Recent reviews by Jack Wiltshire

Love it when a developer retroactively patches censorship in for gore AFTER getting an age rating already associated with the completely uncensored version for LITERALLY no reason at all.

2 F**king years after release.
In a F**ing Warhammer 40K game.

Oh by the by Fatshark, i paid for the UNCENSORED product, seeing as you refused to even put a warning up that the game might be censored in the future or that there's censorship in my edition over the other ones now, either hand me a refund and remove my game or pay attention to how laws work next time.

There's NOTHING in German (Nor Austrian) law that states a game has to be "re-censored" post launch if it already has a USK rating, even with the PS5 release on the horizon as long as the game has the exact same systems as the other versions the rating would hold.

Review is staying negative until what the USK handed it an 18+ Rating for gets FULLY restored.

Squirrel.

Sony retroactively just removed 3 of my friends' abilities to purchase and even play the game in Estonia in about half a month after they start forcing people to create and log in with PSN Accounts that can't be created there, all to look good in front of their shareholders and fluff up their PSN playercount numbers (3. MONTHS. AFTER. RELEASE.)

I got them to buy the game in the first place BECAUSE the account linking was optional.

Well you know what? Go suck on a rotten egg.

Edit: This was now reversed after the hundreds of thousands of negative reviews, mine is however staying negative until they reverse the 177 country purchase ban too, until then it’s just empty twitter posts and hot air.

My ability of picking the "Recommend" option has been removed due to limitations with your design and common sense and to avoid giving people a false sense of this game's current quality.

That marvelous PR f**kup aside:

- The AI has barely improved over the EA phase of the game, Yeah yeah i know, "gitting gud" is certainly gonna help when i open a door and get sniped through five different walls by an NPC in the next area code.

Gas station robbers high on crack cocaine having the same reaction time, combat proficiency and equipment as a professional PMC group who ALSO don't surrender when 4 different people shoot them in the head with pepperballs? Highly bloody unlikely.

Civilians specifically waiting for the cops (Even going as far now as to have them MENTIONED as the people that called the police in the briefings in the first place) not complying with a Swat Officer and even bolting AWAY from them in FEAR while there's armed suspects in the building?
Whipping their phones out when being told to get down at gunpoint at the speed someone would unholster a gun to shoot at you?
You guessed it, Highly bloody unlikely.


- AI issues aside you basically cut out 60-70% of the content the game had in the EA Period just to fit a narrative that should be a SEPARATE mode from freeplay altogether, can't imagine what kind of substance a game designer would have to take to think unifying a freeplay and a linear campaign mode makes any reasonable sense.

- The performance (even WITH DLSS on performance/ultra performance) is still dogwater and does NOT make sense for how the game actually looks (4070TI and a 13th gen I9 processor before you even start.)

- Most of what was shown in the trailers of the game is still absent with no visible timetable in sight for when it's actually gonna be added (Chances are never seeing as this is the "Final" product now.)

- On top of this made people dish out a solid whopping 120 dollars to "support" them and gave bare minimal in return for it, bold move from an indie company with no previous games to have a "Please give us money out of good faith" option on their Storepage at all, much less for THAT much money.


So to summarize this is a game that has:
Spent close to two years in dev hell with promises of a lot, only to then deliver so little that we GENUINELY have less to show for it in the full product that we did a few months after EA Started.
This on top of the devs flat out ignoring or band-aiding issues that need FULL addressing (AI) and charging way too damn much for the kind of game they JUST removed most of the replayability from.

The only saving grace i can think of is how malleable the game is with modding which is the ONLY reason i played as much as i did.
But i think it should speak for itself that no Developer should actively rely on the community to fix their games issues, no matter how big, small, influential or insignificant they are.

I pay for the full experience, not for the experience of having to figure out a way to fix the game for you.

It'd be easier counting stars in the sky than list the amount of problems this game and the developers have but let me try anyway:

- Gameplay loop in Loud is boring and unimaginative, genuinely just play Payday 2 if you want fun loud gameplay.
- Stealth was improved yes but is consistently hindered by random modifiers that change every week and actively make some heists unenjoyable (Lead guard on ANYTHING just makes the experience 3 times worse)
- Every single heist in the game is boring and some actively take player control out of the experience altogether (I just KNOW you all love standing in circles all day with no cover doing nothing but point and clicking!)
- Special Enemy AI has been nuked to the point where a slight altitude adjustment is all it takes to stop Cloakers, literally just walking close to Zappers (Tasers) stops them from tasing you due to animation queueing and Snipers have been lobotomized so now instead of a punishment they're just sorta... there.
(They also switch to their pistols when you walk close to them just like they did in Overkill's The Walking Dead.. HMMMM.....)
- Skill System has been dumbed down into having 3 basic buffs that you have to constantly upkeep the entire heist to trigger half of any other active skill you want to use, Perk Decks have been removed and soft-replaced with the Overskill weapons.
- Speaking of the Overskill weapons our first and ONLY melee weapon and any sort of melee SYSTEM at all is a PAID Overskill weapon, no melee weapons otherwise and your gunbash doesn't deal damage at all.
- Armor System is just bad (Subject to change, will be keeping my reservations until i see it actually improves anything, noone wanted Call of Duty Warzone out of Payday, trust me.)
- Heisters just don't interact with eachothers to any significant degree anymore, who needs that kinda life given to the characters after all right?
- Overall massive cut backs on the base game QOL that should have been there since Payday 2, Modders added a jukebox and AI reviving eachothers in a week while Starbreeze keeps pretending its too hard to do.
- Speaking of AI the Team AI Is no longer targeted by Cloakers OR Tasers meaning if you hear a Cloaker charging in Solo you're DEFINITELY the intended recipient, them reviving eachothers was painstakingly added ONE YEAR AFTER LAUNCH.
- Promised an offline mode during Operation Medic Bag to preserve the game if the servers shut down, halfway delivered by adding a mode that hosts a game offline where you still need internet connection to actually save any progress, no news for the FULL release of said offline mode since that update.
- Oh yeah the game is Always Online, yes that's a negative.
- Consistent server shutdowns during maintenance that either take hours longer than they tell you or just generally take entirely too long for a Live Service game in the first place.
- Awful Minimalistic HUD since the Beta that barely got any better since DESPITE the UI Update.
- AI Generated Artwork in the Under The Surphaze Heist, hire some real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ artists you hacks
- 80% of the base game guns are subpar, all DLC guns are broken the OTHER way (Excepting the FSK) and even then about 2 weapons rule the meta.
- Dev updates the game about once per 6 months (More on that in the next point)
- Starbreeze decided to cut the devteam down to size and then on top of doing that relocated 25% of it to developing a gamemode in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and another undisclosed amount to their next failure, Project Baxter.
- On top of THAT Starbreeze also FIRED 10% of their Payday developers, 10 out of about 100.
- Tried to scam us with DLC's then after excessive amounts of whining from the community, decided to make the prices fairer
- Planned Microtransaction store before the game even came out. (Not pulling any punches on how much they wanted to just have our money with little to no effort huh?)

The list goes on and on, but i think you get it by this point.
If you ever think about buying this game, don't. Buy Payday 2 if anything, better yet stay away from this franchise altogether to teach Starbreeze that actions have consequences because they didn't seem to learn the last couple of times.

If you want to heist so badly, wait out Den of Wolves, Buy Crime Boss Rockay City, Buy Raid WW2 and give THAT developer another chance, LITERALLY PLAY THE ROBLOX HEISTING GAME.
Do NOT buy this, not until they've made it a game instead of a shameless cashgrab attempt.

I will preface this by saying that on my rig the game runs perfectly fine (RTX 4070TI, I7-13700K, Playing at 2K, 32 gigs of DDR5 6000mhz Ram) but that's no excuse for this bad of a PC port, and with that out of the way:

Here's another underpaid and underworked PC port by our dearest friends at Iron Galaxy, known for their fantastic work on:
-Arkham Knight (removed from steam after launch for 3 months because of how bad the port was)
-Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy (Constant option menu issues like the fps limiting itself with higher definition monitors, game flat refused to boot for certain people)
-Uncharted Thieves Legacy: (Mouse stuttering issues, same Shader loading problems as here)
-Rumbleverse (A Battle Royale that flopped on its face so hard they shut it down not even half a year after release)

All of this while Sony owns Nixxes, one of the most famously good PC porting studios on this side of the planet.

The Range of Issues in this one is so much more vast i'm fully expecting Steam to pull this off their store aswell at some point with these reviews.

Let's list a few:
-Shader Installing takes about 4 hours, have fun refunding guys!
-Once Shaders are installed i'm about 200% sure you WILL crash upon pressing the play button (or just randomly whenever it feels like it)
-If you DON'T crash be prepared to be faced with game breaking issues such as essential NPC's getting stuck in terrain.
-If THAT doesn't happen either i'm sure you'll love all the 15 or so FPS the game will grace you with as it eats VRAM and CPU power like a morbidly obese person at a wedding
-Get past all of that and you MAY just get one of the MANY texture bugs the game still has up it's sleeve (Joel's face randomly turning entirely black for some reason, hair looking like it's made out of confetti, etc.)


Stay FAR and WIDE away from this shoddy attempted Sony Cheapout until it's worth actually spending the amount of money they expect you to pay for it by fixing the port up (if ever.)

Out of all the people you decided to get for an "influencer" pack you decide to get a Vtuber who:
-Is a closet racist and does her best to hide the fact ever since she became a vtuber (Don't get me started on her dropping the N-word with the hard R or her Moonman covers)
-Called her fans pedophiles on multiple occassions
-Pretended none of that ever happened once she joined up with her current agency
-Literally played the series only since Yakuza 0 came to PC, because ♥♥♥♥ Kson Onair (Whose entire former NAMESAKE was because of Yakuza) and Devilleon i guess?
I don't mind someone having started with Yakuza 0 but pretending that they're more worthy of a collaboration like this while having the bare minimal knowledge and love for the game is plain stupid on Sega's end (and this is ignoring the other more incriminating factors).

Oh yeah and there's a washed up wrestler and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ E-girl in there aswell, hooray.

I'd have to go on a complete separate tirade aswell to tell you how much NOONE needed the card system in the first place and doing a DLC like this just reinforces that the only reason you're still sticking with it is either Internet clout, or because you simply don't know what to add to a game that was already pretty great in the first place.
Hint: DEFINITELY not Vtubers, Wrestlers and E-Celebs into an EDO PERIOD YAKUZA GAME, take this ♥♥♥♥ to Yakuza 8.

Supposedly the best Sniper Elite game in the series but if "Identity Dysphoria" could be a game this would be it.

Where would i even start with this, for starters the AI somehow manages to make every game that originally came out in the same timeframe as this look like an absolute masterwork, there wasn't a single time in this game where if i was spotted i could 100% accurately shoot AI seeing as the second they detect you but have no direct line of sight they jitter step in every single direction at once, constantly as if they were having an aneurysm on the spot.

Planting traps is practically useless once spotted cause they will absolutely REFUSE to advance towards your last known location, opting instead with vibrating in place.
This can be then combined with the fact how every single enemy AI seems to have pinpoint accuracy (Getting hit from 600 meters by a PPSH whatsoever.. really guys?) and that you die in around 10 solid hits to make an awful ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ experience unless you stay silent.

Three quarters of the game also seems to be composed of close encounters meaning these devs weren't entirely sure back in 2012 whether they were making the next Call Of Duty or a Tactical Sniper Game.. and it shows, painfully so.

The Lack of actually silencing shots (No the very infrequent loud noises to mask my sniper don't count.) in conjunction with the scoreboard that refuses to give you good scores for keeping things clandestine and quiet meaning you either opt with having a high score but receiving CBT from the AI or painstakingly stealthing through everything and then receiving a middle finger the size of the Brandenburg Gate for having done so.

TL;DR -Half-a**ed AI with 100% accuracy that has no idea what to actually do half the time aside from stay in place and rotate,
-Almost 75% of every area is way too CQB for me to even bother using a sniper,
-The scoring system is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful and there's WAY too many enemies for a stealthy approach.
-Traps are almost entirely worthless unless you preemptively know where everyone is gonna be because once you're spotted you can say goodbye to anyone walking into one of them.
(-The Remaster is literally just a texture upscale and it costs 10 bucks to upgrade IMPLYING you owned the original)

The "Elite" in this one must stand for the level of patience you have to have to bother with it at all.

Edit: By all means don't accept the criticism and throw clown awards at me, it's proving my point even more, might even have to add "Horribly stuck up community" to the list of cons ;) (Also thanks for the steam points you're willingly wasting and giving to me)

In it's current state? Absolutely not gonna review it positively.
In GENERAL? Maybe i'd give it an "eh" for "Passable" if anything.

Postal 4 tries to recapture the flame in the bottle Postal 2 had when it went up against lobbyists and a crowd of moronic parents about violent videogames, not only was the political climate back then more "Fitting" to make jokes about they also hit in a much better way than Postal 4's attempts at shallow edgy political humor which has now basically devolved into: haha SJW vagina politics trump trump biden lmao lmao

In my honest opinion Postal 2's charm was a one and done deal and you sure as ♥♥♥♥ ain't gonna recapture its charm by simply making your game as safe-edgy as possible without it turning out either extremely bland or just straw-graspingly bad.

As for the Game on a technical level, guys, i know you're trying your best here but is saying "We're working on it" really gonna cut it when the game still suffers to even slog along on most MODERN PC's?
You keep saying its a priority yet the last patch hasn't even had a single optimization and even before that it was single areas optimized.. barely.
If you're gonna increase the game's price incrementally with the amount of content ingame you guys might wanna make sure the game actually is capable of getting to the point of RUNNING that new content, You made fun of cyberpunk's launch yet your game CTD's every 4 minutes of playtime

I was here supporting you from the very beginning, hell i bought postal 2 and to this day replay it every now and then to get some laughs and fun out of the multitudes of ways you can play it but it's getting incredibly hard to support you with Postal 4 when you've been consistently ignoring the biggest problem the game has, and this in addition to having already created a game that feels outdated both humor and politically before it even launched.

TL:DR Game's humor is outdated and simply not funny (although the practical humor occassionally made me let out a minor chuckle), Game is optimized like ♥♥♥♥ and you refuse to do anything significant about it regardless of your consistent reassuring that you're fixing it, making it almost rage inducing to bother even opening the game knowing how its gonna run (or how it's gonna crash within 5-10 minutes)

Edit: Small update, performance is slightly better now but the game is still disgracefully buggy and broken and bugfixes happen once per millenia, the review itself won't change because nothing aside from the performance got better, and even that only so the game doesn't memory leak into a crash every 10 minutes.

Giving this a negative EXCLUSIVELY because of "Thing In the Lake", other games have their faults but that one is just... good god.
I'd even consider giving this a double negative if the achievement didn't unlock from just OPENING the game because by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GOD someone really needs to do some QA on these games.

- Diving Bell is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore that gives you practically no explanation from the get go on what to do resulting in me having immediately died several times until i realized that i can press one specific button to get off the computer and do stuff otherwise.

- Thing in the lake is just... the guy who made it went for aesthetics and completely forgot everything else, constant instakills, no savestates, practically unbeatable enemies, unfair encounters (Getting stuck in a bear trap means you're immediately dead, dunno why it even bothers giving you a minigame to escape.) completely random enemy spawns, game gives you roughly no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue on what to do.. but hey atleast its "aEsTeThIc" right guys?

- Toy shop was decent but it had LOD issues that made my eyes strain more than any game could, no depth of field options implemented (i'm assuming so they don't have to bother animating the weapon) so DOF is constantly applied over your screen, the screen filter also changes sporatically for no reason.

The other games have their ups and downs but most of them are very decent, albeit short due to the nature of this collection but it does feature some genuine talent in there.
However the bigger more "Extended" stuff (With exception of Squirrel Stapler) seems to suffer from issues that makes all of them feel like they rushed through production with big ideas only to then realize "♥♥♥♥ i only have a week or two to do this don't i?" resulting in half the things introduced not working or left unfinished (DOF in Toy Shop, Lack of hints on how to even start in Diving Bell) or just the game outright being a horrid mess (Thing In The Lake)