Postal 4: No Regerts Is A Glorious Mess

[Music] look out I can't believe it's been over two years now since I originally talked about postal 4's first Early Access release back when I had to tell countless people that regertz is spelled that way on purpose and here we are in 2022 and it's finally finished well supposedly care to give your hand [ __ ] to this petition the fourth main game in the series developed by running with Scissors and featuring arguably the most every man of FPS protagonists the postal do you got any jobs that pay well there's a bit of a sequel of sorts to postal 2 and its expansion pack parallels lost this time with the dude finding himself in the town of edenson after his car is stolen now forced to run errands for cash and hopefully find out who's responsible for Nicky's stuff seems simple enough and if you played postal 2 or Paradise Lost in the past well then you know exactly what you're in for [Music] yep it is kind of hard to really criticize these postal games for being sloppy and janky because for a lot of people that's really what makes them so endearing I know it's definitely been the case for those last couple of games which I think really seemed to ride that line on being so bad that they're good postal 4 again definitely tears a lot in both directions but also to the point that it really doesn't feel like a full release at times there's something funny about him plus it's just downright unfinished in a lot of areas and other times just outright Broken But even still in its arguably broken state it still let me walk down the middle of the road firing an M60 full auto shooting people in the Torso with a flare gun and dosing up on vitamins to the point that my kick could send innocent bystanders into orbit still planning to release updates after the game is launched and postal 2 is really only as good as it is now because of that continued support but right now going off what I played if I had to sum the whole thing up I'd say the content is there but the Polish isn't and in some ways it's also kind of like regressed from the second game now I say the second game because we all know the third game never existed now right off the bat if you do want to buy this game you can get it along with a bunch of other titles through my good oldgames.com affiliate link which is also going to give you a bit of a bonus discount on top of the original price and if you still haven't made your mind up and you're sitting on that fence well then over the course of the next 25 minutes I hope I can help you make your mind up and quit wasting time sir the main premise is still unchanged in the way you're playing is the postal dude moving around in open world map as you complete a bunch of different jobs for each day of the week good you're hired but able to go detour from that as much as you like if you want to go on a killing spree and start rummaging through people's houses well that's entirely up to you and you've basically again been given all the keys to the toy box and a giant sandbox to play in the main difference off the bat though is that there's now a sprint button so you're not having to walk around the entire time plus there's an all-new mode of transportation in the form of a motorized scooter yeah and get used to using these things because it's the fastest way of navigating the map now [Music] and they can be found at pay stations all over the map or sometimes just parked around at random and look I get it it's a commentary on the rising obesity epidemic in America and the dependency that some people seem to have on these things it's just kind of a shame though that that's it I mean there's all these other fancy looking cars parked around town and yet despite the map being considerably larger than it was in the previous games to the point that you know a car would come in real Handy you just kind of relegated to these motorized scooters driving into people and laughing at the wonky physics when you knock them over and the insulting message you get from the Scooter's handlebars is kind of funny maybe once or twice but then from that point on it really just feels like you're doing nothing in between getting to your next destination honestly you spend so much time driving these things around and it becomes so boring that I ended up just watching YouTube videos in the background to try to pass the time you can whip out a gun and shoot at people as well if you want to but that's again really just fun for like the first couple of times you do it after that it's really just a waste of ammo but the worst thing is when they just randomly disappear whenever you seem to reload a save file and that's doubly annoying if you've just spent money renting one of these things for the day and you don't ever get me started on how quickly people try to steal these things as soon as you turn your back on them there's now fast travel stations to make getting around a bit of a faster process to all of these three main areas of the city but you are still going to have your ice checks planted on one of these things most of the time by far now I know they're supposed to be adding more vehicles in the future but have they never thought to include a car from the get-go so you can run people over is just beyond me I mean these guys have obviously heard of Carmageddon right there's even a reference to it inside the arcade with one of these cabinets if I had one big change to make to the game in the future well adding in some more modes of transportation is one I'd like to see edenson is definitely a much larger and more detailed City Than Paradise was and you've got a whole Loop of different buildings and houses just waiting to be broken into in ransack but it just seems that like most of the buildings are completely empty often literally empty and when you go into businesses like shops or convenience stores there's not even anyone standing around there to pretend to serve you aiming something as simple as seeing a hot dog stand without a hot dog vendor I mean how are you gonna have the hot dog stand and not the hot dog vendor kind of sounds like something Jerry Seinfeld would say at least they made sure that civi's drugstore was working because yeah that's a priority it's kind of ironic too considering in real life I think the hardest drugs this guy's done is the cough syrup his mum gave him great and don't get ass prints on my door the last area you visit in the game is the center of edenson which is basically Las Vegas with all these casinos but again all of these buildings the ones you can even get into are just completely devoidable life I kind of hoped I'll be able to play Blackjack or poker you know maybe catch a show with a bunch of poorly animated show goals but all I got was a few interactive slot machines you know what really pissed me off too was how going into most homes now if an NPC is inside they don't even react to your presence anymore I mean compare that to postal too get the hell out of here you lunatic in fact in postal too if you went into someone's house and they had a guard dog well the little mutt would start showing up out of nowhere to bite you in the ass seems the only point to going through these buildings is if you're bored and want to get a few more incremental ammo and health pickups or to find all of these doll Collectibles which have a very similar pickup animation to all of those figurines that you found in do paternal just kind of feels like they put all these buildings down with the intent to maybe go back and populate them but then they just never got around to it and I know that postal 2 wasn't exactly overpopulated either but that's my entire Point you'd kind of hope that almost 20 years later they could make a more detailed and lived in Game World you know what I'm saying I wouldn't even say that postal 4 has improved AI I mean NBC's still just kind of walked down the middle of the road you know as opposed to walking on footpaths but on the other hand it's probably just to make it more tempting to run them over when you're fanging it down the road on a moderately fast moving motorized scooter when you watch all these NPCs from a distance they pretty much just look like zombies in fact this bit here when I was sniping these guys from an overpass kind of reminded me of that one scene from The Dawn of the Dead remake when the gun store owners on top of the roof doming zombies to pass the time holy [ __ ] it's just a dead lifeless world and I mean look that's kind of okay because it is just meant to be the backdrop for all of the weird and sickening [ __ ] the player can think of here catch I guess I just kind of hoped that it would have advanced somewhat since the second game you know over the last 20 odd years [Music] instead of it just being the exact same thing in a better looking engine yeah this time it's the Unreal Engine 4 which yet again runs like complete [ __ ] despite me playing on a 3080t I was 64 gigabytes of RAM and a nice 7 10 700 this thing just chugs along frequently plus that new engine just hasn't really offered up faster load times either and you're still having to sit through these frequently as you're moving across the map I will say one thing though that I was actually genuinely surprised about and that's the shooting doesn't suck no [ __ ] yeah I know out of all things a postal game actually managed to have decent shooting controls foreign intuitive weapon wheel which lets you swap between weapons and ammo types instantly and easily you've got the tried and tested formula here of a pistol shotgun assault rifle and a rocket launcher or returning in one form or another since the previous games the shotgun in particular 2 was actually really good this time it's a Boomstick the rocket launcher though is pretty crappy and that explosion effect looks like something off a Nintendo 64 game but some of those ultimate fire modes at least I guess make it entertaining holy [ __ ] you've also got the dude's trusty shovel he's Boomerang storm machete and of course he's Mighty boot then if all else fails just whip out your junk and taker piss that's the ticket returning from Paradise Lost is the revolver which I gotta say is one of my favorite weapons in the entire game oh yeah able to automatically lock onto multiple heads at once for some easy takedowns and that never gets old I mean I might have a lot of issues with this game but I sure can't fault those headshots fingers left a new addition though is the M60 machine gun and this thing is just ridiculously overpowered to the point that you can pretty much perform amputations with this thing and sever someone in half from the waist down plus a new four-barreled shotgun called the fornicator yeah four barrels and look if you need to have it explained to you why a four-barreled shotgun is a good thing well then this ain't the channel for you what we've got here is this a failure to communicate there's a Super Soaker you can fill up with what I'm hoping is your own piss but the novelty of this thing does wear off pretty quick I mean there's only so many times you can shoot someone in the face with piss before it starts to lose its appeal or how about the pigeon mine throwing down a crappy looking bird cage which then sends out a swarm of Angry Pigeons to attack me by enemies I mean I guess if nothing else it gets points for originality one of the coolest new weapons I think is something called the rattle up it's kind of like something that Pinhead or Scorpion from Mortal Kombat would use launching had a hook that then pulls someone's limbs off get the [ __ ] over here and wait a minute was that one of one of Saint John's lines come over here yeah I guess I forgot to mention that they got Rick Hunter back now to do all the voice lines for the dude I mean nothing against John St John but hearing the postal dude without Rick Hunter is like you know hearing Duke Nukem without Johnson John done like dinner overall look the shooting ain't amazing though it's definitely a damn sight better than it's been in the past with headshots actually registering now like you're supposed to you got power-ups like the energy drinks which let you akimbo weapons and that just makes for some really over-the-top combinations like two fornicators at once for instance is just broken even to the basic shotguns at once is really fun too though I'd love if someone could explain to me how their dude is managing to pump both of these at the same time then there's also those vitamins that make your kick more powerful kicking people so hard that they basically leave the Earth's atmosphere suspect plus it also turns your piss stream into a goddamn fire hose plus if you take catnip you get what's basically LSD combined all the time which is a pretty cool visual spectacle it's just I completely keep forgetting that this is a mechanic it wasn't even until I finished the entire campaign that I remembered that this was a thing I'm still trying to decide whether or not I think the ragdoll physics are good or bad here suspect but I do think the lack of environmental physics and prop interaction is definitely bad I mean even if something as simple as being able to shoot bottles is impossible foreign and when did the implementation of a basic feature like being able to destroy small props just become a complete oversight throughout the map you'll also find ramp Pages now where you need to cause a certain amount of Destruction in a short amount of time and these are just kind of lame because instead of doing something crazy and over the top like blowing up 50 cars with a rocket launcher it's something kind of lame like shooting rabbits yeah shooting rabbits plus the limit of only being able to do them once a day is about the dumbest thing of all time especially in a game where I can just reload a checkpoint and try as much as I want over and over I mean why include this mechanic of it being a once a day occurrence if I can just reload a save file as many times as I want with the main focus of the game itself are the days of the week and all these odd jobs you need to complete to make it through time to do a little dirty work I've always thought that one of the better aspects of these games is the postal dude as a character he's not a demonic Slayer gum chewing alien ass kicker or regenerated Gunslinger none of that stuff he's just the dude a guy in a bathrobe in pajamas who can't even get his hands on a decent meal and is constantly being forced to deal with all the weird and wacky [ __ ] that the world throws it in now how about the pay for my exemplary efforts it's really just a story about a man's dog who just want to get their stuff back and then have everyone leave them the [ __ ] alone and I get it figures the main campaign focuses on five days of the week Monday through to Friday and all these various tasks that people of edenson had for him some good and some not so good featuring writing that can be clever with parody elements and taking subtle Jabs at politics and popular culture oh no well then you've got the less clever stuff like calling an amusement park Connie Island [ __ ] along with dick jokes man lots and lots of Dick jokes remember that scene from The Matrix when Neo and Trinity Jack in to save Orpheus and you sealed those guns on the racks yeah well replace those guns with dick jokes and that's postal Force riding at one point I saw a frozen banana stand which I'm assuming is a reference to Arrested Development and I'm surprised they just didn't make this thing a giant penis [ __ ] you [ __ ] I mean it is kind of dumb to criticize stuff like this in the same game where you can stick a cat on the end of your pistol to make it into a silencer and also have to complete objectives like using a fire hose to wash away giant piles of feces and yeah that's just a small taste of what to expect here so Monday starts off with a dude arriving in Edinson and trying to find a job going around with a cardboard cutout asking for work before he gets redirected to a job center can you put your ankles behind your head no anyway this guy gives you three jobs working as a guard at a prison and helping an animal catch it and then maintenance work in the sewers simple menial jobs oh quit wasting time sir now I did the prison first which went pretty much how I expected it to within a few minutes all the inmates had gotten loose and I had to go from terminal to terminal locking the whole place back down again and right off the bat you'll notice just how bad the enemy AI is they get stuck in walls all the time they run around aimlessly and they show off these bizarre reality defined physics and I'm guessing these guys aren't exactly in here for white collar crimes no after that I went to the animal catch up and this is pretty textbook postal kind of stuff luring straight dogs into a blood-covered van so the main inside can get up to no good with these poor Critters that's it for the dogs around this time too a fire broke out nearby ironically at the fire station so as a fun little distraction I went down there to put out the fire for a few extra dollar dues job well done then finally I headed to the silvers where I had to clear out a bunch of pipes that were blocked with walls of [ __ ] literally I then had to do basic platforming across floating crates to find spare parts and then replace a bunch of Flicker and light bulbs and I feel like if this was postal 2 well there would have been some kind of escalation after each of these like the prison had a ride right so that's fine but the animal catcher and the sewers felt like they were missing some kind of final event like after the animal catches stuff I half expected a group of gun toting animal rights activist to turn up or something seems simple and enough or in the sewers maybe I'd get attacked by sewer people angry hobos or carnies Nomad you know small hands small hands instead it was just a bunch of rats indeed now let's look back at postal 2 right the first objective of the first day was you picking up your paycheck which then ended with a group of violent video game protesters storm in the building plus from that point on that faction would attack you on side so it's set up that Vendetta aspect for the remainder of the game that's the one the second objective cashing that check in ended with a bank heist don't move and you won't get hurt here though in postal 4 this stuff just ended and I can't help but feel that it was like missing something to make it more exciting indeed it's kind of a good example of what I was saying before how it has the content but it lacks the Polish and it seems the ideas are there but they don't always know how to fully capitalize on it like they've done in the past Tuesday at least does start off kind of interesting you kidnapped by Mariachis who give you a bunch of different assignments and this seems like it could be a bunch of fun you have yet to prove your worth but the day is still young it then spawns you inside the headquarters or whatever but again the place is totally empty and just another example of the game World feeling completely lifeless anyway for this bit you have to shoot a bunch of illegal immigrants over the wall and back onto U.S soil avoiding the border patrol and a tsunami of incoming bullets from the constantly spawning reinforcements wow forced into using the clunkiest third person slingshot I've ever seen which we don't even get a proper Crosshair for but this is at least what you'd expect from a postal game just a bit of a shame to hit scanning border patrol can tear you in your [ __ ] so quickly ow yes after that you've got to make a delivery to a Shifty pet store ending with the dude passing out from inhaling chemical fumes only to then hallucinate I assume as he's turned into a cat may as well get to work on those errands whether this is supposed to be real or not I've got no idea but it is again another cool idea where you've got to bully a nearby dog you've got to find a lady cat to then get laid and also pick up some milk in a bit of a throwback to postal too the expiration date for that milk's even set at 2003. nice impressive very nice but aside from offering up a different view of the world this is also kind of underwhelming I mean picking a fight against a dog goes exactly how to expect it to yeah much luck in real life a pit bull has no issue [ __ ] up a small cattle and I'm talking about a literal pit bull I'm not talking about Mr worldwide chasing after the lady cat is kind of funny and all these potential cat suit is wanting to fight you afterwards is clever only you can just run right past them and then watch them all get stuck on this kind of invisible barrier then finally picking up that milk is as easy as walked into the convenience store and grabbing the milk yeah not exactly brain busting stuff and on top of that too throughout this whole section I just kept randomly falling through the map the final job for Tuesday involves going to a nearby Village and spray painting graffiti over all of these Billboards and I know I'm supposed to be drawing dicks on these things but instead I spray painted something that I thought was a bit more appropriate at least this sequence actually gives you something to shoot at though because during this last objective a group of activists show up to attack the player what's going on over there do my eyes deceive me is that white male culturally misappropriating the techniques of this land's beautifully stop it get some help overall I gotta say that Tuesday was more like snooze day but the real thing I was looking forward to here was Connie Island yeah don't take that sentence out of context I saw all of this footage of this thing before I played the game with all these fun looking attractions and rides including a roller coaster which is actually fully functioning one point when riding this thing my head went right through this metal beam and how I wasn't decapitated from that and I've got no idea but that makes up the majority of interactions you can have and I mean look if you have a carnival level in a video game your main responsibility among all others is to fill it with a bunch of useless mini games remember that carnival level in blood we could play through all of these slideshows go check out the freaks or Take a Ride On a Carousel yeah that's how you do it oh ironic I won one Coney Island has a fun house but the entrance is just completely blocked over I mean I can't even get a goddamn cup of honey juice again don't take that sentence out of context the most exciting thing that happens is when you try to leave a woman in a vagina suit tries to kill you why don't we invite him to join us for a little threesome [Music] you do often see the elements of proper postal level design shining through though like one of the later jobs has you going to a toilet paper Factory to install a bunch of bidets fighting off people who violently protest the use of them I mean that's an actual Mission yeah you go around installing them all on these [ __ ] throughout the building and then fighting back against these anti-bid day Warriors it ends with a boss fight against a guy on a giant toilet Throne named tinklage [Music] and yeah look it's pretty dumb and not exactly high brow you will understand that the only thing that should come into contact with man's rear end is the Gentle Touch of a dead tree but it is still pretty clever and it shows emoticum of thought went into the writing could I interest you in a bidet in these trying times Thursday begins with the dude waking up in some kind of nightmare Lodge which looks like something out of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film then with a basement that's just the Red Room from Twin Peaks then later on when you're working for the mob you've got to fix a motorized scooter race because yeah man they're really getting their value out of those things aren't they anyway you do this by making sure the red driver wins which for me just meant I T-boned the other races as much as I could trying to knock them off their scooters this can actually end in one of two ways if you fix the race and the red racer wins you can walk out the front door and everyone's happy dude if you bugger it up though you've instead got to fight your way out of the stadium taking on all these Wise Guys in black suits and this stuff is fun to play through it's creative but then right after this you're in a casino working the floor as a Pit Boss the first part of which is so broken that I have no idea how I even managed to get past it this contraption owes me money and you need to do something about it [Music] followed by a sequence where you've got to fight off a bunch of Thieves trying to get into the Vault and this involves making your way through this Burning Casino putting out fires with a fire hose then shooting the four or five people that spawn in and then repeating this until the whole place is cleared out honestly repeating this like six or seven times that nauseam and I kind of feel like the whole campaign is just a tug of war between these fun and creative missions and then the stuff like this with these repetitive objectives that just kind of feel phoned in and you need to do something about another good example being one that just entirely involves washing away giant piles of [ __ ] with the fire hose and that's not a metaphor you really do run around plugging a hose into fire hydrants and then washing away a Triceratops size piles to [ __ ] and look I'm not trying to be holier than thou or anything like that but if you asked if I prefer to play a mission like that or one where I'm sucked into a Tron mic VR Game World well then yes is pretty simple ain't it I can't believe you've done this the weird thing though is that this I think is exactly the kind of content that people have come to expect and want from these kind of games to the point that it almost feels like heresy to criticize it I don't know if you can really make excuses for a game being so crappy at times like this but love it or hate it this kind of thing is in the series DNA and it's kind of what you'd expect when barely 50 people get together to try to make an open world chaos sandbox like this the game ends with that same apocalyptic event from the second game where everyone starts trying to shoot up yeah a great idea when everyone's armed with hit scanning weapons oh and you're forced to travel across the entire city trying to take out these previous faction leaders one of whom happens to be the mayor returning character Mike J who's on top of a giant toilet wearing a postal helmet that you eventually knock into the toilet to finish him off better Bow Down and Worship my ass [ __ ] and I mean look if that isn't a perfect metaphor and a sum up for this whole game a giant toilet well I don't know what else is I guess really that's kind of the whole point of the thing to begin with in a game series where you can piss on a burning corpse to put it out and attack people with murderous carrier pigeons and you know what if nothing else well still better than postal 3. foreign [Music]

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 534,748

Keywords: postal 4, postal 4 no regerts, postal 4 review, postal 4 game, running with scissors, postal 3, postal 2, postal 4 early access, lets play, early access, first person shooter, video games, duke nukem, postal 4 trailer, postal 4 no regrets, postal 4 gameplay, postal 4 walkthrough, postal 4 all weapons, no regerts, postal redux, postal 4 petition, postal 4 rick hunter, postal 4 friday, postal 4 ending, gmanlives, gggmanlives, first person shooter games, early access games

Id: As3E8__OOOc

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022