Postal 2: Apocalypse weekend is broken, plain and simple. After working with the same tools, engine, and characters for three years, the game hasn't improved as much as it breaks a little more with each expansion. While the original game was a guilty pleasure for a lot of people, there is little redeeming value in Apocalypse Weekend other than the fact that it wraps up the story line for Postal 2. Of course, in order to tie up the story, you'll have to learn to tolerate the numerous bugs, questionable design, and repetitive filler the game throws at you. The game starts off promising enough, only to break down after just a few levels. The quality of the content and presentation is enough to make you wonder if there was any kind of quality assurance involved in the game's development, or if the game's flaws can be chalked up to pure incompetence.

Apocalypse Weekend picks up just a few hours after Postal 2 with Postal Dude waking from a coma brought upon by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He learns through some greeting cards he received that his wife is leaving him, his trailer is being repossessed, and his dog is in the pound. Not one to let a mere head wound get in the way, Postal Dude sets out to make everything right, not to mention taking care of some side business along the way.

Apocalypse Weekend is a single player expansion that requires either the original Postal 2 or Share the Pain to be installed. Those who have played the original game or any FPS for that matter would feel at home with the game's controls. The original game's open-ended gameplay has been jettisoned this time around for ten static levels with objectives meant to further the story along, once in a while, your head wound will kick in causing some crazy visuals and hallucinations to occur. You'll be required to make a trip to a Chinese takeout place to cleansing the town of mad cows to defending game producer Vince Desi's house from a zombie attack. Some levels of the game seem to border on filler, though they usually cross the line into overall shock value, most namely a mission where you're required to kill twenty elephants in an elephant preserve for a man who sells elephant foot wastebaskets. Most level objectives require you to kill a certain number of enemies while others have you fighting through one large level divided into a number of sections. The first few levels of the game are enjoyable to an extent as you'll be pitted against said elephants, holding off a zombie infestation at the local Chinese restaurant, and fighting off animal activists while ridding the town of said diseased cows. The latter is where the repetitive nature of the game lies as you'll be fighting the same terrorists and soldiers in the same environments for a number of levels at a time only to reach your objective then fight your way back out of the level. When you can't take anymore of fighting soldiers armed with assault rifles, they'll throw some soldiers brandishing sledge hammers for variety, though one would wonder why trained soldiers will take up arms with sledge hammers is anyone's question. These levels are where most of the game's glaring bugs show themselves as you'll encounter some ridiculous clipping issues where you'll walk right through solid objects, fall through railings and floors, and watch enemies get swallowed up into walls just to name a few. The worst of these come in the form of a couple of ladders that, if you're not positioned correctly on them, you'll fall into a solid wall and get killed. This isn't just a rare occurrence as I was forced to reload the game three times for one ladder in the terrorist camp level alone.

The bad news continues as the game is shipped pre-broken for you as some of the game's functionality isn't available right out of the box. Though a patch is available to restore it, none of the game's other glaring issues are addressed. How the game shipped without this functionality (being the ability to pee) is beyond me since its mandatory if you get set on fire and need to put yourself out in addition to resurrecting zombies to fight on your side. It only further proves that there was little in ways of testing or quality assurance done on the game to prevent such an oversight.

Thankfully, the monotony is broken somewhat with some new weapons. In addition to the usual arsenal of shotguns, assault rifles, pistols, cow heads, and gasoline, you'll be able to get your hands on some melee weapons which include a sledgehammer, machete, and scythe. The sledgehammer can be used to pop the heads of anyone that gets in your way and the scythe can be used to split them in half. The most satisfying kills are with the machete as you'll be able to chop off arms, hands, legs and heads with some interesting results. There's nothing like literally disarming security personnel and watching them run around screaming with missing arms. It's the most satisfaction you'll find in the game. You can also throw melee weapons for crowd control, with the machete and scythe having the ability to boomerang back to you. Though these weapons won't be of much use as you'll be fighting against gun toting thugs through the majority of the game and throwing weapons will be futile since it takes some time for them to boomerang back to you – especially when the AI likes to charge you with guns blazing.

Enemy AI is even worse on this go around as enemies either possess god-like aim where they can shoot you from a hundred feet away with a shotgun and predict when you're about to turn a corner, to the insanely stupid where they'll stand and stare at you until you attack – providing you don't kill them that is. The dumb as a rock mentality goes even further as you'll see enemies and pedestrians getting stuck in doorways causing other enemies and pedestrians to pile up behind them, or their ingenious ways of avoiding death like running into solid walls and off of cliffs.

Postal's visuals haven't changed in the three years since the game's release, so you know what to expect as far as how the game looks. Apocalypse Weekend reuses a lot of the same textures and character models from the original game. They were average looking to begin with, though they're still not bad, but are starting to show their age. Environments are as sparsely detailed and textures are still as blurry as always.

As stated earlier, there are a number of clipping anomalies that plague the game. Models will also clip through each other and themselves. One laughable glitch will let you see characters' neck bones (usually seen when their heads are severed) clipping through their necks. There is also the same splattered blood bug that will cause straight red lines to spawn from a blood splat on the wall for hundreds of feet right and left or up and down.

All gripes aside, there are some neat effects when people get chopped up, especially when half of their torso or legs are missing, they'll slowly attempt to crawl away – though it's usually into a wall or patch of barbed wire. The game displays plenty of rag doll effects as well which adds a little more satisfaction to the killing, that is, when the corpses don't get stuck on walls. Some items will show physics when bumped into or when a grenade goes off, but for the most part, small items that should fall like cans and small boxes depicting one of the game's mascots are bolted down harder than a table at Denny's.

The game's sound doesn't fare any better than the visuals. You'll get a couple more sound clips from Postal Dude that will be repeated into oblivion by game's end and not much more. While the terrorists possessed stereotypical Arabic accents in the last two iterations of the game, the terrorists now speak perfect English, save for one cut scene foretelling the apocalypse to come. Aside from these small additions, the rest of the game's sound remains unchanged up to and including the music.

Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend in no way warrants the classification of expansion let alone the price tag of $20 for an expansion that can be beaten in three to four hours and adds nothing to the original game, let alone the multiplayer aspect. People are supposed to pay $20 for games that suck, but at least work. Apocalypse Weekend is an over glorified, yet amateur looking mod that looks and plays like it should still be in alpha testing overseen by those two dorks in the Westwood College commercials. After you take away all of the lackluster innovation that Postal 2 attempted, it's reduced to a technically inept and horrible attempt at shock value that isn't worth the disc it's on.

Yeah, these guys.

- Brad Hicks (aka Dr. Swank), SwankWorld Media