TL;DR – Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a very late and yet very familiar piece of DLC for a game that’s simultaneously popular and yet much maligned. For those who haven’t played Postal 2, this is a satirical and nonsensical FPS with some light sandbox elements where you wander around a po-dunk little town completing a variety of minor quests. These quests generally involve going to place X, asking for item Y, getting told you can’t have it for less than some stupidly high amount of money and then having the option to just shoot everyone. For those who have played Postal 2, this really is more of the same but I would say it’s slightly funnier and it has some modest quality of life improvements. Would I recommend this DLC or indeed the base game? Nope. If you did like Postal 2 though, then this might be worth a playthrough as I feel it’s a bit better than the base game. It’s still pretty boring though.
Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a DLC I bought by accident, when I wanted to have Steam copies of both Postal 1 and Postal 2. While I wasn’t a huge fan of Postal 2 due to it’s lame combat, weak humour, weird pacing and frequent fannying around in lieu of gameplay, it’s a game that has it’s own surprisingly passionate fanbase. I guess being able to start urinating at any time is a big draw for those who think the game’s childish sense of humour is endearing. Unfortunately the FPS combat that makes up most of the game is pretty lousy, so you really have to gel with the tone to overlook the fact that most gunfights are underwhelming at best. As for why I wanted to re-buy Postal 2, well to be honest it was included with Postal 1 and I’ve heard good things about that one. Which I wanted to own on Steam for the princely sum of $1. Then when I bought this Postal pack from Fanatical, I found out that I had bought Postal 2: Paradise Lost. This meant I was somewhat obligated to give it a fair chance. Which I have done, playing through the whole thing on the normal difficulty over the past two days.
Which leads to the million dollar question, is Postal 2: Paradise Lost better than Postal 2? I would personally say yes, because it’s slightly more amusing and has better boss fights. This means that if I had to recommend one of them, I’d go with Paradise Lost. The problem is that, well, Postal 2 is in the bargain bin for me alongside such fine games as Legendary. So a better question might be, would I recommend Postal 2: Paradise Lost? Well my honest answer would be “No“. Why? Because it’s not a very fun experience and I say this with love for the small developer studio that made it. Yet after having played through it for around 7 hours, I can say that I enjoyed maybe… 2 of them? Postal 2: Paradise Lost has it’s moments but they are unfortunately few and far between. At this point I think it’s prudent to mention the bad, before we get onto the good.
And believe me, as much as I can respect small development studios this game has a lot of dumb decisions. Not even just the dumb writing, which can occasionally be amusing. Admittedly it’s rarely amusing and most of the time is just obstinately stupid and lazy. To give an example, in the first part of the day you go to get some food from an Asian restaurant. Now if you had to write a lazy joke about a Chinese restaurant, what might it be? Be honest. Did you think “haha the food is made from dogs lmao”? Well then you’d be right, and I assume you wouldn’t labour the point with 5 different puns about it being doggone good and then have the restaurant get attacked by dogs and then the dogs kill the restaurant workers and then you have to escape this whacky escapade. There’s a lot of dumb humour like this, and most of the time it just feels overly dragged out. Brevity is the soul of wit, and generally Postal 2: Paradise Lost is witless. Which is a problem for a humour based FPS. Remember Eat Lead: Matt Hazard and how it’s mediocrity was not improved by it’s inability to land jokes? Well Postal 2 was it’s predecessor, in all it’s glory. For me personally, I’d say Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages to be funny around 1% of the time. Considering that the game is throwing out jokes, there are still a few amusing moments. But I’d be lying if I said the game’s wicked sense of humour was a selling point.
Similarly the combat is pretty bad, with enemy AI being so basic that it occasionally wraps around to being challenging again. They will bum rush you en masse, but sometimes they’ll get stuck on terrain or keep respawning or just otherwise cause trouble. To the game’s credit, it is aware of this and explicitly tells you to stand around corners and wait for the enemy to filter in one-by-one towards you. To the game’s discredit, there are some truly weird design choices. For example the zombies have been given a weirdly accurate projectile attack that they just love to spam. While some enemy animals have been given ridiculously large health pools. One last pet peeve is that some enemies get a homing rocket launcher. Which is always utterly tedious to deal with due to their ability to just spam rockets at you from far away with little in the way of repercussions or recourse. At least Postal 2: Paradise Lost has a lot of enemy variety and weapon variety. Yet most combat encounters are rubbish even excluding the weird way that damage scaling has been implemented. You see, some of the dozen different melee weapons are actually pretty good. While guns on the other hand, are often weak and inaccurate with one or two exceptions.
Then you’ve got the general pacing of Postal 2: Paradise Lost, which could be generously described as a mess. At the start of each day, you’re given a list of tasks and the freedom to do them in any order. Yet these tasks almost always boil down to: go to X, grab Y (or pay for Y), CHAOS ENSUES BIG FIGHT PEWPEPEPWPEWPEPWEPEWPEWP until you can escape. There are one or two exceptions, but this is basically how the entire game is structured. You wander around between locations, enter a building, go to the back of the building, something CRAZY happens and then you fight your way back out onto the streets. It’s not the worst way to handle things, but it does extremely repetitive and boring after a while. Especially when the combat isn’t great. The game also has a weird checkpoint system that often overwrites itself between attempts, alongside unskippable cutscenes. If you can get past all of these issues, then I do have some good news. Which is that Postal 2: Paradise Lost does have some good things to say about it.
First and foremost, while the general combat frankly sucks there are some boss fights that are actually enjoyable. They aren’t terribly common, but when they do happen they’re generally and make for a nice change of pace. These bosses have plenty of health and some unique attacks, which makes defeating them a fun challenge that requires a bit of improvisation. Due to these boss fights being some of the highlights of the game, Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages a rare trick. Namely that the tail-end of the game, manages to be a nice culmination of the players skills and lets them try out some of the better guns they’ve accumulated. Too many big budget have final boss fights that are just glorified Quick Time Events, whereas Running with Scissors have managed to implement them correctly. Ultimately I’d much rather have a boss fight than more of the fairly brain dead combat that exists in the rest of the game.
Alongside the boss fights, Postal 2: Paradise Lost tries to keep the pace up with a few dumb, if memorable set-pieces. They’re hit or miss, with sections featuring abrupt platforming challenges and out-running a mining drill being off-set with weaker sections featuring out-running zombies and a mining cart roller-coaster ride. In spite of the hit-or miss nature, these sections are at least proof that the developers were trying. As for the moment-to-moment gameplay, there is a somewhat decent risk/reward mechanic that rears it’s head. For context, you’ll always be short of money in Postal 2: Paradise Lost. Yet if you have enough money through selling cats of all things, then you’re able to complete quests “properly” and avoid combat. For example, instead of stealing a quest item you can pay for it and avoid a combat encounter. This is more useful as the game goes on, because when you fail to pay for quest items, you’ll often antagonise certain groups. Which means that from that point onwards, they’ll be hostile whenever you encounter them in the overworld. As such you often have to consider whether you have enough health and ammo for large fights, or whether it’s worth playing things through in the law-abiding manner. This is one of the game’s most successful unique selling points, even if doing things the legal way is often incredibly boring.
In conclusion Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a game with a few good ideas that are let down by two significant issues. Namely that it’s a humour focused FPS game with poor FPS combat and generally unfunny humour. Fortunately it’s a game that still has some merits, including a good variety of enemies and weapons alongside fun boss fights and a unique quasi-morality system. Yet in spite of the good parts, I feel that the bad outweighs the good with this game. As a consequence I struggle to recommend it to anyone, although I will give the small developer studio credit for making a product that’s better than Postal 2. Especially one that manages to be so madcap and varied, even if I found it to be ultimately as dull as many of the more bland games that have come out.