Dispatching a bunch of weirdos your way
If you keep up with the Steam Next Fest event, then you probably remember playing the criminally short demo for Dispatch back in June, a superhero interactive fiction game developed by AdHoc Studio. If Dispatch’s presentation and episodic content didn’t clue you in yet, AdHoc was founded by ex-Telltale Games staff and carries a lot of the DNA that their previous title did. I am personally a huge fan of their previous catalog, forever citing The Wolf Among Us as one of my favorite stories in gaming, so I went in with high expectations and ready to draw comparisons, which the game seems to welcome with self-referential dialogue at times.
Dispatch puts us in the shoes of Robert Robertinson (yes, really), the civilian identity of tech-based superhero Mecha Man, whose titular mech is destroyed after being lured into a trap by his father’s killer. Robert is forced to step down as a superhero but still gets a chance to do good by leading the SDN’s phoenix program, where he leads a team of supervillains into rehabilitation. One thing to mention is that AdHoc perhaps carried a little too much of Telltale’s DNA into Dispatch, unfortunately mirroring the company’s controversial choice of releasing games episodically. Dispatch followed a weekly two-episode release schedule, meaning players had to wait a little over 20 days for all of its content to be unlocked. Granted, this is not nearly as bad as Telltale taking seven months to release The Walking Dead Season 1 in its entirety, but it still feels like an annoyingly arbitrary decision.
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: PC
For an independent title, Dispatch features a surprisingly star-studded cast, with Aaron Paul, forever our dear Jesse Pinkman, lending his voice to the game’s protagonist, acting alongside the veteran group of voice actors that make up Critical Role, who are present thanks to an old partnership that dates back to when Dispatch was meant to be a TV show. While the main cast is made up of heavy hitters such as Erin Yvette, Jeffrey Wright, and Travis Willingham, the Z-team consists of more unique talent, featuring a mix of musicians and content creators, some of whom are also first-time voice actors.
One of the crazier picks is Lance Cantstopolis as Flambae, who is not a real person but actually a character/stage persona created by stand-up comedian Fahim Anwar, even being credited in-character. Despite being initially skeptical of the content creator casting, there are some surprising performances to be found, like Jacksepticeye as Punch Up, who sounds nearly unrecognizable, and musician Thot Squad as Prism, who does a fantastic job for a first-time VA, even providing songs from her catalogue to be used as great needle drops. One of the few exceptions is Cr1TiKaL, who plays Sonar, being one of the easiest voices to pick out from the bunch as he sounds like his usual monotone self. The script does its best to hand him jokes that fit his offbeat humor, which does work at first, but the story eventually requires us to take Sonar seriously depending on our choices, which is tough to do when all of his dialogue is written in such a tongue-in-cheek manner.
Dispatch doesn’t feature any of Telltale’s adventure game-lite sections, instead replacing the exploration and puzzle-solving with the dispatching minigame, where you assign members of the Z-team to different emergencies across town depending on their competencies. Some of your team member’s traits are baked into their lore, like Flambae having a higher success rate with issues involving fire or Prism having an easier time with celebrity events, while other emergencies simply depend on a character’s stats, which are increased as they level up. Not every emergency has a perfect solution thanks to your limited number of heroes who have to rest between calls, so you sometimes depend on RNG as you try to cover your bases as best as you can.
While entertaining and filled with small character moments, dispatching is just a formality we have to get out of the way before the game can continue with its more conventional high-budget storytelling, serving as filler to pad out each episode. The game does its best to make up for that with high-quality voice acting and smaller storylines inside the minigame, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say Dispatch is the least “game” out of the choices-matter bunch, especially considering how there aren’t many consequences for failing.
Dispatch does its best to present the player with at least one major choice per episode, and considering how the game’s plot heavily relies on character development and interactions, most of your choices end up pertaining to your relationships with the game’s cast, including being able to pick between two romance options. There are no major life-or-death moments, so it’s easy to feel like your choices don’t matter, especially since the game itself doesn’t make a huge deal when presenting them, but there are quite a few alternate scenes and small changes depending on what you pick, even though they don’t necessarily alter the ending in any major ways.
Without spoiling too much, Dispatch is narratively satisfying, so even though it relies on smaller choices that don’t rock the boat too much, all of them lead to fun character moments and are never undone without your consent. AdHoc’s approach to this mechanic is surprisingly honest, considering this is a genre that relies on having you think your choices matter much more than they do, but I honestly prefer it over manufacturing drama through purposefully unlikeable characters or decisions that are made irrelevant as soon as the episode is over.
Despite tripping over the finish line with a somewhat rushed ending, Dispatch still feels like a good adaptation of the Telltale format, winning me over with its genuinely fantastic voice acting and lovable cast of characters. It’s undeniable that the game relies on quite a bit of padding to hit its 8-hour runtime, but what is there is extremely engaging and well-made, scratching the itch for episodic gaming much better than Deck Nine or Supermassive could, although players used to the standard Telltale formula will most likely be disappointed by the infrequency of dialogue options, as well as the lack of more bombastic choices.
Regardless, I firmly believe that the developers at AdHoc are pretty much only competing with their past work at Telltale, as bigger studios like Quantic Dream still fail to match their writing quality despite having ten times the budget. I’m quite excited to see what a season 2 for the game will look like, alongside any other titles AdHoc creates in the future, hopefully suffering from fewer growing pains and with a much higher budget considering how well Dispatch has been received.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.