You begin in a cell where you are introduced to your crude, satirical and sometimes straight-up brilliant main character; an overweight cop somewhat disillusioned with life and the town he lives in. He has a hangover. He talks about it a lot.
Here you also familiarise yourself with a game-play mechanic which hasn’t been used popularly in some time; you have to collect and use items from the environment to escape each enclosed area and progress the story. There’s usually a pretty obvious low-hanging entry point but sometimes the steps invade the domain of downright convoluted. Fear-not though – there are hints and tips available to stop you getting stuck in one story-area for too long!
The story is humorous and surprisingly open-ended, allowing you to engage in all manner of outrageous conversations with amusingly stereotyped characters. More than once I found that my mouth was open in a ‘can you say that?!’ manner… There were just as many laugh out loud moments though.
Soon after you begin, you are charged with doing the bidding of a local ‘terrorist’ as part of your role as a Hostage Negotiator in order to meet his demand and prevent him from killing his hostages. This sees you having to fix the local clock tower and purge the town of pornography among other things that the lunatic perceives to be degrading the town’s moral fabric!
Hector Episode 1 HD is a fun and amusing game that could very easily grow into a series of great games. The format lends itself very well to the iPad and I did find myself a little addicted. It is however, less than 5 hours of gameplay (much less if you use the tips a lot) so isn’t at the same level of no-brainer value as some other games with more replay value.
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