Post Brutal review - An action adventure without much of either of those
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iOS
| Post Brutal

Some games grab you by the throat and refuse to let go. They’re sharp and engaging and they leave you breathless and desperate for more. They’re few and far between though, like tiny jewels in the excrement-filled sand pit of life.

And I’m sad to report that Post Brutal isn’t one of them. It’s more like a game that bursts in through the door, shouts something incomprehensible at you, and then falls over and wets itself.

It tries to be a bunch of different things, it tries to give you a whole swathe of options and possibilities. And it manages to mess up pretty much each and every one of them. Sometimes all at once.

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The game is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that’s mainly grey city blocks. You play a rough and ready wasteland wanderer armed with a gun and an axe and, if you so desire, your own face.

Everything is presented in blocky 3D that seems to lack any sort of defining characteristic. It simply is, like a tech demo from a failed engine that was first presented to the public sometime back in the mid ‘90s.

Once you’ve chosen the ugly mug you want you’re thrown into a series of missions, each of which is interrupted often by a loading screen. Go through a door, loading screen. Do anything, loading screen.

The core of the game is all about slaughtering things. Mash the attack button and you’ll swing your axe about and cut zombies to bits. Or people if you’re fighting people. It doesn’t really matter.

There’s a dodge button too. And you can swap out to your gun and engage in some really rather poor shooting if you’d prefer. Loot some corpses, find the thing you were looking for, and get ready for another loading screen.

There’s nothing mechanically broken about Post Brutal. It’s all reasonably solid in a PSOne budget release sort of a way. It’s just that it’s so hackneyed and laughable that getting any sort of un-ironic enjoyment from it is basically impossible.

Mechanically it’s not a bad game, but everything else that it does is truly terrible. The main character even runs like his pants are filling up with last night’s tea. And that is not a good look.

Post poo-tal

20 years ago Post Brutal might have garnered some front page coverage on one of the less discerning magazines. Nowadays though it just feels childish. Like two decades of game design have just passed it by.

It’s just about worth playing for a bit of a giggle. But beyond that this is one that’s best consigned to the history books, in a section marked “what were they thinking?”

Post Brutal review - An action adventure without much of either of those

A throwback of the worst kind. Post Brutal is clunky, stupid, and only fun to laugh at
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.