Over ten years ago, Telltale Games took the world by storm with The Walking Dead Season 1. The game reinvented the point-and-click puzzle genre, emphasizing player choice and unique routes above all else. From there, it continued to dominate the genre with titles based on IPs such as Batman, Borderlands, and Fables: The Wolf Among Us, each of which managed to push the formula forward in new and exciting ways.
Unfortunately, that all came to an end when Telltale was shuttered in 2018. While the studio would eventually return, it’s currently still working on a follow-up to The Wolf Among Us, with no news on when the sequel will release. In the meantime, developers like Quantic Dream and Dontnod Entertainment have tried to fill the void with titles like Detroit: Become Human or Life is Strange, but none have really come close to capturing that same magic of the original Walking Dead.
This brings us to AdHoc Studio, and its first major game, Dispatch. Dispatch focuses on a former superhero shifting from his mech suit to a job as a dispatcher, working on reforming supervillains into heroes capable of standing against a terrifying and deeply personal threat. The game stars famous celebrities, beloved voice talent, and even well-known YouTubers as its protagonists. Despite AdHoc being made up of former Telltale and Night School Studio developers, this formula shouldn’t work. Yet, miraculously, Dispatch is easily one of the best games I’ve played this year, let alone one of the best in the genre.
From Mecha Man to Normal Man
Dispatch takes place in a world where superheroes are well-established at this point. Aliens, mutants, superpowered beings, all of which exist in this universe with powers that range from super-hearing to light manipulation. However, the character you follow doesn’t fit into any of those tropes. Mecha Man is an unpowered hero who comes from a long line of heroes with the same name. Behind the hulking suit of armor is Robert Robertson III, an aloof and scarred man who’s grappling with the weight of a role he never truly asked for.
After a disastrous mission involving an attempt at revenge against the supervillain who killed his father, Robertson is left without the suit and without a purpose. This leads him to finding Blonde Blazer, a corporate-backed superhero who comes to him with an offer: join the Superhero Dispatch Network and help turn a group of supervillains into a powerful team of heroes. Only one problem: most of the villains are still trapped in their ways and don’t care enough about doing the right thing, so it’s up to Robertson to try and change that.
In an era where superhero media has completely dominated every medium, Dispatch immediately stands apart as a breath of fresh air. The focus on a normal person who has to manage a team of heroes is compelling enough on its own, even without adding the layer of redeeming supervillains. The story strikes the right balance between the familiar and unfamiliar, and even if you’re someone who’s a huge fan of superhero stories or someone who’s never truly engaged with them, you’ll still find enjoyment in Dispatch.
The heart of Dispatch‘s story comes from its characters. Unlike a lot of games from Telltale, AdHoc doesn’t rely on an existing IP and instead has built an entire universe of characters from scratch. The end result is one of the best ensemble casts I’ve seen in a video game in a long time. All of the characters in SDN, whether it’s Robert, Blonde Blazer, Chase (an old friend from Robert’s past), and the Z-Team that you help to manage, each character is wonderfully charming.
Looking at Z-Team in particular, it’s a diverse motley crew of villains who vary from being former assassins to demons from the underworld. It’s hard not to become invested in the team, especially as Dispatch follows the trend of its predecessors in how it emphasizes player choice. In certain episodes, the game asks you to fundamentally change the composition of your team, meaning that how your Z-Team looks could vary drastically from other players.
I felt such an ownership behind the team that I had chosen, mainly due to just how well each member is written and brought to life. I can’t think of a single character that I didn’t like, whether it was Flambae, the loud-mouthed provocateur, or Sonar, the half-man and half-bat formerly guilty of various financial crimes. Regardless of who ends up on your team and who doesn’t, there are so many characters to love in Dispatch.
A lot of that is due to the game’s voice actors. Dispatch stars beloved actors from the industry, such as Erin Yvette, Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, and Travis Willingham. However, it also stars YouTubers who have never really been cast in major roles. These include Charles White (MoistCr1TiKaL), Seán McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye), and Alanah Pearce. While this may sound like a bad idea in theory, every single actor delivers incredible performances that bring each of their characters to life in fantastic ways.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the heart and soul of the entire game: Aaron Paul, the voice of Robert Robertson. Paul is obviously most well known for Breaking Bad, but he also has a history with voice acting in shows like Invincible, Bojack Horseman, and Tron Uprising. I can confidently say, though, that his performance as Robertson is one of his best. He does a great job at conveying the character’s inner frustrations and balancing it with the complexities of someone forced to mentor the next generation of heroes.
Another aspect of player choice that Dispatch emphasizes is one that isn’t explored all too often in similarly interactive narrative-focused games: romances. The game has two characters you can fall for, Blonde Blazer and Invisigal. The prospect of having romances that are decided through picking one of three dialogue options shouldn’t work, yet it does because of just how strong the writing and character work is.
Regardless of who you choose, it’s hard not to fall in love with both characters. Erin Yvette does a great job with Blazer’s characterization as the Superman of this world, who struggles between wanting to live a normal life and having the responsibility of being one of the most powerful heroes of the planet.
On the other hand, Laura Bailey delivers a career-best performance as Invisigal, a former villain who is as much the game’s heart as Robertson. Her character arc is deeply woven into the game’s themes of redemption, and what kind of hero Robertson ends the game as is deeply contingent on how you treat her.
If I could highlight any problem with Dispatch‘s story, I would say that some of the jokes don’t really land. A lot of it relies on very edgy humor, and some of it feels a bit too overtly crass to the point that it detracts from just how strong the overall writing is. Though I will say that for every joke that didn’t really click with me, there were two that managed to get a chuckle out of me, if not a full-bodied cackle. It really just depends on your style of humor.
Overall, I can’t say enough good things about Dispatch‘s story. That said, the hardest part about these sorts of games is the gameplay formula. While Telltale relied on a point-and-click puzzle-adventure style, Dispatch takes a far different approach with a game that mostly works well, despite some small issues here and there.
The Hero Factory
For the most part, the “gameplay” of Dispatch is fairly bare bones. While other, similar types of games would allow you to walk around and explore the SDN and interact with people, you can’t do that here. In fact, there is no walking that is in your control. While the animation style of Dispatch is drop-dead gorgeous, pretty much the entire game is made up of pre-rendered cutscenes, meaning there’s very little opportunity to interact with your surroundings.
So what gameplay is there? Well, for starters, when the game begins, you can choose whether or not you want cutscenes to include quick-time events or not. While this adds some degree of interactivity in select moments, I really wish there were more to it. When Season 2 of Dispatch inevitably comes out, it would be great to have a fully-modeled SDN to explore and more actual gameplay segments.
Thankfully, this isn’t all there is to the gameplay formula of Dispatch. There is one more key element to touch on, and that’s the actual mechanics of “dispatching” your team. In every episode, there will be multiple segments where you manage a top-down view of Z-Team in Torrance, the city in Los Angeles in which the game takes place. Throughout your shift as a dispatcher, multiple problems will pop up that you have to fix.
There’s a catch: each problem has a select number of heroes that you can send to fix it. When you send someone, they’re out of action for a short amount of time, so you need to manage your roster appropriately. Furthermore, some heroes are better suited to some tasks than others. For instance, if there’s a job that requires talking and reasoning with others, then Prism and Sonar are your best bets. However, if there’s a task that requires beating up criminals, then you should send in Flambae, Punch Up, or Golem.
In fact, some issues are specifically designed to be solved by specific heroes. For instance, if you get a call about a “demonic cult,” you will likely be rewarded if you decide to send in Malevola the demon. When you do send a hero in, a disruption will sometimes appear that requires you to do a skill check for a specific statistic, or pick an option that corresponds to the hero you’ve chosen.
Speaking of statistics, each member of Z-Team has statistics that you can raise every time they level up. They level up by gaining XP after completing a task successfully. The build you choose for a specific character is just another way that Dispatch emphasizes player choice. I’ve seen people emphasize Golem’s combat ability, but I personally focused on his maneuverability and defense capabilities.
The stats you emphasize are key in deciding which hero you choose to solve which problem. Say you’re told to stop an underground fight club. It’s probably not a good idea to send someone like Invisigal, who’s really good at outrunning enemies. Instead, you should probably send the aforementioned combat-focused members of Z-Team, like Punch Up. Maybe you could pair him with Prism, whose ability allows her to duplicate a hero at no additional cost. It’s important to take stock of all of the abilities of your heroes, because otherwise, they will get injured and be out of action, and be at greater risk of failing later dispatches.
Micromanaging the abilities of all of the characters is so much fun. You feel like that “guy in the chair” a lot of superhero media emphasizes, yet somehow, the loop manages to be just as exciting as if you were controlling one of the heroes directly in the field. It’s a constant test of your strategy and knowledge of your team, something that a real team leader would need to have in order to lead them to victory. In later episodes, it can get really tough to manage multiple problems at a time, but when it clicks, it becomes really satisfying.
Of course, the other major piece of the gameplay formula of Dispatch is the act of picking the right dialogue for the right situation. Each time a dialogue option pops up, it filled me with the same amount of dread as the dispatching mini-game did, because I knew that if I pressed the wrong option, it could have major implications for the ending. Of course, like with past Telltale Games, you should get used to seeing that a certain character will “remember that” after each choice.
Thanks to the writing, though, each dialogue option feels impactful. Seeing Robert Robertson’s character come to life and change depending on how you choose to talk to the people around you helps to make each version of the character feel unique. Maybe your version of Robertson is a harsh judge who thinks the worst of the people around him, or maybe he’s a true hero who really believes the best in the world, despite his dark past.
In general, despite the limited gameplay, AdHoc has done a great job with the blending between story and gameplay. Every choice you make in dialogue is just as important as how well you do in the dispatching mini-game. In the late game in particular, if you fail consistently in the final dispatch, there’s a certain choice that you are locked from making. Due to the fact that I was so invested in the game, I immediately went back to replay that section until I got it right.
That’s one of the best parts of Dispatch: the replayability. You could replay the game multiple times, and even if you only have a few other choices you can alter in your playthrough, how you handle the dispatching mini-game could be drastically different between runs. It is frustrating, though, that due to the fact that all of the cutscenes are pre-rendered, there’s no way to skip through them if you’re trying to do something different in order to see a different scene or 100% the game. This is a small problem in the grand scheme of things. When I saw the final analysis of my choices and what kind of hero my Robert Robertson was, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly satisfied.
Even if there are major problems with how Dispatch executes its gameplay loop, nothing can take away from just how well done every other part of the game is. Even the parts of the gameplay that are there, such as the dispatching mini-game and emphasis on dialogue choices, are so much fun to engage with. With all that said, I can’t stress enough how good a game Dispatch is.
A Massive Step Forward For the Genre
When I was a kid, my first Telltale game wasn’t The Walking Dead, but a video game adaptation of Strong Bad, of all things. I was obsessed with the style as a kid; even if the gameplay wasn’t all that deep, I had so much fun becoming invested in the world of one of my biggest obsessions. Since then, I’ve become invested in so many of Telltale’s games, so when it was shuttered, I believed that nothing could fill the void it had left. I was wrong.
Dispatch is an absolute marvel of a game. In an era where the superhero genre is more oversaturated than ever before, it manages to stand apart due to some of the most charming characters I’ve ever seen in a game. Whether it’s Aaron Paul as Robert Robertson, Laura Bailey as Invisigal, or Charles White as Sonar, the cast is fantastic and had me fully invested in the bizarre found family that is Z-Team. Plus, the events of the story will leave you on the edge of your seat, regardless of whether you play it episodically or all in one go.
Dispatch is by no means a perfect game. The hit-or-miss humor, the limited gameplay mechanics, and the lack of any interactivity beyond the dispatching mini-games are often quite frustrating. Plus, even if the game has a lot of replayability, the fact that there’s not an option to skip ahead through dialogue so you can quickly get to a scene you miss or retry a mini-game is a huge missed opportunity. Yet, these issues are nothing when you look at the big picture.
After I beat Dispatch, I felt a new void in my chest; I wanted to see more of these characters interact. There were countless moments where I felt invested in the story to such an extent that I was almost emotional. There are very few games I’ve played in my life that have pulled that off, and I am thrilled to say that Dispatch joins that list. The game doesn’t just revitalize the genre that Telltale innovated: it is easily one of my new favorite games released this year. In fact, when all is said and done, it may end up as one of my favorite games, period. I cannot wait to see what AdHoc does next, but I will be counting the days until we can see more of Z-Team.
Disclaimer: Dispatch was reviewed on PlayStation 5.
