Postal - Brain Damaged and These Sunny Daze DLC PS5 Review By Mike 5/10

Postal: Brain Damaged – A Flawed, Repetitive Shooter That Somehow Earned My Respect

From Crude Chaos to Unexpected Introspection

I wasn't planning on playing Postal: Brain Damaged. After Postal 4, I had done my tour of duty. I said I'd review it to make the Games Freezer team laugh and then, God help me, I had to play it. I ventured into the wilderness, stared into the abyss and discovered that the abyss occasionally got stuck in doorways and forgot to load its textures.

As far as I was concerned, the Postal series was locked in a 'race to the bottom' cycle of diminishing returns. A relic of a different era when shocking people was enough and a man urinating on strangers could somehow generate national headlines.

Enter Postal: Brain Damaged.

Not a sequel exactly, more a fever dream spin-off. A boomer shooter in the grand tradition of Doom and Duke Nukem, developed not by Running With Scissors themselves but by Polish studio Hyperstrange, who apparently looked at the Postal licence and asked a question nobody else had thought to ask:

"What if we actually made a game?"

The answer is, shockingly, not awful.

Brain Damaged immediately feels more focused than Postal 4. Gone are the lifeless open streets, the endless backtracking and the sensation that you are wandering through a town evacuated moments before your arrival. Instead you're thrown into tightly designed combat arenas where the objective is refreshingly straightforward: shoot everything until it stops moving.

Movement is fast, weapons are satisfying, and the entire thing feels unapologetically indebted to shooters from the late nineties. You dash, strafe, bunny-hop and unload increasingly ridiculous weapons into increasingly ridiculous enemies.

For the first hour, migraine-inducing visuals aside, it's genuinely enjoyable.

Then the repetition sets in, and you realise the game has, mechanically at least, few cards to play. Arena. Key. Arena. Corridor. Arena. Switch. Arena. Repeat until your eyes glaze over.

Like its predecessor, Brain Damaged often mistakes quantity for variety. Levels drag. Encounters blur together. New enemies arrive but rarely alter your approach in meaningful ways. By the later stages, I wasn't excited to see what came next so much as relieved when a section finally ended.

It's also very rough around the edges, even for a small game like this. The graphics, if we're being charitable, could be described as an 'homage' to the likes of Quake but, despite a refreshingly bright art style, it's not a handsome game. Bugs remain, encounters occasionally misfire, and there is a persistent sense that the game is being held together through sheer force of enthusiasm.

And yet unlike Postal 4, I kept wanting to continue. Partly because the shooting is competent enough to carry itself. Mostly because beneath the screaming, swearing and gallons of cartoon gore lurks something I genuinely wasn't expecting.

A narrative.

Not a good narrative, necessarily. Not in the traditional sense. More a collection of ideas buried beneath layers of immature vulgarity.

The game gradually reveals that you're travelling through the fractured psyche of the Postal Dude himself. Locations become distorted memories. Satire becomes self-reflection. The further you descend, the less it feels like you're fighting enemies and the more it feels like you're excavating a damaged mind.

Most surprising of all is the game's willingness to turn its attention inward.

The final confrontation is not with some world-ending villain or government conspiracy but with another version of the Dude himself. A manifestation of his own worst impulses. The violence that has defined the series suddenly becomes cyclical, repetitive and ultimately self-destructive.

For a franchise built on provoking everyone else, Brain Damaged spends an awful lot of time examining the man holding the gun.

It is more thoughtful than anything bearing the Postal name has any right to be and genuinely caught me off guard.

The DLC, These Sunny Daze, continues in much the same vein. Mechanically, it's more of the same, and unfortunately that means the same strengths and weaknesses. 

The shooting remains entertaining in short bursts, but the repetition becomes impossible to ignore. Narratively, it feels less substantial, functioning more as an absurd epilogue than a meaningful continuation.

Still, it remains oddly compelling. Which leaves me with a familiar problem.

I didn't particularly enjoy Brain Damaged. I found it repetitive, occasionally frustrating and far longer than its ideas could comfortably support.

But unlike Postal 4, I, oh God, respected it.

There is a strange sincerity buried beneath all the crude humour and adolescent provocation.

The result is a game that pleasantly surprised me, but one I can admire far more than I can recommend. 

But that's a win, right?

SUMMARY
A broken, repetitive and frequently exhausting shooter that somehow manages to be more introspective than most prestige games with ten times the budget.

Which may be the most surprising thing the Postal franchise has ever done.

5/10

💧MELTING💧