POSTAL

POSTAL is the kind of game people remember for provocation first and design second, and that is also its biggest ceiling. By our assessment, it is a crude top-down shooter built around causing chaos, which makes its tone and its reputation more notorious than its mechanics. The strength is bluntness: it goes straight for shock and mischief, with a simple setup that leaves little doubt about what it wants to be. The weakness is just as blunt, because that same simplicity can leave very little depth once the novelty fades. In practice it is a noisy, aggressive game that is more about attitude than systems, and that can wear thin quickly. Compared with more developed action games, it is rougher, smaller, and more interested in offending than in lasting depth. It is a snapshot of a certain kind of PC game history, and it stops working well the moment a player wants more than provocation.