Reader reviews for Hector: Badge of Carnage - Episode 1: We Negotiate with Terrorists

Story-wise, the game is great. Hector is a fun character to play, and his voice acting is top notch. Voice acting is pretty good throughout, and the one case where it slips (the ravers) it may have been intentional.
Graphics are nice and clean. While there’s no hotspot highlighting, objects and exits are easy to locate.

The writing is pretty good, and the game is funny throughout, if you’re into foul British humour.
The interface is a pretty standard affair. There are some rough spots where it’s unclear why double click and single click do the same thing and you can’t get Hector to understand what you’d like to do, but in general it works well.

The game does suffer from some glitches. Occasionally the mouse cursor disappear and you have forcibly shut down the game to continue playing. Animation and sounds keep playing, but it’s impossible to do anything and the Esc key doesn’t bring up the menu.
Some hotspots do nothing. Some objects re-appear after you’ve taken them. Luckily this doesn’t break the game, as the autosave-only approach means you’d have to restart from scratch if that were to happen. Not that that would be such a terrible ordeal - episode one takes between 2 and 3 hours without using hints and without rushing to complete it (i.e. deliberately choosing the silly dialogue options).

Puzzles are a bit on the easy side, but there’s enough creative ones to keep you from going bored. Sometimes they’re a bit contrived, but you could say that about most cartoon adventure games.
One problem is the game design. Hector sometimes makes comments that make no sense in the context, because the developers expected you to go in a different order about things. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it’s weird to have Hector say “oh, this item is perfect for that” and you had no idea you even had to do “that” since you didn’t visit that location yet.

All in all, those were a fun couple of hours. While not the best game by any means, episode 1 has high enough production values to keep you entertained throughout, mostly thanks to the excellent dialogue and voice work.