/ga/ - Games

Knew that my criticisms wouldn't be taken seriously on /v/, so I came here.

What had made the initial POSTAL 2 have integrity was how it laughed in the face of moral panic—whether on the conservative side against video games or book-banning, and later on the acts of organizations such as PETA.

The modern day's conservative moral panic is mainly focused toward the LGBTQ+ and immigrants. POSTAL 4 had an amazing opportunity to comment on these things(we already had an entire group dedicated to getting rid of books in the last game), they side with the moral panic narrative by only telling a story about the rabid SJWs.

The terrorists in POSTAL 2 were also done quite well; they could be found everywhere on the map(the grocery store, the mall, behind RWS) to show how ridiculous the narrative of "terrorists could be anywhere" that justified the Patriot Act was. They could have played it this way, too. They could have had random trans people hiding among the populace looking to cut your dick off. They could have had a mad university professor trying to hypnotize a local college campus into having gay sex. They could have had the book burners show up mid-way through that, but then target Postal Dude midway through because "Hey, look at those buttons on his clothes! Those are a secret symbol of the queer agenda! I saw it online!" and then have them target him as well.

Instead, POSTAL 4 just uses the cheap conservative joke that its ancestor would have tore to shreds and loses its shine because of it. It feels like if a modern sitcom writer tried to make a POSTAL game without understanding any of the bite that made those games special. I'm not going to pretend that they were fine art or anything like that, but it was a special component.