Postal: Brain Damaged

Playtime: 10.2 Hours

Finished 02 August 2026.

This game was quite short, so I ran through both the main game and the DLC (These Sunny Daze) in just a few days. My playthrough of the base episodes was on Hard, but I decided to bump it up to the Postal difficulty for the 4 DLC levels.

This game is a competent entry into the boomer shooter genre, though it's far from perfect. It's a pretty significant departure from the rest of the series in terms of the gameplay format; where Postal 2 felt like more of an open-world exploration & task game, this one is a very typical old-school shooter from start to end, really only carrying over the Dude as the main character and an attempt at Postal's edgy humor and tone. The theming doesn't do the game any favors to be honest; the animated scenes are pretty well done, but the writing and humor falls completely flat, as if a high schooler from the 2010s never grew up and yet wrote this in the 2020s. Tired jokes about Karens, memes, and crude dick jokes are delivered completely deadpan without any of the Postal 2 jank to go with it, so the Dude's narration just sounds like what a perpetual loser would mumble to himself to feel cool. That said, the visual design is good - I like the variety between the visual designs of every level; even though there are only 15 of them, no two of them feel quite alike.

The mechanics are very solid, with crisp controls and fun weapons. Like a lot of its contemporaries, most of the base weapons have very straightforward function, but differ greatly in their alt-fire mechanics. Funnily enough, I think a lot of the alt-fires are recycled from other games too - the pistol has an auto-aim similar to the one in Turbo Overkill, the SSG has a chain grapple, etc. One of the more interesting guns was a vacuum launcher that shoots cats, which you can suck back up (with alt-fire) and act as boomerangs that way, doing damage in both directions and also giving you effectively infinite ammo. It's every bit as overpowered as that sounds. There's a huge variety of power ups in the game as well, from basic health/armor boosts to items that change the effect of your piss stream (yep) - allowing you to freeze enemies or set them on fire. Not much thought was put into balance unfortunately, given that there is an akimbo upgrade that gives you both double damage AND infinite ammo for a pretty long duration (~15-20s?). These are handed out like candy as well, with probably ~5 per episode, and giving you a free kill on all of the bosses. Not sure what the plan was there.

This takes me to my biggest overall point. Lots of other factors - enemy design and behaviors, level and arena design, etc. - are completely overshadowed or made irrelevant by the fact that the game is laughably easy. Playing the base game on Hard, I found it almost impossible to die given the sheer amount of health and armor pickups strewn all over the place (and this is without any powerups or upgrades, unlike Turbo Overkill's chainsaw recovery). Ammo is so abundant that I barely ever had to care about my reserves. Battling through entire levels just to end with a full supply of everything doesn't feel quite right; the game stocks you before, during, and after each encounter, and a number of great arena setpieces are left completely empty of enemies but full of ammo for some unknown reason. All of this is exacerbated still further by the vacuum gun (mentioned previously) - it's a very powerful, spammable, and infinite-ammo projectile weapon that can pierce through enemies in both directions of its boomerang trajectory. You could beat entire chapters with just one ammo and no other weapons! On Hard, the 2nd to highest difficulty, I'd expect to be fighting every step of the way. This even applied to an extent on Postal in the DLC! I remember very specifically a massive plaza in front of a Nazi Cat building (yep) with ammo and recovery strewn all over the place. Passing through that area maybe ~3 times in the level, I never saw a single enemy there. What's up with that?

All in all, this game was a nice little change of pace from Turbo Overkill, sharing the same base DNA but somehow managing to take the pace in completely different directions. Where TO was overtuned to create mass chaos in every fight, this game felt a little bit empty in comparison. Not only are enemies far more sparse, arenas tend to be fewer in number, and fights are far less vertical (or 3-dimensional) in the level's space in Postal. The writing is immature and amateurish, but the gameplay still feels refined, and the (relatively) low level count still feels paced well, takes you to a lot of different places, and all without truly running out of gas.

The DLC is basically more of the same, so I played it right after finishing the base game. Most of my previous comments still apply; I found that Postal difficulty was noticeably harder, but still not a thread outside of a few real meat grinders, and even those were mostly individual rooms with lots of spam or mobs rushing you at the same time. I'd put Postal difficulty a little bit below "Hard" difficulty in a more normal experience. Some of the new enemies (especially the small biker dude with the SMG) can truly rip you apart in an instant if you're in a bad position. Otherwise, there's a few minor weapon changes and/or additions; the pistol now shoots piss, your shotgun fires hot dogs and has a charge-up piercing explosive for its secondary fire, the rifle fires bouncing gumballs, you get a sniper that generates nuclear explosions when fully charged, etc. Most of these sound funny in theory, but in practice they feel like minor but solidly-implemneted variations of other existing weapons. Given that there's only 4 levels (and the last one is a boss arena), I don't think it's worth the full price, but could be a fun couple of hours for a few bucks. I'd rather not play the base game or the DLC again, but I got my fun out of the barely 10-hour runtime.