Postal III

Postal III features a third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective, unlike Postal and its sequel, which featured a isometric and first-person perspective, respectively. The gameplay is much more linear and mission based, also unlike Postal 2, though an open-world game mode was later added in an update. The player, taking the role of The Postal Dude, uses various firearms and melee weapons to defeat enemies, with the option to attack them either lethally or non-lethally. The player is also able to use cats they find throughout the environment of the game as silencers for their weapons, players can also combine cats with hand grenades and load them into their rocket launcher.

The game features a karma system. The player can either use lethal forces on enemies, and obtain negative Karma, or non-lethal force and obtain good karma. The karma meter is displayed as an icon on the player's HUD, during the first five missions this icon is disabled. The karma system allows for different paths through the game's story, if the player uses excessive violence then the "good" path is unavailable for them.

Postal III includes performances by a wide array of minor celebrities, including Ron Jeremy, Jennifer Walcott, and Randy Jones. The game also contains characters depicting Uwe Boll (director of the 2007 Postal film), Sergei Mavrodi, Osama bin Laden and Hugo Chávez.

In Postal III, the Postal Dude emigrates to Paradise, Arizona's sister town of Catharsis after he destroyed Paradise with a nuclear bomb. Due to the 2008 financial crisis, the Dude drives into town and becomes stranded because he can not afford a tank of gas. He must then find work and do various odd jobs to escape the town.

In 2006, Running with Scissors was struggling financially and contracted Akella, who had published Postal 2 in Russia, to create the next entry in the Postal series. Running with Scissors provided the initial design for the game, but was not very involved in development. Shortly after the beginning of development, the 2008–2009 Great Recession in Russia disrupted the game's development and put additional financial strain on Akella. During and after development, Akella refused to provide Running with Scissors access to the game's "source code, assets or developers tools."

Because of this, Running With Scissors was not able to provide any updates or patches for the game, and players were not able to create mods for it either. In 2012, shortly after the game's release, Akella ceased operations after being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Postal III received "generally unfavorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

GameSpot gave the game 3/10, while Game Informer also lambasted the game, giving it a score of 1/10 and saying that "the people behind Postal III don't have the writing ability to back up their gutter-dwelling mouths. As it turns out, they also don't have the design or programming chops to create a stable game. This makes it one of a handful of games to ever receive such a low score."