The creators of the Sam & Max series, Telltale Games, have brought PC gamers Hector: Badge of Carnage, another detective game consisting of three episodes that will have you laughing into a sloppy cardiac arrest. If you like games that can be played with your family, and feel good adventures with a modest alignment of characters, this is not the game for you. Hector is in itself a vulgar and crude game that is only directed towards the adult crowd. This is not the kind of title were only one or two things are mature: it’s adult-oriented down to what I can only hope are crud-covered pixels.
The player takes control of unlikely protagonist Hector: a nasty and out of shape policeman who from the very start has to perform grimy, disgusting acts just to keep his job. The main story involves a cop-killing activist that has hostages held up inside of an old apartment building. To get the hostages out alive you have to straighten up the not-so-fair, hooker infested city of Clappers Wreake, filled with porn shops and churches that have been converted into strip clubs. If you like gross potty humor games then you will most certainly enjoy condom fishing in a toilet and exchanging crack heads for sex dolls. It all may just sound like a bunch of people getting gross, but these episodes offers players a fun and different form of detective work that truly tests your mind’s problem solving and thinking-out-of-the-box abilities.
The puzzles are challenging with plenty of stupid-funny solutions that will keep you occupied. From stealing a hooker’s lingerie, to fixing a car, all the way down to using vibrators to destroy a building; this game will leave you happy, a little frustrated, and with a rage-broken computer. Now when I say that it is challenging, I mean so challenging that it will leave you feeling like a dumb ass. Yeah, you’ll be trapped with Ron Burgundy in a big glass box of emotions.
There were times while playing that I really didn’t know what to do. I had to select every single option that the game had to offer just to get on the right track. The thing about Hector is that when you finally get a hint, it’s incredibly literal. If it says there’s something wrong with the clock tower, then you better mosey on down to the clock tower.
With Hector being a click and pick detective game, the controls and gameplay are as simple as they come, unless you don’t have motor skills, but were not judging. The layout of the game is very simple, which makes the game very accessible to a great many players. A few things in the first episode could have been better, but the creators thankfully noticed the issues and introduced improvements in the second and third episodes. The biggest problem that they fixed is the means of moving inbetween areas. In the first episode you literally had to walk through a few different scenes just to get to the transportation map. The new setup makes it so much easier to move around freely without feeling like you’re going on a pilgrimage. In the later episodes, players just bring out their maps and click the location they want to travel to.
The way the game is layed out, when you click on an interactive person or object a list pops onto the screen giving you different options to choose from. The options that are given are pretty diverse. They range from cursing someone out to being a good cop by asking the right questions, and any of these options could potentially be correct. During your gameplay you will receive many objects that will help to assist you along the journey; including a condom, hooker clothes, mouth wash, and sex dolls. As you can imagine, the creator was either really creative or just a really sick man.
Looking back, the Hector series is rather short, but during gameplay it seemed like it was never going to end. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad thing: the game was extremely fun to play through, with its crude humor and creativeness driving me to continue onward. Hector: Badge of Justice is definitely worth your time, and that’s high praise from someone who rarely plays this type of game.
