Trying to elbow your way into the crowded superhero genre in this day and age is no easy task. Marvel and DC have the wholesome angle covered, and even occasionally delve into darker, grittier territory. The Boys and Invincible have the adult demographic covered as those shows cater to a more mature audience looking for something different. So, what’s left? Well, I guess we could always try merging superheroes with a workplace comedy setting and see what happens? That’s exactly why AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch has done, and to great effect.
Dispatch puts you in the shoes of Robert Robertson the Third, a human man who dons a large metal suit and is known as Mecha Man, a revered superhero in LA. Robert’s life changes when his Mecha Man suit is destroyed by Shroud, a masked villain who was also responsible for killing his father. Feeling lost and despondent, Robert manages to make the most of his situation when he’s approached by another superhero named Blonde Blazer who talks him into joining SDN. He then becomes a dispatcher tasked with training a Z-Team of supervillains-turn-heroes to help protect the city.
If you’ve played a Telltale game before, you’ll know exactly what to expect here. Dispatch is a choice-based narrative game that shapes itself according to the choices you make in the story. Some decisions have far-reaching consequences. Others, not so much. The ultimate conclusion that the story comes to will remain largely the same regardless of your choices, but the journey towards that conclusion may shift ever so slightly.
Right off the bat, I’ll tell you this much: after having played Dispatch to its conclusion, there are one or two instances where your choices do actually matter and drastically change the way your ending plays out. Outside of that, the rest of it mostly feels like flavor text. That’s completely fine by me. As someone who’s been burned by these sorts of games multiple times, I’ve learned to just go into them with lower expectations. If the game ends up being a really great visual novel with a fun story and characters, that’s more than enough for me. And Dispatch absolutely nails it in that department.
Over the course of Dispatch‘s eight episodes, you’ll get to know and love every single member of the Z-Team. There are eight or nine of them, give or take, with the story focusing on a select few. Invisigal is the obvious star of the show, as she’s often portrayed as the spunky tsundere who acts like she doesn’t care about this hero stuff but secretly does. But Dispatch doesn’t neglect its “lesser” characters either, and that’s because of how well-done the gameplay is.
Yes, there is actual gameplay in Dispatch outside of just making decisions and doing a few QTEs. In every episode, Robert will have to get through a shift at SDN where he answers calls and sends out the best heroes for the task. Every Z-Teamer basically gets into a conference call with him during the shift where they’ll shit-talk Robert at the start, gossip about inane things, and complain when they’re asked to do their actual jobs. Despite some of them not getting quite as much screen time as the main players, I’ve grown to adore each of them.
Flambae appears scary and intimidating at first, but is secretly a diva who loves karaoke and being in the spotlight. Malevola was designed to appeal to Karlach fans, but I love that she’s a girl’s girl who hangs out with Prism when they’re off work. Despite the shorter runtime of Dispatch‘s episodes, the game does a great job of building a sense of camaraderie between the Z-Team. And when you finally get to bigger team-bonding scenes with the entire crew, they feel like massive payoffs that were earned and built up towards from the previous episodes.
The dispatching gameplay isn’t half bad either. In fact, I think it might be the game’s strongest point. Every emergency call you get requires you to assess exactly what the situation needs and send out the best hero for the job. You also need to account for the fact that it takes time for a hero to return from a job and rest up before you can send them out again. Dispatching your heroes is a delicate balancing act that also feels rewarding whenever they gain enough experience to level up. Over time, you’ll beat them into shape and train them to become bona fide superheroes that Robert can be proud of.
This feeds into the excellent team-bonding scenes I’d mentioned earlier. As the team grows in strength and starts to see the fruits of their labor, they begin opening up to Robert too. By the end of the series, you’ll have fully bought into the bonds that have been forged here, thanks in no small part to the act of manually training up the heroes yourself, and the wonderful characterization work on display.
Most importantly, though, Dispatch absolutely nails the superhero workplace comedy setting that AdHoc was going for. While the Shroud plot does eventually come back into focus in the last two episodes, you’ll spend most of your time watching Robert facepalm or sigh in exasperation whenever a Z-Teamer does something completely asinine. The chemistry between him and the team is undeniable, however, which prompted me to play him as more of an optimistic, nurturing leader who genuinely cares about his subordinates. You could certainly choose to play him as a jaded or cynical ex-hero who only cares about getting Mecha Man back online, but I’m willing to bet you’ll get much more out of the story going the other way.
If there’s one complaint to be had with Dispatch, it would be that the main plot with Shroud does feel a little rushed. Aside from that initial encounter in the first episode, he doesn’t appear again until the end of episode 6. And by then, you’ve only got two episodes left to properly establish Shroud’s motives and wrap up the conflict. I appreciated that Dispatch spent as much time as it did on the workplace sitcom bit, but this does also result in a main plot that feels a little undercooked as a result. It definitely doesn’t help that each episode’s runtime falls on the shorter side, ranging from 45 minutes to an hour.
As it stands, however, Dispatch is the culmination of all the lessons AdHoc’s developers have learned from their time at Telltale Games and Night School Studio. This is a game that knows exactly what kind of story it wants to tell, and it tells it confidently, self-assuredly, even in a genre that was once considered to be overcrowded and overdone.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
