Postal III was bad. The critics always thought it was a bad title, so the revelation that the third iteration was worse came as no surprise. For the fans, however, the third game was a major step backward in all respects, and it was a more than disappointing debut for the developer's foray into Steam. With this knowledge at hand, Running With Scissors decided to retcon it so the third game never happened. Instead of proceeding with a new stand-alone game, the developer went with Postal 2: Paradise Lost, a full expansion pack for a 12-year-old title.

The game immediately starts after the events of the last expansion, Apocalypse Weekend. As the Postal Dude, you and your dog Champ are leaving the town of Paradise, Arizona, just as a mushroom cloud rises (from the nuclear explosion that you had detonated). As you drive along the highway, your dog spies a cat and jumps out of the moving car to chase it. Before you can get your mutt, the bullet lodged in your brain causes you to lose control of your car and crash into a nearby boulder. You're stuck in a coma for 11 years until a Good Samaritan wakes you up. Despite all the time that has passed, you know that you need to return to Paradise and rescue your best friend.

From a mechanical standpoint, Paradise Lost possesses some traits of older first-person shooters. You can carry a near-limitless amount of weaponry, and a wide range of firearms, melee weapons, and throwable objects are at your disposal. Ammo may be limited, but you never have to worry about reload times, so firing off an uninterrupted stream of bullets is completely feasible, especially since you don't have to worry about weapon recoil. Health doesn't regenerate, so food and health packs are valuable resources, and there's a way to give yourself a temporary overcharge of health if you're willing to pay the penalty later. There's also no melee beyond your designated melee weapons, so arming yourself with a gun doesn't mean you can smack someone when he or she is within reach.

The gunplay is also reminiscent of older shooters, though not always in good ways. There's no cover to speak of, so you'll have to make it yourself by ducking and standing behind objects without specific buttons that give you special animations or better evasiveness. You can't lean, either, so using your makeshift cover spot means you'll have to walk out, open fire, then walk back, just like the old days. Most enemies don't seem to possess much intelligence in this department, so they'll gladly stand in the open, take your shots, and rush you before stopping at a distance to open fire. They're pretty resilient, though, so they can take a number of shots before going down. There are a few instances when you can put them down quickly, like when you shoot a zombie in the head with a shotgun, but for the most part, don't expect to take down the crowds with a few bullets.

If you haven't played Postal 2 before, then you'll be surprised to find that this isn't really a first-person shooter but a first-person adventure game that's reminiscent of Fallout 3. Similarly, it's an open-world adventure with distinct areas of the town, and each area is unlocked as you progress. The game spans a week, and each of the days has you trying to fulfill a set of tasks that can be completed in any order before you can move on to the next day. While some are story-driven tasks, such as asking the townspeople about your dog and finding food to munch on after your years-long coma, other tasks are provided by faction leaders, who either bribe or threaten you. In terms of location and types of activities, the assigned tasks are all over the place. Some are rather mundane, like gathering air conditioner parts or delivering motherboards, but others are more eccentric, like cultivating weed, getting an oversized breast pump, and sabotaging the computer systems of a rival game developer.

Paradise Lost's open world doesn't just throw you into wide-land expanses with lethal enemies everywhere. Much like a Saints Row or Grand Theft Auto title, every area you visit is populated with civilians and enemies. For the most part, everyone minds their own business, but pulling out a weapon means some people will run away while others get aggressive and aim at you. What makes things more interesting is that you aren't always the only target, since other factions and random people may be fighting one another and ignoring you — until you make a move. This helps the environment feel alive when compared to open-world titles that seem to ignore these details.

One of the aspects that makes this so distinct is that there isn't just one way to approach a task. Shooting first and doing what you want is probably the most normal course of action, and it's similar to any number of shooters on the market. However, you can also take a path of pacifism, and while it make the game boring, it requires an equal amount of skill to pull off while dealing with the town crazies and random events. Early on, you're faced with a line of slow-moving people before you can get your food at a restaurant, and impatient players will either kill everyone in line to reach the counter, cut in front of everyone, or walk to the employee section to grab a take-out bag. More patient players can wait in line for a long time until they can order their food, pay an exorbitant price for it, and avoid the conflict that occurs between the restaurant staff and the town's pack of wild dogs.

The concept of choice also extends to your non-mission activities within the town. Most people are already familiar with the fact that you can run around town and gun down everyone, douse them with gasoline light them up, urinate on people until they vomit, or a combination of those actions, but you can also walk around with your gun holstered and not bother anyone at all. Getting robbed means you can give them your cash to end the event or bludgeon them to death with a shovel. When you're arrested by officers, you can comply and get out of jail after paying bail or blow them away with some sub-machine gun fire. Though the game has a tendency to suggest the violent path, it doesn't penalize you much for embracing non-violence. The only place where this isn't true is during some of the mandatory boss fights. Much like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, unless you know about those fights and prepare for them appropriately, pacifists can encounter a rather large roadblock in these sections.

Perhaps one of the more surprising aspects of the Paradise Lost expansion is how packed it is. Unlike more recent DLC offerings and some older expansion packs, the amount of content here matches the full title in gameplay length. It also helps that the game sports some of the better textures of the 2013 Steam release, so while the geometry is still very old, it looks better than other games that were built with the same engine. As expected, the game uses lots of assets from the original game, and some of the quests and scenarios feel like they're retreads, including an attack by protesters and the meeting of a famous actor in the unlikeliest of places. Still, this is a great example of how DLC and expansions can be done correctly.

Of course, all of this is wrapped in a rather polarizing sense of humor. Toilet humor plays a prominent role in the game, especially since your own urine can be used as a weapon and a means to put out fires. Feces litters almost every bathroom and shows up in unexpected places, and you're encouraged to make characters vomit with well-placed urine streams. Some humor remains dark; you can still play fetch with severed heads, and Al-Qaeda has become a group of weed-loving hippies. Parody abounds in ads, game titles, the goings-on of the video game world, Tim Schafer, and even Running With Scissors. There's also a bunch of politically incorrect humor with references to Chinese people serving dogs as meat, comments about welfare reform, and quips about being politically correct by shooting women and minorities first. People will either love the absurdity or be disgusted by the juvenile crassness of it, but at least the stuff here is consistent. The developer knows its audience well, and regardless of your opinion on the comedy stylings, it's good to see a willingness to be focused instead of haphazard in the hopes of attracting a wider audience.

While humor is subjective and can be ignored by some, it is harder to ignore some of the more rampant bugs in the game. Weapons and corpses are constantly floating in the air when they fall near a wall or elevated objects. Some enemies in cave sections will even fall through the floor when they die. You'll find some foes standing still and unwilling to attack unless you shoot them first, while others can hit you without even turning around first. There's even a boss fight where the boss stands in a T-pose while firing his Gatling gun. Some of the scripting is broken, so you won't hear any audio and need to reload the scene if you want to progress. Characters often run into walls, and some of the cops instantly target you for showing your weapon, even if you don't have anything equipped.

The older engine also has other issues, like constant environmental clipping, lots of stutter when anyone walks on stairs, and visible bloody flesh on characters who are still intact. The constant traversal between areas means lots of loading bars, although load times can be mitigated if you install on a SSD instead of an HDD. Then there's the issue of crashing that can happen if you automatically reload from a manual save spot instead of the autosave checkpoint. Patches are coming in at a fairly constant rate, so some of these issues could be fixed as time goes by, but this is still a pretty messy affair.

Postal 2: Paradise Lost is an expansion pack that's meant explicitly for fans who love the idea of a first-person adventure title and don't mind its broad and potentially offensive humor. The fans should also be able to deal with a litany of bugs to get to a game that lets them do almost anything they want and play any way they want. For that audience, the pack is certainly worth it, warts and all. For anyone who isn't already enamored with Postal 2, the expansion won't affect their feelings on the title at all.

Score: 6.5/10