Dispatch, the superhero workplace comedy by AdHoc Studio, oscillates between being a fun, low-stakes romp and the video game equivalent of those obnoxious YouTube brain-rot videos your edgy teen nephew can’t stop watching, and it does so with such whiplash-inducing intensity that there were points when I was genuinely unsure if I even liked the game. Yet, when the week-long gaps between its eight episodes started to close, I was always looking forward to spending time at Robert Robertson III’s desk and sending my team of ex-criminals out to save the day again.
As a video game, Dispatch is a paper-thin, choice-based adventure game that seems kind of annoyed that I’m even holding a controller while its superpowered dramedy plays out. When it’s being a comedic, playable television show, it has almost as many misses in its jokes as it does belly-laugh-inducing one-liners. Then, as a management sim in which you’re sending heroes out to finish odd jobs, Dispatch has all the complexity of your favorite time-killing mobile app. The individual pieces of Dispatch leave much to be desired, but when it’s all put together, it’s a breezy workplace sitcom that occasionally looks over its shoulder to ask for your input. I play its episodes like I watch The Office: I don’t need it to change my life, but its weekly drops were a nice thing to look forward to.
Robert Robertson III is the latest in a family line of heroes. He, like his father and grandfather before him, pilots a mech suit under the name Mecha Man. Though he doesn’t have superpowers, his heroics have earned him respect in the local superhero community and the fear and disdain of the villains they take down. However, after a fight against his arch-nemesis, the enigmatic, calculating villain named Shroud, puts his robot out of commission, Robert finds lighter work behind a desk at the Superhero Dispatch Network. Here, he guides the Z-Team, a group of ex-villains looking for a new lease on life.
These ex-cons are all a bunch of delinquents, but the lovable kind that you want to see succeed. Invisigal, voiced by Laura Bailey, is the game’s de facto leading lady, who hates teamwork and doing good, but volunteered for the SDN’s program. Flambae is the flamboyant, fire-manipulating bastard who doesn’t know that the guy who put him away is leading his team. Then there’s Sonar, the literal batman voiced by YouTuber MoistCr1TiKaL, who transforms between his more reasonable anthropomorphic form and his more unpredictable monstrous one. That’s not even half of the crew, but by the time Dispatch’s eight episodes concluded, I was pretty smitten with all of them. Each member has their own strengths, weaknesses, and relationships, and knowing them is what can make one of their episodic dispatch shifts a smooth operation or a managerial disaster.
But manning the dispatch desk is only half of the team-building exercises Dispatch requires of Robert. The other half of the game is made up of mostly non-interactive story segments. Despite all he’s been through, Robert wants to believe in something, and if he can’t believe in himself, maybe he can turn this group of rehabilitated comic book villains into a real team that cares about the city and each other. Aaron Paul gives one of his more reserved performances after years of being synonymous with burnout characters like Jesse from Breaking Bad and Todd from Bojack Horseman, and while he veers close to monotony at times, he makes a good straight man to the more eccentric heroes he works with.
I really do enjoy the character dynamics of Dispatch, and when it’s not devolving into toilet humor, it’s got a lot of great gags, endearing relationships, and memorable dramatic moments and action sequences for you to QTE through. My trouble is that despite some entertaining writing and the occasional meaningful choice, Dispatch feels like it’s railroading you throughout several of its supposedly big decisions. AdHoc is made up of ex-Telltale Games developers, and Dispatch’s approach to time-based decision-making feels mostly in line with how that studio’s old adventure games handled it. The major exception is that Dispatch almost never gives you the option to say nothing, like The Walking Dead or Tales from the Borderlands did. If you let decisions time out, Dispatch will choose one of its (usually binary) dialogue options for Robert to utter, and broadly, the game doesn’t do a great job of masking that it’s forcing you into something, no matter what you do or don’t pick.
For example, Dispatch has two competing romantic subplots going on. Robert can get with either his subordinate, Invisigal, or his boss, Blonde Blazer. I felt like both of those relationships weren’t right for Robert at this point in his life, so I tried to circumvent romance entirely. However, as the episodes went on, it was clear to me that Dispatch was going to force me into one romance or the other, so I went with the one that felt less objectionable and wooed my boss. That’s a microcosm of what it usually feels like to make choices in Dispatch. There are some meaningful ones, like a point at which you choose to fire one person on your team and replace them with a new recruit of your choice, but those are so few and far between that I sometimes wondered if there was any real reason for me to engage with them. Dispatch has a story it wants to tell, and the real, meaningful impact of your choices is only felt in a few key plot points.
By the time I finished the eighth and final episode, I was invested in some of the decisions I’d made and felt like they culminated in a drastically different fate for some of the members of Z-Team, but a lot of them ended up feeling like they were only on the team as props for a few of the others. I rarely felt like I could touch the world of Dispatch as a choice-based game, but I still cared about the outcomes, whether I was truly shaping them or not.
Dispatch was originally conceived as a TV show, so it makes some sense that the best parts of it are the ones that are tailor-made for that medium. Its animation pops, the performances range from alright to pretty damn good, and the actual workplace drama that acts as the foundation for all the management sim mechanics makes for a genuinely compelling adult animation story. You know, when it’s not aiming for the lowest hanging fruit (or testicles) for its jokes.
As for its most video-gamey aspect, its management sim segments start pretty rote but become more complex over time. As Robert, you assign different team members to odd jobs around the city in real-time, with each character having different stats, passive abilities, and synergies with other team members. Objectives can time out, people need breaks between jobs, and sending the wrong person can snowball into a larger problem for the team if you just throw people at work at random. The micromanaging nature of Dispatch’s assignment systems is the stuff of your least-favorite retail middle manager’s dreams, but hey, at least in this scenario, you’re actually dealing with life-or-death scenarios while watching your workers’ break time whittle down and not being a cog in the machine of a multi-billion-dollar retail chain.
-
Back-of-the-box quote:
“SDN: when you’re here, you’re family.”
-
Developer:
Adhoc Studio
-
Type of game:
Superhero management sim with narrative choices.
-
Liked:
Good characters, animation, and management elements; funny sometimes.
-
Disliked:
Aggressively unfunny at other times, choice impact varies, maybe could’ve just been a TV show.
-
Platforms:
PC, PS5 (played on)
-
Release date:
Weekly from October 22, 2025 to November 12, 2025.
-
Played
~8 hours
Dispatch gradually adds new systems to its calls, such as synergies between different heroes that make them ideal partners and implementing thresholds that can cause you to automatically fail jobs if you overtake certain stat levels, and sometimes it will intentionally overwhelm you with more work than you have people for, so you have to make hard calls as their timers tick down. In between sending people out to do the grunt work, Robert also puts his hacking skills to use for certain jobs, so you’re not just letting everyone else do the hard work while you point and sip your coffee. It’s a simple interface (which is sometimes a pain to navigate on a controller), but it gives you enough moving parts to juggle that some of the latter shifts are a genuinely stressful challenge.
Each mission you assign heroes to gives you a breakdown of the situation and a general vibe of what the work entails, and it will often be up to you to discern who you should send to do something based on a job description, rather than hard numbers or required stats. That’s what makes knowing your team so important. I wouldn’t send the rash Invisigal to do PR work when I could send the charismatic Prism, for instance. Dispatch usually doesn’t tell you who the right person for the job is, but by about the season’s midpoint, I was typically no longer consulting my character sheets because I knew the team’s strengths and weaknesses after working with them for several weeks.
I tend to really enjoy Dispatch in the moment when I’m playing it, but when I think about it in hindsight, I recognize that it’s really at its best when it drops the facade of trying to be an interactive narrative adventure and is just a TV show. When I actually received QTE prompts during its action sequences, it was often a genuine surprise; almost as if I’d been watching so much of it unfold without my input that it felt like someone tapping me on the shoulder after I’d zoned out. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Dispatch is worthy of deeper consideration about whether it’s “making the most of the medium” or if it treats the player as too superfluous at times. Dispatch was a fun time, but I don’t know if it’s a game worth standing on a soapbox about.
No disrespect to anyone who loved or loathed the game, but I’m surprised at the extreme, visceral responses of both love and hate Dispatch has received, not because I don’t think people are right to feel one way or another, but because it’s such a low-stakes, silly, and often jaunty little thing that I couldn’t imagine feeling that strongly about it. In the end, I had a fine time with Dispatch. I liked it when I was playing it, looked forward to its next episodes when I wasn’t, and most of my biggest complaints with it I express with a shrug. Sometimes your experience with something is not that serious, and it’s nice to be able to leave something behind knowing you’d pick it up again if another pair of episodes dropped next week. And if no future episodes come, that would be okay, too.
