Okay Geek Farm
PC - Hector: Badge of Carnage Episode 1 Review
Alex Tretrop
Hector: Badge of Carnage released earlier this year as an Iphone exclusive title by Straandlooper Animation, and now Telltale has picked it up in order to publish it on a wider variety of platforms. It’s hit PC’s this week and radiates some great ideas, namely the art style and mature premise as well as some fairly good voice acting and dialogue. Though its gameplay isn’t always exciting, I also feel like the objectives aren’t always clearly laid out, which essentially breaks the flow of these games in an instant. If you can overcome these, then Hector is an enjoyable experience but it feels like it’s overshadowed by Telltale’s previous games.
Story
Unsurprisingly Hector: Badge of Justice puts you in the shoes of Hector, a detective inspector who’s generally found in various states of drunkeness with a generally violent and unhealthy attitude towards crime. It’s pretty interesting to see a point and click adventure title be so openly mature, something that I applaud the developers for. Generally speaking though, it’s also has some silly humour sprinkled in for good measure and a few lines did get a chuckle or two from me. Otherwise though, you’ll be doing a lot of talking and area traversing as is fairly standard in these types of games. It does have the signs of a port, with the dialogue options covering the entire screen as opposed to spacing it out so you can still see the artsy graphics style but it isn’t all that distracting in the long run. Hector himself is an interesting character and the writing is good enough to support his very different outlook on his messed up world.
Gameplay
While it’s hard to classify point and clicks under a form of gameplay, we can judge how well the puzzles are constructed. And most of the time, they’re unclear or unfocused. The first area of the game puts you in a cell with no real indication of how to escape. While this isn’t necessairily a bad thing, you aren’t given a reliable starting point or an indication of the item your looking for. It felt like blind luck when I stumbled accross some answers while haphazardly combining two random items at once. Still, some of the puzzles do get fairly good and while some of the solutions to problems are found in some extremely unorthodox ways, you start to get an idea of how to solve them based on the rules of Hector’s world and previous interactions with other characters and objects.
The hint system also makes a reappearance, with a much more detailed look into very specific problems of each environment. While you can look up simple hints in the system, there is one option that outright tells you exactly what to do if you don’t care to solve the puzzles. Like in Telltale’s previous games, it’s nice that it’s there and caters to every variety of gamer that could be picking this game up.
Visuals / Audio
One of the most noticeable aspects of Hector is it’s art style. While the environments are a combination between a water colour painting mixed with a darker tone, the character models are all cartoonish and animated, making for an interesting and effective look for the game. It conveys the mood perfectly while still looking good enough for many of the more key environnments in the game as well as some of the visual jokes. That being said, it isn’t, from a technical view, a great looking game and it’s easy to see how this was an Iphone game.
For the most part, the audio is fairly good. Hector is voiced in a gruff, tough guy way and he sounds exactly as you would imagine him. While some of the other voices can start to drive you a little crazy, for the most part, many of the actors do fairly competent jobs playing the roles, delivering some joke lines at just the right moment.
Final Thoughts
Hector has a lot of cool little parts to it. The story is different and well written, the setting and environments feel like new and exciting territory for point and clicks while looking very nice from an artistic point of view. But for every cool idea there’s an annoying problem that pops up. The gameplay itself often feels unclear and uninteresting, which found me using the hints to make my way through the majority of the game. It’s Iphone roots aren’t that well hidden either, making ample use of the entire screen to display dialogue choices as well as not really doing anything too complicated with the graphics in the technical sense. It generally looks more like a painting than a game!
Pro’s
- Cool Artistic Vision
- Interesting and Mature Story
- Adventure is well written
Con’s
- Gameplay is often unclear
- Feels like an Iphone port
- Graphics aren’t technically impressive
The easiest way to summarize Hector is by saying that it’s alright. It has a lot of good ideas and it’s heart is in the right place but with it’s large amount of problems, you’ll be entertained one moment and frustrated the next. It’s like a balancing act and Hector: Badge of Carnage is sitting right in the middle.
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