Is Dispatch just another Invincible? Kind of, but it’s good too.
When Dispatch was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, despite its deserved buzz around its cast, it had a lot going against it.
For one, it could be argued that the episodic release structure in gaming is all but dead, and the recently released Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is damning evidence of that. Secondly, while its premise of being a superhero workplace comedy is interesting, we’ve definitely seen superhero/comic book fatigue. Lastly, one of the selling points for new studio AdHoc is that it’s made up of mostly Telltale Games alumni. With critics panning the most recent Life is Strange game, Double Exposure, and people waiting with baited breath for The Wolf Among Us 2, it makes you wonder whether a hankering for another “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game exists.
The first couple episodes of the game came out on Oct. 22 and the final two in the story came out yesterday, as the game approaches more than 1.5 million units sold. A bit more than three weeks has passed since the first episode’s release, so it’s safe to say they checked all the boxes.
Since Dispatch is a narrative game, I don’t want to go into too much of the plot to avoid spoiling anything, but here’s the gist of what this experience is. As mentioned earlier, Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy. You play as Robert Robertson III, mainly known to everyone as Mecha Man (essentially a foil of Iron Man). After he loses a battle in which his Mecha Suit gets destroyed, he struggles with life as an estranged former superhero. Eventually, he gets recruited by the Blonde Blazer (think Captain Marvel) to work at the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN), where he becomes “the guy behind the computer” calling the shots and dispatching a team of former villains and not-quite-superheroes to help stop crime in Los Angeles. That’s all well and good, but he also has to run the Z-Team, the team with the least impressive lineup.
AdHoc Studio is made up of a lot of Telltale Games alumni, so timed decisions are an obligatory part of the experience.
So what is it that you actually do in the game? It’s a mostly chill experience, but you can choose to have the game be more active with quicktime events that happen in cutscenes (though the whole game is a cutscene) or you can just see them play out. The main thing you’ll do is make decisions, with a number of them affecting how the story unfolds. Aside from that, you’ll also be working Robert’s day job at SDN. When Robert logs on for a shift, you look at the computer from his perspective and see a map of his team’s area, and it’s up to you to send the right hero(es) for the job.
In other words, you’re making more decisions.
Before the demo came out this summer, my thoughts on Dispatch were dubious at best, because I’m a huge Telltale and Don’t Nod fan, and I’ve seen their highs and their lows. I loved every season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and Life is Strange is my jam. But after rough outs with Double Exposure and Lost Records, I wasn’t sure if I needed this kind of game anymore. I also love Marvel and shows like Invincible and The Boys (both of which will get compared to this game a lot), and I just wasn’t interested in having yet another crude superhero story join those ranks.
Even after playing the demo, I wasn’t sold. In fairness, it didn’t do much of anything except put you in a short scenario in what ended up being the game’s second episode, without much context, I appreciated the animation and the performances from the voice cast. However, I don’t know if any of the dialog choices I made mattered.
And the same thing happened with this final version of the game.
Dispatch’s “work shifts” are a low-cost way to make even more decisions, this time allowing estranged superheroes to level up when they do their part.
For what it’s worth, I finished the game completely satisfied with the story. I thought it was very well written for what it was, and I definitely came away with an appreciation for all the game’s characters and their voice actors.
When it comes to the actual dispatching, though, I did horribly with it in each of the game’s eight chapters. I’m not just saying that either. According to my final stats after rolling credits, 80% of players did better than me. The whole time I wondered if that even really mattered, and since that stat was kept, I’m just going to assume it was.
That brings me to one of my main gripes about the game: Hardly any of the decisions mattered. That’s not all that surprising from a Telltale-style game, but I don’t believe a lot of big “this or that” decisions were all that hard to make either. In Dispatch, it seems like the biggest decisions you make revolve around firing a member of your team and who you romance. When it’s time to make those decisions, they’re pretty easy to make because they’re early on. You aren’t even thinking about the stakes yet, but the story moves on anyway. In The Walking Dead, it was about who died. It was about trust and loyalty with Life is Strange. I didn’t feel morally challenged with Dispatch at all, and I don’t know if that was intended.
It’s just different, and that’s something I can appreciate.
It’s worth noting that Dispatch is surprisingly not a walking simulator either. Every Telltale and Don’t Nod narrative adventure is exactly that. Because of that, there’s less gameplay as 90% of what you’re doing will be making decisions — whether they’re plot-related or something you’re doing on a dispatching shift, which happens no more than twice per episode.
Hacking is definitely not one of the game’s strong points, but luckily, you aren’t really required to do well on any of these instances — unless you want the trophies/achievements.
One gameplay aspect that people should have mixed feelings about is the hacking. As you deal with your dispatch shift, you’ll come across several instances in which you have to hack something, and that’s when actual gameplay comes in. During these hacking sequences, you’re essentially in a dot maze looking for the exit. Early on, these puzzles follow a linear path, but eventually they become open and frustrating mazes with an actual fail point. You get three chances in all these puzzles, and if you fail, that mission fails, but the beauty is the shift goes on. Are you going to have casualties on your mind? It depends. Do you think about all the people that die in kaiju movies after seeing so many buildings torn apart? You probably don’t, because that’s just thinking too hard.
Because there’s no walking, there’s a lack of actual dialog choices. The shifts aren’t all that long, so every episode of Dispatch ends up being refreshingly short. This is actually my favorite aspect of the game. Every week since the game came out, AdHoc has released two episodes that were roughly 30-45 minutes each. Now that all the episodes are out, it shouldn’t take you more than six hours to roll credits. If you want to Platinum the game, you’ll of course be spending more time doing that, but luckily you do get to choose which scenes to replay in each episode if you want to pursue that.
Before capping the review off, I do have one design fault that I wanted to make known because I feel like it can happen to anyone. As you’d expect, Dispatch supports multiple save files. I played each episode of the game as they came out, but before the final two episodes dropped, I wanted to see if I could create a new save on the off-chance I play the game with my partner when the weekend came. When I came back to the game to start the final two episodes, I was surprised to find my progress gone. I did everything from loading cloud saves and signing out of my PSN, but there was nothing in the UI that suggested I still had my data. So I reluctantly went ahead and started a new game, and when I did that, I finally had the opportunity to go back to my original save.
I don’t believe this is a small detail at all, and it shouldn’t have to be this way. Whether you start a new save or not, you should immediately have visibility of the other save files there, so I do hope this is something the team patches.
Now that every episode is available, it’s clear that AdHoc Studio’s hard work and dedication made Dispatch stand out in all the best ways possible. With episodic games, critics and gamers complain all the time about the time spent waiting on releases and random delays. That didn’t happen. Superhero fatigue is definitely a thing, but a brilliant story and a colorful cast of heroes led to people’s anticipation of every succeeding episode.
While I have my issues about the (lack of) weight and impact in the game’s “choose your own adventure” decisions, this weekly release format definitely did a lot to make all sorts of players talk about how their stories went. Dispatch is the result of learning from mistakes made in the genre, while doing just enough to make it special.
Now that every episode is available, it’s clear that AdHoc Studio’s hard work and dedication made Dispatch stand out in all the best ways possible. Dispatch is the result of learning from mistakes made in the genre, while doing just enough to make it special.
Is Dispatch just another Invincible? Kind of, but it’s good too.
When Dispatch was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, despite its deserved buzz around its cast, it had a lot going against it.
For one, it could be argued that the episodic release structure in gaming is all but dead, and the recently released Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is damning evidence of that. Secondly, while its premise of being a superhero workplace comedy is interesting, we’ve definitely seen superhero/comic book fatigue. Lastly, one of the selling points for new studio AdHoc is that it’s made up of mostly Telltale Games alumni. With critics panning the most recent Life is Strange game, Double Exposure, and people waiting with baited breath for The Wolf Among Us 2, it makes you wonder whether a hankering for another “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game exists.
The first couple episodes of the game came out on Oct. 22 and the final two in the story came out yesterday, as the game approaches more than 1.5 million units sold. A bit more than three weeks has passed since the first episode’s release, so it’s safe to say they checked all the boxes.
Since Dispatch is a narrative game, I don’t want to go into too much of the plot to avoid spoiling anything, but here’s the gist of what this experience is. As mentioned earlier, Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy. You play as Robert Robertson III, mainly known to everyone as Mecha Man (essentially a foil of Iron Man). After he loses a battle in which his Mecha Suit gets destroyed, he struggles with life as an estranged former superhero. Eventually, he gets recruited by the Blonde Blazer (think Captain Marvel) to work at the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN), where he becomes “the guy behind the computer” calling the shots and dispatching a team of former villains and not-quite-superheroes to help stop crime in Los Angeles. That’s all well and good, but he also has to run the Z-Team, the team with the least impressive lineup.
AdHoc Studio is made up of a lot of Telltale Games alumni, so timed decisions are an obligatory part of the experience.
So what is it that you actually do in the game? It’s a mostly chill experience, but you can choose to have the game be more active with quicktime events that happen in cutscenes (though the whole game is a cutscene) or you can just see them play out. The main thing you’ll do is make decisions, with a number of them affecting how the story unfolds. Aside from that, you’ll also be working Robert’s day job at SDN. When Robert logs on for a shift, you look at the computer from his perspective and see a map of his team’s area, and it’s up to you to send the right hero(es) for the job.
In other words, you’re making more decisions.
Before the demo came out this summer, my thoughts on Dispatch were dubious at best, because I’m a huge Telltale and Don’t Nod fan, and I’ve seen their highs and their lows. I loved every season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and Life is Strange is my jam. But after rough outs with Double Exposure and Lost Records, I wasn’t sure if I needed this kind of game anymore. I also love Marvel and shows like Invincible and The Boys (both of which will get compared to this game a lot), and I just wasn’t interested in having yet another crude superhero story join those ranks.
Even after playing the demo, I wasn’t sold. In fairness, it didn’t do much of anything except put you in a short scenario in what ended up being the game’s second episode, without much context, I appreciated the animation and the performances from the voice cast. However, I don’t know if any of the dialog choices I made mattered.
And the same thing happened with this final version of the game.
Dispatch’s “work shifts” are a low-cost way to make even more decisions, this time allowing estranged superheroes to level up when they do their part.
For what it’s worth, I finished the game completely satisfied with the story. I thought it was very well written for what it was, and I definitely came away with an appreciation for all the game’s characters and their voice actors.
When it comes to the actual dispatching, though, I did horribly with it in each of the game’s eight chapters. I’m not just saying that either. According to my final stats after rolling credits, 80% of players did better than me. The whole time I wondered if that even really mattered, and since that stat was kept, I’m just going to assume it was.
That brings me to one of my main gripes about the game: Hardly any of the decisions mattered. That’s not all that surprising from a Telltale-style game, but I don’t believe a lot of big “this or that” decisions were all that hard to make either. In Dispatch, it seems like the biggest decisions you make revolve around firing a member of your team and who you romance. When it’s time to make those decisions, they’re pretty easy to make because they’re early on. You aren’t even thinking about the stakes yet, but the story moves on anyway. In The Walking Dead, it was about who died. It was about trust and loyalty with Life is Strange. I didn’t feel morally challenged with Dispatch at all, and I don’t know if that was intended.
It’s just different, and that’s something I can appreciate.
It’s worth noting that Dispatch is surprisingly not a walking simulator either. Every Telltale and Don’t Nod narrative adventure is exactly that. Because of that, there’s less gameplay as 90% of what you’re doing will be making decisions — whether they’re plot-related or something you’re doing on a dispatching shift, which happens no more than twice per episode.
Hacking is definitely not one of the game’s strong points, but luckily, you aren’t really required to do well on any of these instances — unless you want the trophies/achievements.
One gameplay aspect that people should have mixed feelings about is the hacking. As you deal with your dispatch shift, you’ll come across several instances in which you have to hack something, and that’s when actual gameplay comes in. During these hacking sequences, you’re essentially in a dot maze looking for the exit. Early on, these puzzles follow a linear path, but eventually they become open and frustrating mazes with an actual fail point. You get three chances in all these puzzles, and if you fail, that mission fails, but the beauty is the shift goes on. Are you going to have casualties on your mind? It depends. Do you think about all the people that die in kaiju movies after seeing so many buildings torn apart? You probably don’t, because that’s just thinking too hard.
Because there’s no walking, there’s a lack of actual dialog choices. The shifts aren’t all that long, so every episode of Dispatch ends up being refreshingly short. This is actually my favorite aspect of the game. Every week since the game came out, AdHoc has released two episodes that were roughly 30-45 minutes each. Now that all the episodes are out, it shouldn’t take you more than six hours to roll credits. If you want to Platinum the game, you’ll of course be spending more time doing that, but luckily you do get to choose which scenes to replay in each episode if you want to pursue that.
Before capping the review off, I do have one design fault that I wanted to make known because I feel like it can happen to anyone. As you’d expect, Dispatch supports multiple save files. I played each episode of the game as they came out, but before the final two episodes dropped, I wanted to see if I could create a new save on the off-chance I play the game with my partner when the weekend came. When I came back to the game to start the final two episodes, I was surprised to find my progress gone. I did everything from loading cloud saves and signing out of my PSN, but there was nothing in the UI that suggested I still had my data. So I reluctantly went ahead and started a new game, and when I did that, I finally had the opportunity to go back to my original save.
I don’t believe this is a small detail at all, and it shouldn’t have to be this way. Whether you start a new save or not, you should immediately have visibility of the other save files there, so I do hope this is something the team patches.
Now that every episode is available, it’s clear that AdHoc Studio’s hard work and dedication made Dispatch stand out in all the best ways possible. With episodic games, critics and gamers complain all the time about the time spent waiting on releases and random delays. That didn’t happen. Superhero fatigue is definitely a thing, but a brilliant story and a colorful cast of heroes led to people’s anticipation of every succeeding episode.
While I have my issues about the (lack of) weight and impact in the game’s “choose your own adventure” decisions, this weekly release format definitely did a lot to make all sorts of players talk about how their stories went. Dispatch is the result of learning from mistakes made in the genre, while doing just enough to make it special.
by Danreb Victorio
