#violent games

ever played violent video games?

Futaba: I don't play them on my own. Anxiety and PTSD and shit.

Futaba: I don't play the nastiest stuff a lot. That's reserved for Mom, Bro, and occasionally Haru.

Marc: Is Hifumi gonna be on the list someday?

Futaba, flushing: Yeah, I hop- HEY!

Version played for review: PC (Steam) Available on: PC, DVD-ROM or Steam Price I paid: £6.99 Other Notes: This review will include the Apocalypse Weekend DLC seeing as it's included in the Steam version.

The first Postal was a game designed to annoy reactionaries of video game violence and it did so rather well. Overall it was a slightly above average game that nowadays is up on Steam for around £2 which is the perfect price for its short length. Postal 2 changes everything up as it's a first-person sandbox with more controversial aspects. I have an intriguing relationship with this game. When I first played it I was 17. I was also a fan of many loud shouty right-wing YouTubers and went out of my way to annoy religious people. To be blunt I was a bit of a nasty loser and the only reason I enjoyed this game was that it upset other people. Since then I've come out as transgender and learned a lot about people, the world and social justice. I would consider myself hard left politically. This makes me almost the polar opposite of who I was when I last played this game. So what do I think of it now that I'm an older and slightly more enlightened person? Let's find out.

Gameplay now takes the form of a first-person shooter in a highly interactive open world. You can use a variety of weapons from melee to explosives and almost everything in between. On top of this, you are able to unzip your jeans and pee anywhere at any time. This can actually be really useful in certain cases such as when you need to put out a fire. If you do this at the wrong time or in the wrong place it can lead to people around you getting violent. It turns out if you walk into a strangers house and empty your bladder all over their living room they get upset. Exploration is encouraged with hidden areas, pathways and pickups being plentiful. You have 2 ways to play Postal 2. You can avoid killing or hurting people and stay on the right side of the law as much as possible. Or you could always go postal and butcher everyone around you. Although the game never forces you to do this it does try to make itself as annoying as possible in order to push you over the edge. I love this clever use of game design. It's obviously designed for silly violence against the population of Paradise but not once does it tell you to hurt anyone. If you decide to kill people that is a choice made by you and you alone. It's perfectly possible to play Postal 2 as a slightly insane chore simulator if you like.

So let's go over these two styles of play. My first playthrough had me as a pacifist trying not to kill a single person. Although this limited my use of the many fun systems in Postal 2 it still felt amusing simply because I was managing to avoid violence in a world designed for it. The game would try to annoy me into killing people. More than once I would have wait in virtual queues then after I had made it to the front some group would end up attacking the area I was in. This left me having to somehow make it past a group of violent extremists without being killed or fighting back. I would often have to use local police for protection or use the very limited amount of stealth. Other times I would have to use the game systems in clever ways. An example of this would be the time I managed to escape an exploding factory by allowing the police to arrest me. On top of this, you have the nonsensical layout of Paradise itself forcing you across multiple load zones as well as having to confront the map every few minutes. It's obvious that Postal 2 is a game that's trying it's hardest to make you lose your cool which is why keeping it feels like a victory. This is just good design as it flips the common complaint that violent games force you to kill innocent people on its head. The game never makes you do anything, it never even suggests it to you it's just that you know the option is there.

Of course, for my second playthrough, I allowed myself to enjoy everything Postal 2 has to offer. While the more standard firearms are a let down the melee weapons such as the sledgehammer or machete are really enjoyable. Guns, for the most part, all feel really underpowered. Most NPC's take bullet after bullet before they fall to the floor. They don’t even have to reload as all of them are able to fire a near endless amount of rounds. I would honestly avoid guns for the most part unless you're really struggling and need some long-range damage dealers. When you get your hands on an axe and start to cut off limbs the game really shines. The baseball bat can swing side to side knocking targets through the air or can be swung downwards crushing heads. You can throw the sledgehammer smashing the skull of a faraway foe. This wonderful display of violence is enhanced with how the NPC's react to all of this. Some will die right away after losing an arm, legs or entire lower half but not all will. Stronger NPC's will run away screaming after losing a limb while others will crawl along the floor with no legs as blood drips from their wounds. The blood, urine and vomit all have physics so if you cut off a limb on a hill then the blood will drip down. Once you have cut off or crushed someone's head they will squirt blood from their lifeless neck which will cover walls, floors and continue to drip down on its own after. This adds a real level of visceral detail to the massacres of Postal 2. It's just a shame the guns are pretty much useless.

Despite my so far mixed feelings for Postal 2 the story and world building are what lets this game down for me. Don't get me wrong now and again the world building in this game is really good. I'm thinking of the way that any bridge will no doubt have a number of crashed cars at the bottom. Then you have the prison which is a multi-story maze. When you first get arrested you will be put in the cell closest to the exit making it easy to escape. If you keep getting arrested and thrown in jail then you will be put in cells continuously further away from the exit. This makes escaping harder and harder until you get put in cell block F-U at the top of the building. Escaping from this cell is next to impossible on anything but the easiest difficulties. This is so good because its all done in a believable and dynamic way that uses the systems of the game without relying on set pieces or cheap tricks. But then you have the barren looking interiors that feel like nothing more than a lazy G-Mod. People walk around the world aimlessly never really doing anything at all unless they're in a queue or combat. Even then once they have reached the front and carried out their scripted action it's back to the aimless wandering. Unless they are using the most basic attacking behaviour everyone in this world feels like a zombie.

The story is almost non-existent on top of these world building problems. You play as the Postal Dude from the last game. It's never discussed if the events of the last game are canonical to this one but with a game like this, I doubt that's important. I'd guess and say they it was all fictional just because during Monday we learn that the Postal Dude works for Running with Scissors (RWS). For those unaware RWS is the dev team that made the Postal series. I do like that they included versions of themselves in Postal 2. This means you're able to kill, torment and pretty much torture the people that made the game. I admit this is cool. So things seem more-or-less normal for the insanity that is the Postal series from Monday to Friday. 

After your last chore on Friday, however, the apocalypse happens which leads to Postal dude shooting himself in the head. So he wakes up in the free clinic on Saturday and so starts the awful DLC Apocalypse Weekend included in the steam version for free. From start to finish this is a mess that fails to understand any of the good points from Postal 2. You're forced during several instances to fight and kill people, zombies and animals. Most of the stages are linear and scripted. Plenty of annoying first-person platforming is included that lead to me just spamming the quick-save. As a last kick in the teeth, the final boss failed to load for me despite me reloading varies different saves in an attempt to get it to work. All of this seems minor though when we look at the thing that really destroys Postal 2. That's the way it's needlessly racist, transphobic, homophobic and sexist just for the sake of being edgy.

At best this is just uncomfortable to watch due to the awful amount of cringe. Then at worst it's downright offensive and damaging. Some of the worst examples would be the arcade machine known as Fag Hunter. This was expanded on in the 'AWP' mod supported by RWS that allowed players to play this arcade game. The Fag Hunter mini-game had you hunting down and killing stereotypically homosexual men. I shouldn't have to explain why this blatant hate is disgusting. It boils gay men down to nothing more than a joke and then rewards players for targeting them over other non-gay NPC's. Now in the name of fairness, I will admit that this mini-game is missing from the steam version. In fact, RWS removed all the textures for the Fag Hunter arcade machines and replaced them with Bastard Fish instead. This removes most of the homophobia with the exception of the very minor gay stereotypes found in the local gay bar. I will still bring this up for 2 reasons. Firstly is that is that this still happened, RWS sold the game with this content in it and removing it in a patch doesn't erase the past. Secondly, all of this content can easily be added back in with Steam Workshop so it's still available. There is also a transphobic NPC found in the gay bar which is basically the body of a female NPC with the head of a male one. Her body has visible breasts but she also sports grown out facial hair with a balding hairline. This gives us the classic deluded tranny joke as was so popular during the 2000's. The most offensive thing in Postal 2 without a doubt is the insane Islamophobia. Every Muslim person in the game is a stereotypical Al-Qaeda terrorist. They will run up to you screaming nonsense with plans to suicide bomb you. Others will use more conventional weapons while shouting about Allah. This is the sort of thing I'd imagine some horrible KKK modder to come up with and I hate it. They play more of a role in the Apocalypse Weekend with nothing but jokes about 72 virgins and so on. All of it is in bad taste and all of it undermines the wonderfully intelligent use of violence elsewhere in the game.

Postal 2 is a game I used to love just because it offended people but then I grew up and now I can see this game for what it is. Disappointing. Certain parts of it are genuinely clever. But none of that counts for anything when it's in a revoltingly racist and homophobic product such as Postal 2.

The Suffering is gory during gameplay, and Manhunt is much gorier when you trigger a cutscene while executing someone (which happens all the time!) In The Suffering, keep in mind you are usually killing monsters and demons. In Manhunt you are ruining humans. If you are looking for gore, I’d go with Manhunt, because it’s also so damn mean-spirited. Gameplay in The Suffering is awsome, though…..

Ares: Gore. More. GORE. MORE.

Athena: Plays tactical games on her PC, puzzle games on her phone sometimes

Hera: too old to play most games, can’t figure out controllers, plays candycrush and sends requests on Facebook

Dionysus: He is better when he is drunk.

Hades: two player games with Persephone

Demeter: All the resource management games

Apollo: Talks about wanting to be a concept artist. Never does.

Artemis: Hail the Dovakin. Big CoSPlaY.

Hermes: Only plays timed games. Campaighns? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Zeus: Cant play anything, too old school and eventually he always gets frustrated and electrocuted the controller

Hestia: Plays Animal Crossing and sweet melt your brain otome

Posidon: 110% Casual.