Recent reviews by Radical Russian

The Gamebryo engine, or "Creation Engine" as Bethesda proudly calls it has shown it's age since Skyrim. This time they wen't too far to try to make graphics that match other modern titles for what this engine will ever be able to handle. Performance is absolutely horrible, way below expectation.

Before buying the game, ask yourself what your expectation to performance is. Are you okay with 60 fps? Then perhaps you can buy it if you have a 4080 and intel i9 9900K and above and that you are using at maximum a 1440p panel and you're okay with using FSR2 with upscaling for the resolutionscale. It looks horrible.
For reference, my expectations of modern games is that I can reach at the very least an average of 90 fps, preferably 120+ on new games at low-medium settings. Anything below is not acceptable.

I first tried the game at a friends place during early access, he bought the package that contained the preview. We were immensely disappointed.
He sports a 8700K, 32GB DDR4 ram at 3600mhz CL16, Samsung EVO sata SSD without QLC cache memes, and lastly an RTX 4080. Although he does use a 4k display.
Immediately upon moving around it felt sluggish. Turning on an FPS counter revealed a framerate in the caverns
Lowering most settings to medium and using FSR2 at 60% resolutionscale got him to 50-60 fps.

I went home thinking if i should get it on release. I told myself, yeah the 8700K is old. And it's not an NVMe like bethesda recommends and oh, day one patch and drivers will fix it!
My specs: R9 5900X, RTX 3080TI, 32GB DDR4 3200mhz CL14 and samsung 980 pro nvme, ultrawide 3440x1440 display.
Needless to say, I was wrong.
In atlantis I get an average framerate at low-medium settings, 70% resolution scale using the DLSS2 mod of 53 fps. On kreed I was lucky to get around 57. And the game doesn't even look good! I was able to hit 70 fps in empty-space.

The game needs more time in the oven as well. I experienced bugs when seeing the game at his place, as well as when I played it myself. The bugs are part of bethesda games, I don't mind the non gamebreaking. But landing the ship being unable to move sucks, npcs moving in ticks/waves during dialogue, large sutters when opening inventory, map and dialogue with an NPC.

Bethesda should stop using Creation Engine just to be able to reuse systems and assets from previous games. Bethesda owns id Software which in turn means they have full licensing to the Id Tech engine. Look at Doom eternal. it's gorgeous. It runs at 200 fps in 4k with mediocre hardware. Use what you have, take the time to improve. And stop using a 26 year old engine. Even with improvements throughout the years the engine it falls short in both visuals and performance of just about any other engine out there.

The recommended specifications will bring you 30-40 fps on 1080p as youtube videos show.

UI is rendered at 30 FPS, there's some mods that try to fix this too. (like when aiming in space)

The game itself seems to have an interesting premise. I hope to play it again in the future, and hopefully buy it on a sale. I'll attempt to refund it. If nothing is done, then wait for a 15900K and RTX 6090 gpu or higher to attempt 70+ fps average at 4k.

Gutest ist

It's a great game. It has a few shortcomings though.
Great fast paced old school action with some rogue lite elements.

Episode 1 and 2 are great, but episode 3 begins to feel too abstract and the levels do become annoying. I won't go into detail to keep it spoiler free. It'll make most people from the late 80's and early 90's nostalgic.

I would however love if the game featured more unlocks, more arenas (for example the ship levels were great, but not even one arena is placed on it), and perhaps a last unlock that would allow to somehow build your own weapons to see just how broken you could make it. It should be through the doctor. Also why not have an unlock to keep 3 and 4 weapons? At that point in the game we're already OP and it's either be killed in a second or kill everything in the area in a second. It could easily continue to accommodate new game + with more health, ammo capacity upgrades etc

Instead of new game plus it'd be great to be able to choose which kind of level the random generator should generate. Going through the game again feels a bit weird.

Lastly the performance could be a lot better after grabbing most unlocks. I guess the game has a lot of checks for everytime the player fires, an enemy takes damage, and I believe the particle effects are too cpu bound. They could be simplified without a loss of how the game would look overall. The fire effect and the orbital cannon are two examples of things that'll bring you to low fps if you spam them.

I know I primarily mentioned negative things. The game is really good and the dev deserves praise. The negative things are just wishes which would improve the game for me. But everyone has different wishes.

Combat feels a bit bland and repetitive. Not much punch to the guns nor to the melee.
Bots are bad and random teammates seem to always run off in their own direction instead of following the team.

It's a bit of fun if you have friends to play with.

Fullscreen doesn't work, auto reverts.
Resolution issues.
Bad audio quality.

Find a key for megaton.

As others have said RWS truly went back to the old Postal 2 formula, except it didn't mix well. The game feels spiritless and is filled with game breaking bugs unlike fun bugs in Postal 2. No amount of polishing will fix the design of the game, even if the 1.0 release is a joke due to the 4/20 memes.

It feels like a bland, empty indie game where playing it is more of a predictable chore than a fun experience. Going between objectives is tediously boring, at times even confusing. Performance is horrible. Especially for how many loading segments the game has between areas. For reference I'm using a 3080ti and a decent R9 5900X cpu.

Rick Hunter and Jon St. John both delivered a great performances with their voice acting, but the free content RWS made for Postal 2 feels and plays better.

Loads of fun with friends. The developer responds to their players and fixes bugs accordingly. This game will only be getting better as it progresses through early access.

A spiritual successor to SWAT 4 in both good and bad.
It holds onto some of the clunkyness and humor from SWAT 4 while also innovating the gameplay.

For Nvidia users I can say DLSS is available and with it enabled on performance mode I experience no problems with framerate nor framedrops.

I'm excited to see what the game will become in the future. I hope for unlocking equipment as a progression element later on. I also hope they'll add stats for the different weapons (mag size, penetrative force, firerate etc.) as it can be confusing which weapons you should choose for now for which situation.

Great game overall.

The performance, however, is horrible. You can fix a lot of issues by making it use at max 4 cores of your cpu (deselect threads as well).

It would benefit greatly from an Unity Engine upgrade. They mentioned this in a recent post. I hope they'll go to the version which includes DLSS. It would benefit heavily of running DLSS in a performance mode if it was available. Unity engine versions 2021+ should have DLSS per default.

Pop in can be annoying as well.

Negatives: Can't throw a knife or grenade while crawling on ladders