POSTAL
Worth it · Shooter · 1997
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
PLAY IT.
Worth it at free.
- Length
- 2.4h
- Price
- Free to play
- Reviews
- 92% positive
Minimum on the Steam store: 399 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Take control of The POSTAL Dude in his infamous first outing as he battles to survive in a world gone mad! POSTAL is a classic isometric shooter filled to the brim with fast-paced explosive action.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 88 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, POSTAL Redux ($8.99, scores 84) beats it on value, while it beats Hatred ($5.99, scores 67).
Critics scored it 56. Players sit 36 points higher at 92 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 8 percent of players ever finish it. On a 2.4-hour game, that is a lot of evenings most people never spend. Inside the two-hour refund window, 78 percent of the 1,115 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 44 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 2.4 hours; clearing it takes 14, which is 5.8 times the campaign.
It is still busy. 41 players were in it at once at the last check, across 81 days of tracking.
The drop-off
54% start to 8% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 2.4-hour game, that's a lot of time most people never put in. Steam global achievements
Players
41 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Released in 1997, the original POSTAL by Running With Scissors is a stark, fascinating artifact of PC gaming history. Long before the series pivoted to the slapstick, satirical comedy of its famous sequel, this debut title was a genuinely grim, surreal, and unsettling isometric shooter. You control the Postal Dude, an unstable individual who believes the world has been infected with a madness-inducing rage, driving...
I thought Postal was just another old-school shooter that people remembered because it was controversial. I was wrong. The graphics are dated. The gameplay is simple. You run around, shoot things, complete objectives, and try to survive the chaos you create. And somehow, it still has a personality. Postal doesn't take itself too seriously. It's dark, ridiculous, violent, and completely unapologetic about what it is...
One of the very first " edgy " games ever made. It's not as satirical as the other Postal games. This one's a bit darker and you can tell by listening to the music and reading the texts between missions. The Dude decides to go out and kill as many as he can, simple as that. But there are a couple of funny lines here and there. Also, I get it now why Postal was often mentioned as an inspiration for the game called "...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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POSTAL scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/232770/postalThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12.
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