Review: Hector: Badge of Carnage (PC) 1

Synopsis: Hector, A.K.A. the “Fat Arse of the Law” , is a a zaftig, vulgar, drunken Police Detective who is awoken after a long night of boozin’ and called to a Police incident. There is a terrorist who is holding people hostage and wants his demands met or he will kill the hostages. To show he means business he guns down several cops before Hector arrives on the scene. Hector is then tasked to be the negotiator and is given a list of demands by the terrorist. It is up to him to complete the tasks or let the hostages perish.

Let me start off by saying I love a good fart joke. Poo Poo, pee pee, and vomit just crack me up. I am 33 yrs old and I still die laughing when I watch Beavis & Butt-Head. So from the description I should by all rights really like this game. But from my experience the game was just ok for me, not overly great but not overly terrible.

Let’s begin with the actual gameplay which is a PC point-and-click game. As the player you have to just hover your mouse around each scene and look for objects or locations that are clickable and interact with them. While I’m not normally a PC gamer the pointing and clicking part was not a problem for me but I felt that figuring out how to combine and use the objects in each environment was not as accurate or obvious and I thought it should be. For example the first location you start the game in is a locked jail cell. Hector somehow lost his trousers and decided to use an empty jail cell at the precinct he works in as a good place to sleep off a night of drinking. In order to get out of the jail cell you have to create something to fish out the keys from a toilet full of poo. Now I was clicking all over the room and found locations that gave me some kind of response from Hector but no matter how many times I clicked on stuff I only kept getting the same responses and I couldn’t find any hidden objects. As hard as I tried I could not figure out what to do next so I begrudgingly went into the hints section to figure how to get the keys. I ended up looking at the hints section several times through the game in order to figure out the puzzles.

Now while I’m not a gaming genius I finished Portal 2 in about two days (because I had to sleep at some point) so I believe that I have enough intelligence to figure out a puzzle game. Why I had so much trouble with ‘Hector’ is a mystery to me because the puzzles themselves weren’t terribly difficult. I think the mechanics of the game, changing it from a touch input to a mouse input, did not convert over as smoothly. Several times I would click and double click on objects and Hector would not interact with it but after cursing out the game for a few minutes and trying it again he would finally interact with it and reveal an item I needed. It’s this fault in the game is what cause me to have such a hard time getting through the game rather that it being an issue with comprehending the actual puzzles.

Another aspect of the gameplay that I had some issue with was interacting with other characters. You can find out hints as to how to progress in an area by speaking with the various and colorful characters in the game. A lot of the conversations use conversation trees and you have to figure out how to respond to keep the chat going until you get to the crucial clue or correct response to advance your investigation. Some of the conversations were pretty straight forward but there were several instances where I was going around in circles looking for the correct thing to say. I literally spent ten minutes on one conversation before I got the correct sequence of responses to progress in the game and it was frustrating as hell. I would have liked to have some kind of notepad check list or something to that effect to know whether or not I’m on the right track with my responses.

Onto the graphics which were well done. Telltale went with a cartoonish hand drawn style and it works well in bringing the comical world that Hector shuffles around in alive. The game is not very animation heavy but what animation there is it good. The cut scenes are nice as well and really enhance the story as well as the humor. Speaking of the humor as I mentioned earlier the game is just full of dick n’ fart jokes from the get go. While some of the jokes were genuinely funny there were other moments where I felt they were being gross to get a laugh but in the end it wasn’t funny. There is some British slang and humor in the game but it’s still accessible to everyone.

Overall Hector: Badge of Carnage is a decent game that could appeal to gamers looking for something casual to play. The game is very obviously built for touch screen environment as I think the porting over to mouse click inputs may not have been as smooth as it could be and can lead to a lot of frustration which can affect your enjoyment of the game. The story is well done and the end of this first (“We Negotiate with Terrorist”) of three episodes does leave you with a cliff-hanger making you want more. The humor in the game is great for those that cry laughing at movies like Jackass or Dumb and Dumber but sometimes the gross-out humor is more gross and less humorous. If you are looking for a break from your console games or if the PSN is still down Hector is worth a gander.