be, the game does slip in some clever and well thought out parodies of our American way in a surreal and dark manner that will please fans of South Park.

The graphics are decent. Nothing special even for their time, but they get the job done and there is some good modeling and characters faces are relatively detailed, and there are also some great physics for ragdolls, blood, fire, and... erm, a couple other bodily fluids. Liquids realistically drip, pool, and smear and fire realistically catches and it is impressive to pour gasoline and an elaborate, almost domino-esque trailer and then light it on fire and watch the fire spread and follow your trail.

Multiplayer matches are... erm, interesting to say the least and fairly fun (There is no multiplayer support out of the box if you own the vanilla package, but it was re-released as Share the Pain with multiplayer and you can download the upgrade for free online) with some good maps.

Cats! I know the game is most infamous for using cats as silencers, but what I think its more fun to use the cats as weapons. I love gathering up as many cats as possible (Seriously, one time I had 100 cats in my inventory... that most be one huge coat) and then dropping them, because when you drop a cat they go dervish and start spinning around like the Tazmanian devil, and god help you if you get in the way of those cats because they will shred and eat civilians.. then of course sit down, take a bath, and start purring as you pick them back up. xD Any game that lets you massacre people with a horde of evil kitties deserves credit.

The Bad
The game can be fun, but very repetitive. Although its great for blowing off steam you wouldn't want to play it for long periods of time.

The game is buggy, buggy, buggy, buggy. Its buggy enough to be an insect zoo. The game is poorly optimized, and even on a monster machine the game will sometimes go apeshit and your framerate will drop to practically unplayable rates. There are tons and tons of things that will crash the game, and sometimes you will collide and become stuck in objects for the weirdest reasons. One time in a convenience store, I knocked over a jar of pickles and the jar of pickles rolled over to my feet and I got stick in it. That's an epic failure in the collision/physics department. The only time I'll admit this bug was funny was when a roaming civilian got stuck in me, and then when the game decided to unstick him from me he exploded. That was kinda funny. The game also has ridiculously long load times, and trust me you will run into long load times A LOT because each section of the map has a loadtime between them. Maybe the Unreal Engine simply wasn't made for sandbox games.

The AI isn't the brightest in the world. Sometimes they act really weird and will cause most of the bugs that will piss you off. The civilian AI is so stupid that you can sometimes find it on top of a power line, throwing up while trying to shoot you with an empty pistol. I'm not joking, Ive seen the AI do that. Sometimes the AI is placed in strange places, and one time the game decided to spawn a civilian on my spawn point and ended up telefragging us both.

While there are a couple funny moments and jokes, most of the jokes are more offensive then they are truly funny. An arcade game called "Fag Hunter?" Is that supposed to be funny? There are several offensive jokes, and other jokes that aren't offensive are often stupid and lame sex jokes that not even Beavis and Butthead would laugh at. Its disappointing because like Grand Theft Auto, American culture and civilization is ripe for parody and had Postal 2's writers been a little more clever they could've easily aped Suburbia in a much better way, and I would love to see Suburbia tackled better in a game such as this because I highly doubt GTA will ever tackle it since GTA is on a much larger scale.

The voice acting, while not necessarily bad, is poorly done for one reason: A cast consisting of about maybe only 7 people. You will hear every voice tons of times, and they only had one female voice actor and she didn't do much to at least do more than one type of voice. The only female character that doesn't sound exactly like all the other female characters is the Dude's wife, "Bitch" (Seriously, that's the name given to her although believe it or not, for once that nickname actually is proper considering that she is pretty damn mean. In fact she shoots the dude in the head for not bringing home her favourite ice cream. Ouch.) and she only really exists to give you chores. There are some decent acting jobs, but its too repetitive and slim to make a proper impression.

The Bottom Line
Postal 2 isn't a game for everyone. It is very buggy, its offensive, and its got too many design flaws to truly list. However, with an open mind, it can be great catharsis and a good way to blow off steam. It has a lot of potential, and it has a lot of growing up to do. I'm hoping that the upcoming Postal III will be a bit more mature and have better coding. I'm part of a cult audience, I love this game but as a critic I still have to pick it apart and it is VERY flawed. Its hard to recommend Postal 2 without sounding like a psychopath, but if you believe in Catharsis as a good way of relieving stress and you have a fondness for blood and guts, Postal 2 can provide some fun times and it can really blow off a lot of steam.

Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2009

RWS teaches kids that killing is boring

The Good
Remember in the early 90's when Mortal Kombat came out? It's success spawned tons of knockoffs and clones that suddenly realized what movies had found out a long time ago: In order to sell you don't need guts. You need Blood, and lots of it.

This was the marketing idea that gave birth to the original Postal, an itty-bitty action game that billed itself as the next big thing in ultraviolence. Now, I'm a sucker for bizarre games and a lil' bit of the good 'ol ultraviolence, but while I appreciated the idea of you being a psycho freak gunning down innocent civilians and listening to their cries for mercy in the demo, I never found it to be much entertaining and threw it out the window in no time. Lo and behold, the thing must have sold some copies (or the developers must be really persistent) because a decade later we get a sequel to this uhm.... "cult hit".

Forget the crummy sprites of the original, using the Unreal Warfare engine, the new Postal is a next-gen FPS complete with all the cool polygon-pushing features in today's games. The premise is a little more developed, yet remains the same as in the original: you are the "Postal Dude" (now updated to a black-trenchcoat wearing, white-trash idiot look a-la Columbine's "Trenchcoat Mafia"), and you live with your wife in a trailer on the outskirts of "Paradise, U.S.A." your typical peaceful, backwater, religious and conservative North American smalltown.

Now, instead of just going around shooting people for the fun of it, you are sent out on "missions" given to you by your wife, that involve everyday stuff like returning books or buying stuff at the grocery store. Still this IS Postal 2, and you ARE the Postal dude, so the shit is gonna hit the fan sooner or later, and this is where the main gameplay concept of Postal 2 comes into play: Basically you are in a virtual town, filled with NPCs going about their bussiness around you and stuff happening right next to you. If you want to, you can just stop and take a stroll around the gameworld, see the sights, waste time, etc... But whenever your "missions" trigger some problem you are going to have to defend yourself, or at least find a way out of the mess by shooting the rednecks, policemen, terrorists etc. that come gunning for you.

So far we are in “FPS 101” territory, but Postal 2 wouldn't be Postal 2 if it didn’t add the kind of twisted and downright sick details it’s known for. This include the arsenal of weapons that includes the usual shotgun/machinegun/pistol combo as well as more exotic additions such as a can of gas and matches (hmm! Crispy!), a taser, a cow head filled with anthrax (yep, you read that right) and the ability to do things like urinating on other people and yelling around so as to make them get down to their knees and beg for mercy. And this is what gives Postal 2 it’s edge and what allows you to unleash your most pathetically repressed urges such as knocking someone senseless with a shovel until they start crying and barfing, make them get on their knees and beg for their life only to stun them with your taser, watch as they pee on themselves from the shock, douse them with gas and burn them alive, and finally put the fire out with your own urine.

Sure, you can just shoot them, but where’s the fun in that? At least take their heads off and kick them around like a ball! I know you might argue that none of it is “fun” but the retarded, mad-at-the-world, poorly-endowed freaks that get a hard-on with this kind of stupidity sure do, and they did pull some occasional laughs from me and my friends so as to warrant their inclusion here.

The other element in play here is the gameworld itself which parodies most of the elements in US. pop culture, kind of like an interactive South Park, filled with offensive references to practically everything (my favorite being the group of gay gamers picketing the entrance of Running With Scissors’s offices with signs that read “We want games with stories!” “No more violence”, etc. etc.... Har-Har! I know some geeks like that). Plenty of funny stuff if you appreciate that kind of humor.

And if that doesn’t sound like enough for you how about throwing in Gary Fricking Coleman?? That’s right! He’s actually in the game!! The little bastard must be really pressed for cash to do something like this, but what the hell… as long as it adds to the game!

The Bad
I’m not going to make a statement as to how bad or good all this violence is and how amoral this stuff is as it’s totally pointless (not to mention a complete hypocrisy as the people who condemn this sort of material are the first ones to rally behind wars, capital punishments, and whatever criminal behavior suits their needs), if you are the kind of people that gets this kind of stuff, good. If not, get your oversensitive ass out of here. As for me? I know how to enjoy being a virtual killer for what it is, and I have the common sense so as to “take the gloves” off after playing and leaving the whole thing behind the monitor’s screen. If you can’t do that without going psychotic then that’s your problem.

Now, as for real problems with Postal 2 we have that it’s not much of a game really. Basically you raise some hell following your “objectives” and as you make more and more trouble, a police-meter (lifted right out of GTA) will rise, and the cops will start hunting you down, which means you better hide and cover until it’s safe to go back out there and tackle the next objective, and thus the world of Postal 2 goes around. As the game progresses more and more factions start to gang up against you (be it the angry gamers, or the cultists, or the taliban, or the rednecks or whatever) and thus it starts to get harder and harder to get around without getting shot on sight. And basically that’s it… A Psycho sand-box simulator, in which there’s nothing to do except kill people… Believe me when I tell you that it gets boring real fast, no matter how many “creative” ways you find to exploit the ragdoll physics and violent features in the game. I guess for what it’s worth Postal 2 leaves you with a nice moral, and that’s that senseless killing is boring as hell.

Worse still, the game really missed the opportunity to become the digital equivalent of South Park, as that show in particular showcased how you can combine shock tactics with social criticism effectively, however Postal 2 in the end doesn’t make a case for anything, offers no witty sarcastic critique or ideas behind it leaving you just with violence for violence’s sake. And if that’s what the developers were going for then ok, but there are titles like Serious Sam that do the brainless stress-reliever –thing much better than Postal 2.

Plus it takes ages to load, the AI is retarded and there’s no area damage save for the head (WTF? If ever a game needed dismemberment it’s this one!).

The Bottom Line
Earns points for including some downright disturbing stuff, lots of politically incorrect humor and adding Gary Coleman to the game. But like a joke without a punch-line, Postal 2 is devoid of any purpose or point, this doesn’t mean that I punish the game for not having a story, but even minesweeper offers something for you to aim for. Postal 2 is just about venting whatever aggressive behavior you might have deep inside you, and I guess if that’s your ticket you are bound to get some enjoyment out of it, however if you are serious about that there are much better titles that offer a longer lasting experience and better gameplay with the only value left out of the game being the laughs you can pull out of your friends while saying "Dude... You'll gotta see the stuff this game does!! Uh-Uh-Uh.... Coool!!".

And for the religious anal-retentive folks out there: Last time I checked the game wasn't being distributed for free at orphanages. This is an adult product for adults, and we are all adults here.... right??

Windows · by Zovni (10504) · 2004

Don't judge the game yet...there's fun to be had!

The Good
This game is FUN. Its not fun as in I have to complete this next mission to see where the story goes, its not fun as in I have to show off these graphics to my friends, its fun because you can run around and cause havoc in this town. There is a huge variety of weapons to use, and the unreal engine provides adequate environments to use them. Everything can be blown up, and cars especially go flying up into the air and land with a gratifying crash after a good explosion. Some missions can be tackled from a number of different perspectives. Example: In one mission you must infiltrate the police headquarters to obtain something, I can't recall what. One way is to use a police outfit to fit in with the other officers and just waltz right up and take it. Another is to go in guns blazing. Another way is to take some "catnip" that slows down time, thus allowing you to run by all the officers, grab it, and run out. Or there is another way, I sat on the roof of the police station, found a skylight window, and lobbed grenades, molotov cocktails, and gasoline into the headquarters until there was no one left to stop me!
The game has a...distinct...sense of humor as well. Gary Coleman makes an appearance if that gives you any idea as to the basic scope of the game.

The Bad
The AI is this game is legally retarded. Basically the people in the game just stand and shoot at you until they are dead. Occaisionally they will run for cover, but most often not. The graphics are also quite lame, weak textures with low poly models most of the time.
The biggest detractor from this game is the load times. LOOOOOONG. Moving from one section of the city to the next can take forever as the level has to load ala Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Also if you don't appreciate this kind of humor, you may be very offended by the game.

The Bottom Line
Postal 2 gets a lot of bad press because of its content and tongue in cheek attitude. You play the Postal Dude, you live in a trailer, and throughout the game you are trying to go about your business (ie picking up a pay check, getting grocceries, etc.). Eventually you get into some pretty hairy situations that require the use of bazookas and flamethrowers...must've been a pretty bad week eh? Its a first person shooter based on the Unreal engine, although it is not optimized very well. It is fairly open ended, you have a whole town to walk around in and cause mayhem, although bits of it are locked and must be opened up at later levels. Its a very politcally incorrect game. You can pee on people and yourself, douse people in gasoline, use a cat as a silencer, at smoke a "magic pipe" that somehow heals you temporarily. You can kill a whole marching band and shoot up a circus. But it's fun!

Windows · by MojoHelperMonkey (39) · 2005

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

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Banned in New Zealand as of November 24, 2004.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by JPaterson.

Linux added by LepricahnsGold. Macintosh added by Jeanne.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Katakis | カタキス, Sciere, Kabushi, Solid Flamingo.

Game added April 17, 2003. Last modified January 18, 2024.