Building comparison
head to head
Grand Theft Auto IVvsPostal
Neither is meaningfully harder - they pose close to the same test. The widest gap is execution, and it is a single point.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Execution · Practiced Mastery
A grittier crime story where weighty driving and gunplay carry the experience.
Postal
Execution · Practiced Mastery
An early top-down rampage shooter with simple execution demands.
Grand Theft Auto IV leans Execution (Practiced Mastery); Postal leans Execution (Practiced Mastery).
Grand Theft Auto IVPostal
Axis by axis
Execution5 vs 4
Grand Theft Auto IV leans a little harder on execution, though the gap is small.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Heavier driving and cover shooting reward control.
Postal
top-down shooting and movement
Reads1 vs 0
Grand Theft Auto IV leans a little harder on reads, though the gap is small.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Scripted AI, no adaptive opponent modeling.
Postal
enemies use fixed aggressive scripts
Variance2 vs 2
Same score on variance - which means the number cannot separate them. The difference is in what each one asks of you.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Minor mission variance.
Postal
enemy spawn and pathing randomness
Optimization3 vs 3
Same score on optimization - which means the number cannot separate them. The difference is in what each one asks of you.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Mission routing and weapon picks learnable.
Postal
weapon choice and route clearing
A matching score does not mean a matching test. Two games can both sit at 10 on execution and demand completely different things of you - which is why the reasoning above matters more than the number beside it.