Dispatch—the first game from AdHoc Studio, which was formed by veterans of Telltale Games— contains a lot of “almosts.” It’s almost a revival of the choice-driven Telltale adventure game we’ve been missing for nearly a decade, but without all the walking around and examining the environment while the game was barely holding itself together. It’s almost a superhero story, but it’s mostly a workplace management sim with superheroes in it. It’s almost as irreverent as Deadpool, but stops short of its fourth-wall-breaking crudeness. I’m still figuring out how I feel about all of those things rolled together in one package, but I can’t deny I felt a coziness typically reserved for pastel farming sims as I slipped back into the better parts of the Telltale house style.
Robert Robertson III isn’t a superhero, but he was a mech-piloting hero who once steered a suit that his father and his father’s father passed down to him. Mecha Man, as the family’s shared heroic identity was known, has become a symbol in a superpowered world where everyone believes they can save the day. So when Robert, voiced by Aaron Paul, is defeated and de-meched by a villain named Shroud, it seems like his heroing days are over. That is, until he is approached by the Superhero Dispatch Network, an organization that assigns heroes to odd jobs based on their various powers and expertise. If Robert can’t be out in the field yet, maybe he can put all those years of hero work to use by guiding others.
In just its first two episodes, Dispatch has all the makings of an old Telltale classic. While the drama of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us made the now-defunct studio a household name, my favorite game by the studio has always been Tales from the Borderlands, which manages to elevate the often tiresome source material into a rollicking action comedy with wit and incredible timing. Dispatch feels most reminiscent of that as a slapstick, raunchy workplace comedy where Robert’s co-workers are a gang of superpowered misfits.
I still haven’t gotten much time with Robert’s team, but I’ve seen enough to know they’re different from other groups at SDN. These guys are a bunch of ex-villains, some of whom Robert slapped around in a mech a time or two. As such, his identity is kept under lock and key from most people in the company, so as far as this team is concerned, he’s just another in a long line of paper pushers SDN has brought in to try and wrangle them into a proper superhero team. Dispatch will live or die based on whether or not it can pull off the interpersonal relationships between Robert and his crew, and the brief flashes in these first two episodes show potential.
Invisigal, formerly known as Invisibitch and played by Critical Role star Laura Bailey, gets the most screen time. Her powers of invisibility allow her to shroud herself in mystery to her foes, like she also does to her friends, and she is pretty much actively rebelling against the entire rehabilitation program, despite turning herself in prior to Robert’s arrival. There will no doubt be a lot to unpack with her as the game goes on, but a lot of the other wannabe heroes are enigmas to me right now. I’ve mostly had to intuit who they are through their stats on a spreadsheet, but thankfully, it sounds like that will change in the next two episodes launching later this week.
Dispatch is pretty neatly divided into two halves. One is the “Telltale game” half, playing out as a less interactive version of the choice-driven dialogue and QTEs that defined the studio’s previous work, though here you don’t walk around or interact with the environment at all. The dialogue choices you get will change the cadence of conversations and people “will remember” what you say and do, but overall it’s a much less involved experience. The best parts of Dispatch are in the dialogue and the eye-catching comic book-style animation, but so far, the actual experience of playing it feels a little thin.
This is especially noticeable because of Dispatch’s episodic format. Unlike Telltale’s games or the older Life Is Strange releases, which had episodes come out over the course of several months, Dispatch’s eight episodes are rolling out weekly, two at a time, between now and November 12. Two episodes are coming out each Wednesday for the next few weeks, and these first two episodes are bite-sized. Dispatch was originally going to be a live-action television show, and that feels about right given its brief, TV-episode-length run times. I enjoyed my time with both episodes, but I was also caught off guard when they abruptly ended and the credits started rolling. When Telltale or Don’t Nod did the episodic format a decade ago, it was because it was developing episodes and putting the tracks down in real-time. Dispatch seems to be mostly done, its episodes just haven’t unlocked yet. Ultimately, when all the episodes are out, will its episodic format really matter? Or is cutting a game into eight pieces mostly just a nod to AdHoc’s lineage? We’ll know for sure in a few weeks, I suppose.
But what about the other half of the game, the actual dispatching? What Dispatch lacks in more direct control, it makes up for with its pretty entertaining management sim. I was given brief dossiers on my crew and told to send them around town doing heroic things despite their non-heroic attitudes and histories. Surprisingly enough, the big stuff is pretty easy. Baddies are attacking people? Send in Golem, a giant, hulking mud and gunk guy who specializes in defense. Someone needs to reach an objective unnoticed? Probably easiest to send Invisigal because she barely even needs to hide behind cover to get somewhere. It was the smaller jobs that turned out to be more tricky. I thought Invisigal would be able to get a lost balloon out of a tree, but alas, she couldn’t manage it. There was also a point when SDN needed someone to go do some PR, and they decided someone from my group of ex-delinquents would be right for the job. So I had to think a little more creatively about who to send out. There were some obvious non-starters, but Prism is a socialite who dresses like a pop star. She’s probably the one who can sweet-talk the public on a radio show, right?
Getting to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses is one thing, but Dispatch’s management segments also require you to juggle the crew’s division of labor, breaks, and travel time all at once like any other shift manager. Sometimes a task needs completion but the right person is resting from their last job, so you have to let it sit there and hope they’ve recuperated before the job times out. Other times you just have to send whoever’s on hand and hope for the best. Some jobs are handled by multiple characters, each of whom can handle certain requirements, but even then, you might get pinged to make a call or hack into a system to help them progress. It’s not all chance, and even someone perfectly suited for a given job isn’t guaranteed success. I’ve been trying to accommodate for some characters’ weaknesses by leveling up different stats like intellect or charisma, so hopefully everyone’s pretty well-rounded and reliable by the game’s end.
Dispatch is doing a lot of things right despite some of my reservations, but regardless of how I feel by the end of episode eight, I’m glad that the Telltale vets at AdHoc are getting to make a game like this again. Despite some bangers like Lost Records: Bloom & Rage earlier this year, the episodic narrative adventure genre has largely fallen out of fashion in the years since Telltale fell apart. It’s nice to think these types of games could get a second chance at life, and if Dispatch helps get us back to that, I’ll just be happy it exists at all.
