Dispatch feels like it harkens back to the early 2010s–a time when Telltale Games was creating incredible episodic adventure games inspired by graphic novels, superhero stories were beginning to fill to the brim with quips to counterbalance the angst of the genre in the 2000s, and office-based TV comedies were everywhere. If not for snippets of gameplay, Dispatch would simply be a great TV show that I would want to tune into every week. It sometimes feels like it skews a little bit too much toward its TV show inspirations, but superb writing and voice acting maintains investment in this character-driven drama and makes for a story I want to replay.
In Dispatch, you play as Robert Robertson III, aka Mecha Man. Once a prominent hero without superpowers who had to rely on piloting a mechsuit to stop monstrous supervillains, Robert finds his life adrift after his suit is damaged beyond repair. He’s approached by Blonde Blazer, a famous hero-for-hire, who offers him a job as a dispatcher–someone who directs and assists a team of paid heroes. The catch: Robert’s assigned group of misfits is entirely composed of former supervillains, and their crass attitudes, explosive tempers, and lack of camaraderie make them a poor team and ill-suited for hero work.
It’s a stellar set-up, made even stronger by an incredible cast of varied characters. While trailers and advertisements offered an initial impression of Robert being your typical washed-up hero defined by dour sarcasm, the character is a remarkably refreshing take for a protagonist in a superhero story. Yes, he’s depressed and often uses humor to deflect, but he has an earnest desire to help people and continue being a force for good. He doesn’t view the supervillains under his command as a hindrance, but a mission: He’ll mentor the roster into a group of heroes even greater than he was because it’s best for the city and for the former villains’ lives.
A few characters joke about Robert being good at speeches, and I’d be inclined to agree. His words of encouragement are a strong motivation to take each assignment as seriously as possible, adding weight to both the story and the choices you make throughout it. The main gameplay loop of Dispatch sees Robert behind a computer screen, being alerted to crimes and calls for help across the city. It’s up to you to carefully read each request, which are all worded to specifically point to what a person is asking for, and react accordingly. A caller might be asking for help stopping a fight, but they specifically mention to not do so violently, for example, or a concerned citizen might reach out because they’ve found a bomb that needs diffusing and it’s going to go off soon so a responder needs to hurry.
Each wanna-be hero on Robert’s roster has an array of scores split across five stats: Combat, Vigor, Mobility, Charisma, and Intellect. Based on the language used for each crime, you have to decide which former villain would be the best option to send. The sword-wielding and portal-making half-demon Malevola is a bit of an all-rounder, for instance, while the winged assassin Coupé has good Combat, Mobility, and Intellect, but poor Vigor and Charisma. Rarely is a single hero the perfect choice for the job, and each mission carries with it a chance of failure that’s left up to luck. You can close the margin for error by sending more than one hero on an assignment, though–if a mission calls for a high-speed chase while holding off enemy fire, I might send both the highly mobile stealth hero Invisigal and damage-soaking bruiser Golem.
The trade-off for overpreparation is time and resources. Every hero you send off takes them out of the rotation for a while; first traveling to the assignment, then doing it, then traveling back to base, and finally, resting after the ordeal. You’ll usually have a dozen or so missions per shift, with two to four popping at a time, and each only remains on the board for a short period before timing out. This encourages you to be quick and strategic with your choices. Frontloading too many of the early assignments with numerous heroes to avoid failure means everyone will be out of commission and resting when the second batch of missions rolls in, causing them to end in failure. But if you don’t send enough heroes to begin with, you might fail anyway.
On occasion, a hero might ask Robert to intervene and provide a more hands-on approach as well. This often boils down to making a judgment call on how a hero should proceed when a complication arises–three to four options are typically presented, with each phrased in a certain way to hint at the skill needed to press ahead. Other times, however, Robert can use his experience as a tech-based hero to lend his hacking expertise and circumnavigate the problem.
Hacking plays out as a minigame in which you guide a polyhedron through a maze of nodes. To proceed through each maze, sometimes you just need to reach the end. Other times, you’ll have to input a pattern to unlock the way forward, bring a charge of electricity from one node to another, or maneuver around an antivirus that pursues you through the maze as a glowing red eye. As the game progresses, these hacking minigames grow more complex, and your margin for error increases with harsher time restrictions and limited attempts. They can become fairly challenging and suitably tense by the endgame (though there is an option to grant Robert unlimited time and retries if you find them too difficult or stressful).
The entire experience of dispatching heroes is an exciting challenge that grows more complex as the game goes on. It’s not difficult to figure out, but your first few shifts will still likely end with a couple of missed calls and/or failures as you learn the ropes and deal with a group of former supervillains that may be ill-suited to the various tasks at hand. However, as each member of the team completes assignments, they’ll gain experience and level up, allowing you to upgrade any one of their five stats.
Over time, you’ll learn to recognize which buzzwords clue you into the best team member to dispatch. You’ll train each hero to be better at handling calls, and you’ll learn which heroes have synergy together in a way that increases their success percentage if partnered together. You’ll also learn more about each member’s unique skill set–each person on the crew has a unique passive ability that you only learn of later in their career. You can briefly take each would-be hero out of the rotation at select periods to go train with Blonde Blazer, who helps them hone and learn additional passive skills. As you succeed at calls, Robert gains experience too, letting him level up and unlock dispatcher perks like powerful coffee that can get a hero back into the available pool without resting, or medic training to heal characters who get wounded on the job and are suffering penalties to their success rate until their injury is addressed.
Dispatch is structured in such a way that the learning curve for dispatching on a first playthrough perfectly matches Robert’s growing confidence and camaraderie with the team in the story (or at least for me; admittedly, your perspective could be different). It makes for a more engaging and personalized experience, crafting a compelling illusion that it’s your efforts to get to know the team that’s directly impacting their level of solidarity with Robert over time.
A lot of Dispatch is a carefully curated illusion–one that hides how powerless you really are to impact the story. Between shifts, you’ll guide Robert through this new period of his life, meeting and interacting with coworkers, flirting with potential love interests, and striving to find a way to be Mecha Man again. Each branch in dialogue grants anywhere between two and three choices, and a timer encourages you to stay glued in in order to make a quick decision that still takes into account the subtleties of each option. You can pause the game at every choice and take all the time you need, which is an appreciated moment of accessibility for someone like me who does not read very fast and sometimes needs more time than the three or so seconds allotted for each decision. But it’s clear that Dispatch is designed with the intent that you should be making these decisions on the spot with your gut reaction, consequences be damned.
It’s a familiar setup for anyone who played the Telltale adventure games back in the day, or similar titles. But Dispatch makes one notable deviation from this long-used format, and it’s made weaker for it: You cannot choose to have Robert stay silent. In games similar to Dispatch, choosing to say nothing (whether purposeful or accidental) was a choice that could impact the narrative; silence is a particularly powerful narrative decision in games like 2012’s The Walking Dead and 2016’s Firewatch. In Dispatch, however, the game auto-picks one of the available options if you don’t pick anything (presumably, the game picks the “canon” choice). This means you don’t actually have to do anything outside of the dispatching shifts. The game’s story will just keep going.
This cheapens the gameplay aspect of Dispatch and pulls the overall experience closer to an interactive TV show rather than a cinematic video game. The overall story further reinforces this distinction. While there are choices that see you pushing major characters out of the story or pulling in new ones, these decisions don’t have any dramatic ramifications. One of the biggest examples occurs early into Dispatch: Robert is told to cut the member of the team who’s lowest on the leaderboard that details each hero’s effectiveness. However, the decision of who to cut eventually comes down to two candidates. It doesn’t matter how much you focus on those two characters to improve their performance ahead of the decision, fight back against the idea of cutting anyone, or purposely sabotage other characters during shifts to worsen their overall ranking; you must always cut one of those two characters.
On subsequent playthroughs, this highlights just how few narrative pathways Dispatch’s story has. But even on your first playthrough, the signs that your choices are an illusion already begin to poke through. The two candidates up to be cut don’t have any significant impact on the story or any major scene with Robert that might inform your leadership style or what you want to get out of the team. Granted, because the two candidates have different superpowers, they have different stats and passive abilities for shift assignments. But with how easily you can craft each member of the team, you can find cover for the hole in your roster. It might take a shift or two to level up the hero you want to fulfill the role left by the person who was cut, but it’s not hard. So while this decision is not totally devoid of consequence, it might as well be.
The game further reinforces this lack of player efficacy by making the choice for you if you just choose to put the controller down and let the timer run out on the decision. All of this doesn’t ruin Dispatch, per se–the writing in this game remains fantastic, and its story would make for a great TV show–but it does dampen the tension of each choice. You can play this choice-driven video game without making many choices and still watch a satisfying ending.
To a certain extent, this lack of true responsiveness is made more frustrating because of Dispatch’s phenomenal writing. Invisigal is proof that there could have been a bigger bite to the consequences of choices. Of all the members of Robert’s team, Invisigal is the one struggling with being a hero the most, believing that having a superpower like invisibility means she’s destined to be a supervillain. One of the first things Robert does (unless I haven’t found it, there’s no exception to this–the game traps you into doing it) is give Invisigal a pep talk that boils down to fate not being real; it is our choices, he claims, that define who we are.
Ignoring the hilarious irony in the juxtaposition of this speech’s theme and the overall structure of the game, fate serves as the main throughline of Robert and Invisigal’s relationship. Robert becomes the de facto mentor of Invisigal, and your choices involving her do have one ramification on Dispatch’s conclusion. If Dispatch didn’t wrap up right after, this impact would be quite substantial. As is, it makes for an interesting differentiating factor if developer AdHoc decides to make a sequel one day.
Robert and Invisigal have a fun back-and-forth dynamic, brought to life by expressive animations and superb performances by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul (voice of Robert) and Critical Role’s Laura Bailey (voice of Invisigal). Most of their best scenes are squirreled away into their romance path, so you lose crucial character-building moments if you instead pursue Blonde Blazer or don’t date anyone at all. But choosing to invest time and effort into Invisigal, regardless of romantic interest, is worthwhile, and creates a compelling reason to engage with the game’s choices if only to help her see she isn’t fated to be a villain and can be a hero if that’s what she truly wants.
While the rest of the team doesn’t get the same treatment as Invisigal, they’re all enjoyable to interact with, regardless of whether you choose to make choices or not. While the lack of branches in the narrative keeps most choices from feeling substantial enough to warrant careful consideration, the arc of Invisigal’s potential redemption, incredible writing, and stellar voice acting make this one of the best superhero dramas I’ve watched. Plus, the act of dispatching heroes and growing as a leader is a fun interlude between all the choice-making, especially when you can see your improvement reflected in Robert’s growth throughout the story. I have my qualms with parts of it, but Dispatch is more than worthy of getting a second season. The writing and world-building behind its story are too good for this to be a one-and-done entry.