When you just wish everyone around you was a walking target.
You are “Postal Dude” (yep, that’s his REAL NAME), and as Mr. Dude you have to complete five days of your life and accomplish errands for your wife…gee that sounds fun. Anyway, these tasks are things as simple as getting your paycheck (during which you get fired), getting milk, picking up an alternator for your '87 Difuque, and so forth. There are a few odd ones in there like getting Gary Coleman's Autograph and picking up your Christmas tree and voting on the same day IN JULY. There are always a myriad of ways to accomplish these tasks. Those which require payment can be done as civil and nice as you want. Just pay and take your stuff. Or you can swear at the clerk, shoot them, and take your stuff. The only thing is that this game isn’t just “as violent as you are” because certain missions put you in a place where you have to shoot or die trying. For example, you end up having to enter the “Employees Only” area of the butcher shop to get your steaks and you end up shooting it out with everyone. Then the cops show up. You can give in and get arrested but you still had to shoot your way back to the steaks. The question of violence or not comes in getting to and from each of the objectives. You can just pull out a weapon and mow down everyone in your path. You can shoot dogs, cats, people, cops, and any other living thing in the area. The only major gripe I have with this premise is that 5 days averaging 5 missions a piece translates into one of the shortest games I have ever liked. We’re talking less than 10 hours (perhaps even coming in at under 8 hours) to actually accomplish your goals.
As you accomplish these goals you begin to acquire hate groups. These are groups of citizens who will attack and try to kill you on sight. I have not been able to round up said groups by simply killing them on the street. They only pop up during your errands. Like after getting your paycheck from Running With Scissors (The company responsible for Postal 2) the office is overrun with anti-video game protestors. For a “peaceful protest” there sure were a lot of gun wielding nuts present. After gunning your way out of the swarm they are now your enemy. This only happens a few times. From that point on if they see you in the street they will try to kill you. If you shoot at them in self defense and a cop sees you do it the cop will shoot at you. If you dodge the bullets and keep your weapon holstered the cops go after the guy with the gun.
The mechanics are very by the books for an FPS. Nothing too special here, just their own spin on the game. You have a button to unzip your fly which enables you to urinate all over everything. This includes people. The weapons are interesting. You have your common, garden variety pistol, shotgun, M16-esque machine gun, “sniper rifle” (hunting rifle), rocket launcher, napalm launcher, and a shovel, police baton, and taser. The interesting one is the Diseased Cow Head. This is just a severed cow head crawling with disease. It’s very effective against large groups in tight spaces. Throwing it causes it to spread it to let out a cloud of contagious disease for everyone to breathe. The victims begin vomiting blood and eventually die. Nice touch. Still nothing too spectacular.
The fun factor of this game is in just going f’ing crazy in the environment (which BTW is FRAUGHT with loading screens, constant loading screens). You can just grab a weapon and start shooting. You bump into someone and they get rude…BLAM! No more rude person. You don’t like the way someone looks…POP! No more imbecile. It’s an interesting premise.
Sadly…with all of this going for it Postal 2: Share the Pain is too short and even replaying it in “Enhanced Mode” can’t compensate for this short coming. The game relies rather heavily on its multiplayer to carry it through. I don’t play much multiplayer so I don’t have an opinion on this. Either way, it’s a great game if you only play it once in a while when you’re really in a bad mood. It is fun while it lasts, but it should have lasted a lot longer.