P2 is a hard cookie to swallow when you view the game from a technical standpoint. The game is littered with somewhat bland environments that feature the same basic character model for NPCs, recycled lines and voices, and numbers of tedious, coma inducing objectives to fulfill your daily chores. It's like your six grade summer, only with more guns and urination.

You are The Postal Dude, a man without a name, or A/C in his trailer park home. Starting your quest on Monday you proceed through the week, doing errands around town for yourself and your loving companion who, apparently, can't read. Day one has you picking up your paycheck from Running with Scissors, cashing it, and picking up some milk on the way home. While some of the missions are interesting and put a nice variation on the standard first person action seen in so many higher caliber games, you are left with the fact that you are doing nothing more than becoming a virtual errand boy.

To increase the action on certain mission there will be protestors pissed off about everything from violent videogames to libraries stocked with books. When you complete your primary objective at these locations the mob becomes unruly and attacks you. Then you die. You should get used to dying in Postal 2 because besides the horrendous load times, you will spend a great majority of the game looking at your wasted corpse and having the game give you advice on learning to duck.

Speaking of load times, they are incredibly long and incredibly frustrating unless you plan on writing a book in between level sections. Just to make it to the first destination on your very first day you must pass through a number of these with seemingly no action in between. You load, load again, and then load some more just to get anything done. One of the major draws to the game is the semi-freedom given to your character (a la Grand Theft Auto), but you can never capitalize on this feature because exploring becomes a lesson in frustration after nothing more than an hour of playtime.

The only thing the game has going for it is a sometimes funny code of humor that ranges from bottom of the barrel bathroom humor to some intellectually funny billboards strangely reminiscing of Fight Club. At times the humor is downright funny, such as trying to get a petition signed and the reactions to people who don't want to sign it. Otherwise the jokes rely on the constant use of vulgarity (done better in Kingpin) and the appearance of feces on bathroom floors. Luckily the voice work for The Postal Dude is always on time and unexpected, similar to Caleb in the Blood series, so you get a good chuckle every now and then from his many one-liners.

Running on the Unreal engine doesn't seem to help the game all that much in the visuals department. Most of the texture work is well done, with the game looking respectable in higher resolutions, but the awkward ape-like character models and bland brown of the Arizona desert don't leave much room for highly detailed architecture or amazing lighting effects. The only true particle effects to be found require the unzipping of your pants and urinating on your surrounding environment. This sends nearby people either running or vomiting as you coat them with waste. Sound, as previously mentioned, features some excellent voice work in an otherwise mediocre experience. Music is non-existent so be prepared to either hum or pop in your favorite CD.

Postal 2 is a budget title slapped with a price of a full-fledged game. The entire thing is over in five days in game and each one of these days, sans load times, will take you roughly and hour if you can figure out how to avoid death. Even with loading and dying the game is excruciatingly short for $50 bucks.

The game does feature some humor and gameplay elements that will serve as enjoyment for the short length of time that they last, but for the price, and short-sighted gameplay, Postal 2 is hard to recommend. If a buddy picks this one up by mistake, or you see it in a bargain bin for under ten bucks in the very near future it could provide an afternoon of fun, but paying anything more just isn't worth your time. For a truly satirical, bathroom-humor-laden experience you are better off picking up a copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64 and see what this game should have been. In the meantime, kids, don't try this at home.