February 20, 2008 - The world of Postal has always been synonymous with death, destruction, and pretty much outright debauchery in every way you can imagine. Postal III is no different. The second game featured a cow head covered in anthrax as a weapon and the third looks to follow suit with its own unique take on conventional weaponry. Rather than having a chainsaw to slice through enemies you'll have a badger in a harness. Yes, you read that right. Welcome to the upside-down world of violence known as Postal.

It's clear from seeing this latest entry in the Postal series that Running With Scissors (the developer, not the unruly action) is creating a slightly different experience from the go-anywhere-do-anything sandbox experience that was Postal II. From the get-go players will be told in a very cheeky way what to do. Postal III pokes fun at itself often so as to assure gamers that it's fully aware that it's using common clichés.


After nuking the city featured in the second game "The Postal Dude" meanders to a town called Catharsis. Your first goal? Find a damn job. What job could you possibly do in Postal? Think, dirty. Think, filthy. Think, "porn store maintenance man." That's right; you run around with a vacuum on your back and clean up "snot" rags from the "private viewing rooms." "Get it?!" Clean up the place to the manager's satisfaction and you complete the job, at which point a group of bible-loving soccer moms storm in and try to ransack the place.



This is where Postal III starts looking like it's attempting to offer some depth to its gameplay. Gamers can approach certain situations -- such as the soccer mom brigade -- from either an evil or good perspective. Obviously the evil route is violently slaughtering them and good is keeping them alive. The job offers that you attain later on will vary depending on which way you've played. You'll also find different endings based on your actions, though no word was given if it would expand beyond two.

There are still open world elements to be found within Postal III. You can still run around the game world -- created using a heavily tweaked version of Valve's source engine -- and slaughter innocents if you so desire. There will also be optional side missions for players to complete. One can only imagine how many of them will feature the defamation of Gary Coleman.


While we did see a working version of Postal III running right in front of us, Running With Scissors said that the gameplay was painfully early and thus very limited. The build was so early, in fact, that the devs on-hand said it was closer to the prototype stage than the alpha stage. Needless to say, we won't be seeing Postal III on store shelves until mid-to-late 2009 on Xbox 360 and PC. According to RWS it "likely" be on PS3 eventually.

Still, moving forward we're hoping to learn about the mysterious multiplayer feature that couldn't be discussed because the weight of its awesomeness would've blown the doors off of our meeting room (PR speak). We'll also get the rest of the details for Xbox Live play which is currently said to be locked at sixteen players. Running With Scissors did say that Postal III would include all of the usual suspects -- i.e. deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag but no information beyond that.