In the realm of first-person shooters, Bioshock is a fine cabernet sauvignon, a fancy drink meant to be savoured slowly and fancifully. Doom is a vodka with Red Bull cocktail, meant to jack you up to eleven and let you party like a beast. Call of Duty is your less refined Jack Daniel’s, not the best but still drinkable. Meanwhile, Postal can only be described as toilet wine you drink when you want to either hurt yourself, or give you complete amnesia after a traumatic event. Postal 4 came out a few weeks ago only to remind us of how bad and unfunny the franchise was, but apparently, that wasn’t the only Postal planned for 2022. Postal: Brain Damaged is out now, with a totally different premise from the mainline games. At the very least, this doesn’t suck. Not that the bar was very high to begin with.

Postal: Brain Damaged calls itself a “boomer shooter”, and that alone is enough of a reason for me to look at it with skeptical eyes. No, I actually LOVE games based on 90s shooters, but I hate the fact this terrible terminology is being used and accepted by developers themselves. Especially since the term implies you have to be old and behind the times to enjoy a specific kind of first-person shooter based on fast-paced movement, exploration, high-octane action, and item management. As a game itself, however, Postal: Brain Damaged is quite alright. All it took for Running With Scissors to find success with a Postal game, was to let someone else develop it.

Making a Quake-esque shooter with a Postal coat of paint was risky due to the unfunny and idiotic content the series is based on. While the sense of humor (or lack thereof) is still, by the far, the worst aspect about Postal: Brain Damaged, the gameplay and level design are pretty good. Instead of being your typical retro shooter set in small corridors, Postal: Brain Damaged goes for large environments full of extras and hidden areas to explore. It’s easy to get lost, sure, but every corner of the map has something to unveil.

The combat itself is also excellent, for every weapon at your disposal has two functions that allow you to come up with different strategies on how to deal with enemies. The “Smart Pistol” allows you to lock onto enemies and load up to four shots at once, letting you McCree your way into victory. The shotgun has a grappling hook identical to the one in Doom Eternal, and so on. Mechanically, there is not a lot to complain about Postal: Brain Damaged. It has a myriad of issues, but those stem from the part that hinders its potential the most: the fact it still has to be associated with Postal at the end of the day.

I have nothing against dumb, potty humor. I’m the one person who actually laughs, to this very day, at the idiocy featured in South Park for the Nintendo 64, for instance. I will forever cherish Conker’s Bad Fur Day and the Deadpool game. The thing with Postal games is that they aren’t funny. Their attempts at social commentary and triggering people fall flat because making people laugh is hard. It requires talent and some semblance of intelligent script writing. Yes, you need to be smart to make dumb humor. If all you can do is spit out dumb takes with a dumb mindset, you end up sounding like an edgy fourteen year old who thinks that saying “Harambe” is peak entertainment.

You can enjoy Postal: Brain Damaged for the great retro-inspired first-person shooter it is as long as you shut your brain off when it comes to anything that links it with older Postal games, namely the bad voice acting, the edgelord “plot” and the terrible attempts at being funny with (innefective) shock value. At its core, this shooter has some of the most impressive level design I’ve seen in a while, and its combat is also pretty good. There was some love put into this title, something that cannot be said at all about the mainline Postal games.

 

Graphics: 6.5 That good old Quake-esque, early polygonal art style that is very hit-and-miss. Environments look great, while characters look atrocious.	Gameplay: 9.0 Great level design, punchy weapons, good combat, decent performance, and so on. Mechnically, there is very little to complain about Postal: Brain Damaged.
Sound: 5.0 The soundtrack in Postal: Brain Damaged is actually not bad at all, but the voice acting is avant-garde levels of obnoxious.	Fun Factor: 6.5 You can (and should) enjoy Postal: Brain Damaged for the good FPS it is. Sadly, it’s still a Postal game, so its humor is just too atrocious to ignore.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Postal: Brain Damaged is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC.