Post Master is yet another game in the recent trend of odd simulator games. These games are trying to relive the glory of the simulator games of old, but does it succeed?
In Post Master, you take the role of a post office manager. You are starting up with a new company in the city. Your competition with another post office company lies within the neighboring city. Depending on what difficulty you choose to place on, they will either be a bit of a threat or just non-existent after a while.
I’ve tried the game on both Easy and Medium so far. Perhaps it was due to not really understanding the mechanics of the game yet, but I was getting utterly destroyed on Medium and really struggled. I decided to restart on Easy and went in a bit more cautiously. The payoff was huge – money very quickly became a non-issue.
When you first start Post Master, you are give given an initial post office, starter money, and some bonus stars. How much money you are given depends on which difficulty, with Easy giving the most and Hard giving the least. You have to 
be careful about how fast you initially expand your post office empire. If you expand too fast the money will quickly run out and it is very hard to come back, which gives your competitor a huge advantage.
Unfortunately, Post Master suffers from a massive list of issues. The game likes to come up with random “crash” errors, even if some of them don’t actually crash the game. Should you decide to try and minimize the game, forget trying to reopen it. When I did so while playing on my laptop, it reopened to a grey game screen and I had to force crash the game.
Speaking of needing to reopen your game and reload a save, have fun doing so! Whenever I did so, the game would become nearly unplayable from lag while on the fastest speed. Oh, and the fastest speed is the only way to actually be able to bearably get through days upon days of just watching trucks drive around town. If you wanted to actually try and do any action in any decent amount of time you had to lower the speed just so your clicks would actually go through.
Post Master suffers from a major lack of past-initial-start-up content. Once you setup your initial post office, you just need to spend a little time slowly upgrading it. A bit later, add in a few more offices and then well… You’re set for the rest of the game. You can continue to add more offices if you want but there isn’t much point really. You’ll earn bonus stars (which are used to initially unlock things in your office, vehicles, and then are also used for upgrading your staff)
through completing the “missions”, the weekly competition, and priority deliveries. But really, once you set up a few offices and are raking in a decent income… you’re set. You can just let the game play itself. This leads to an incredibly boring simulator experience, and doesn’t really make you want to play much longer.
The controls and UI of the game also leave a lot to be desired. With priority deliveries, these will randomly spawn somewhere on the map and you have absolutely NO indication that one has spawned. You have to constantly look around should you want to try and catch these. Forget moving around at any decent speed too – the controls for this game are literally all on your mouse. Holding the right mouse button lets you scroll around the map with your mouse and yes, this is your only way to get around. There is absolutely no mini-map in a game that desperately needs a mini-map.
Also, should you want to play in windowed mode the office UI doesn’t like to close. The “X” for closing it is right over your currently stats (current money, stars, etc) and you have to point in a particular spot to actually close it. This is avoided a little by fitting the window to your desktop, but this shouldn’t even be an issue in the first place. Also, at least at the resolution for my laptop, the bottom of the UI for vehicle maintenance is partly cut off on the bottom line of vehicles.
Overall Post Master suffers from a wide variety of issues and should generally be avoided, even for simulator game fans. Support for the game seems to have been completely dropped, with the last (and only) update having been 6 months ago from the time of posting this review. It’s a shame too – there was some pretty good potential within Post Master but it just wasn’t truly realized. Unless you desperately want to play the game, just avoid it and play one of the better simulator games out there (I suggest a Roller Coaster Tycoon or Zoo Tycoon game).
Post Master Review Score
1.5/5
Hooks you in initial start-up but falls flat really fast. Just avoid it unless you desperately want to play it.
