Dispatch review-in-progress: funny, beautiful, and clever… so far
By Kirk McKeand
Dispatch is a beautifully animated superhero cartoon where you play as Robert Robertson, aka Mecha Man, an Iron Man-style hero whose suit gets destroyed so he’s forced to work as an emergency call operator for a team of former supervillains turned sorta good.
The closest point of comparison would be Invincible. These are flawed heroes who get naked and bloody, and don’t mind dropping the odd F-bomb. Before he loses his suit, Robertson battles a shit-talking villain called Toxic, who fights with his wang flapping free, and one of your first choices is whether you want to stomp on him or punt him through a skylight and send him careening across Greater Los Angeles. It’s sharp, funny, and well acted, boasting a cast of big names like Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, Matthew Mercer, and Erin Yvette. There are also some YouTubers.
These characters have depth and complex interpersonal relationships that you have to navigate, finding the right synergy among your team of misfits, from Invisigal, an emo asthmatic with ADHD who can vanish when she holds her breath, to Flambae, a greasy pyro with anger issues. But I can’t talk about how these play out or intersect because the review schedule means I can only touch on things that happen in the first two episodes, despite having access to four, which is half the season.
Yes, despite breaking away from Telltale, the developers at Adhoc have gone for the episodic format. It’s not as bad as it sounds, since the team will launch two episodes per week, but trying to critique it at this stage – when I have no idea how the choices I’ve made will play out across the second half of the story – feels a bit like trying to fight crime without my Mecha Man suit.
Adhoc is attempting to evolve the Telltale style of storytelling with more interactivity. Each episode, you have to handle dispatch calls in a light strategy game where you manage time and resources to send the right heroes to each job. But with each episode coming in at just under an hour, that means I’m discussing stuff I’ve played for around 15 minutes, and with half of that time spent on a training mission. There’s no exploration, so the only parts where you take control are the dialogue choices and the dispatch sequences, which don’t open up until later on because the dysfunctional team doesn’t trust you and won’t always follow orders, making these early dispatches feel scripted.
There’s a lot of potential, at least. Heroes have synergies and incompatibilities with other heroes and situations, and later on you’ll be able to train and develop skills, with a light RPG stats system allowing you to grow heroes in combat, charisma, agility, and other statistics.
It isn’t just a case of sending the right people, either. Dispatch doesn’t tell you outright your odds — you have to intuit that from the issue at hand and the skills of the heroes you send. Then your success chance is randomised based on those stats by two shapes overlaid and a ball bouncing randomly within. If the ball lands where the two intersect, you succeed.
Sometimes situations pop up and you have to directly involve yourself, and there’s also a simple hacking minigame where you can manipulate security cameras and other smart home devices. My only real complaint with this stuff is how awkward it is to navigate to the situation you need to respond to on the controller, which isn’t ideal when they’re on time constraints.
Dispatch shows a lot of promise, but it remains to be seen whether it can hold attention through the busy games season while drip-feeding the episodes. I hope it can because if the first couple of episodes are any indication, Dispatch could be something special. I found myself laughing out loud more than once, which isn’t easy to do to someone who’s hunched over like a goblin watching something alone. The writing is sharp, the acting is excellent, the animations wouldn’t feel out of place in a premium TV show, and the interactive sequences tease some amount of depth. I just think it’d be better off binged because of how little you actually play during an individual episode.
Version tested: PC