Dispatch

Publisher: AdHoc Studio

Developer: AdHoc Studio

Platforms: Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)

If you're anything like me, superhero fatigue has been around since before the MCU's first phase ended. The complete lack of stakes, the quips, the serviceable mediocrity, the quips, the exhausting interconnectedness, the quips, the copycatting every other media property keeps trying to do, the quips, the list goes on. I seethe with rage every time yet another goddamn AAA developer puts Marvel quips in their games...which means that things aren't looking great for Metroid Prime 4, but I'll try to withhold judgement until I actually play the thing. 

Anyway, all of this is to say I've had a realization now that the credits have rolled on Dispatch, the subject of today's review: maybe superhero fatigue isn't actually what's going on. Maybe it's just Marvel fatigue, which seems to extend to other superhero things because they all try to emulate Marvel. 

God I hate Marvel, did I mention that?

There I go getting sidetracked again. What I'm trying to get at here is that Dispatch shows that superhero stories can still be excellent if they just eschew the usual Marvel trappings....well, if they mostly eschew them. 

Dispatch comes to us from AdHoc Studio: a development shop made up of veteran Telltale Games folks. Their goal, clearly, is to continue Telltale's proud tradition of creating superb narrative-based games...just without the whole "being a terrible company" part. So...have they thus far succeeded in this goal? Well, I don't know what goes on behind closed doors there, but in terms of making superb narrative-based games, absolutely yes!

The premise is this: in a comic book-style version of Los Angeles, there's a side to superhero work that I haven't seen considered in these types of stories before. With villains running around with reckless abandon all the time, things like property damage are pretty much a foregone conclusion. So...what's your average Joe blow to do? 

The answer is a subscription contract with the Superhero Dispatch Network, or SDN - a sort of 911-adjacent call routing center that sends heroes to situations they're best suited to handle. If that sounds like some kind of Outer Worlds-esque critique of capitalism...well, it isn't. There's the occasional caller who just needs their cat helped down from a tree or some rich subscriber who needs to get to their private aircraft to fly to Paris while the rest of the city is under attack..but these are the kinds of people you'd find clogging up the proverbial line in any kind of superhero story. And unless I happened to pick all the wrong dialogue options, I never saw any other references to this subscription model other than just the name. This isn't a complaint, mind you, I just find it a little odd. 

So if a critique of some kind was the goal here, it's a failure. But no points off for that because I legitimately can't tell.

You are Robert Robertson III, A.K.A. Mecha Man (voiced by Aaron Paul, who played Jesse in Breaking Bad). Mecha Man is a generational hero title passed down through the Robertson family, all of which are born without powers and use gigantic mech suits to fight crime. While in battle with the villain who killed his father, Robert's suit sustains irreparable damage, forcing him out of the hero life for good. 

However, just when Robert seems to be at his lowest, he's suddenly approached by a famous heroine with a proposition: join the SDN as a dispatcher in exchange for a new suit eventually. So, he naturally accepts the job, but quickly realizes there's a catch.

The catch in question? He's in charge of "The Z Team," a team of reformed villains just now trying to turn their lives around. This particular branch of the SDN is facing the possibility of closure unless their performance can turn around, so it's up to this once-revered superhero to step up for the city once again, but as a mentor this time. 

The team is as follows:

Sonar: a man-bat hybrid who went to Harvard, is a wannabe tech-bro, and is voiced by beloved Hunger Games actor Charles White.

Flambe: a charismatic afghan human torch-like.

Invisigal: exactly what that name sounds like

Punch-Up: a teeny-tiny guy with the strength of 10 men, played by Jacksepticeye.

Prism: a pop star with vague light-based powers

Karlach, I mean, Malevola: a demoness who can open portals

Golem: a homunculus with super-strength

Coupe: an assassin who flies with wings made of knives

There's much more to these characters than I've laid out in these little summaries (especially Invisigal...we get to see a lot more of her), but those are the high-level overviews of your teammates. What I find truly impressive about these wannabe heroes is the fact that there isn't a hatable character among them. They all have strong personalities and flaws, but over the course of the plot, they become progressively more endearing.

This is largely due to the game's mostly stellar writing. The tense moments are sufficiently tense, the emotional moment sufficiently emotional, and the humor sufficiently funny. I spent a great deal of time in the introduction railing against Marvel quips, so I think it should be obvious that this game doesn't feature them. But because everything needs a comparison to the MCU, I think Dispatch falls a lot closer to Thor: Ragnarok than anything else. This is a tremendously funny game at times. For instance:

Malevola: *to Robert after a scolding* yeah, shut up, dad!

*Robert leaves the room*

Prism: ...I never had a dad.

Or for another example:

*Prism uses a flashbang power during a bar fight*

Goon: *wailing like a banshee and holding his eyes* She temporarily blinded me!

Then there are some cruder, less funny moments that are still at least a little endearing...usually involving sex and the bits used in that. If not that, then references to pop culture or products ("I was hoping we were going to play Magic the Gathering tonight..."/"Top ten anime betrayals..."). These are usually saved from being cringe by nothing but delivery. Come to think of it, it's entirely possible that all the writing is cringe and saved by delivery...but I have no clue.

There are, however, some bits where the writing flies too close to the Marvel sun. It never quite gets there, but it gets way too close for comfort. Asking why a dead goon's weaner is out during the big climactic battle just isn't it, guys! All of these bits happen during the final episode, oddly enough. 

[NOTE: Now is probably a good time to mention that while this game is episodic like all of Telltale's projects, all the episodes were released in quick succession. So I'm reviewing a completed product]

That final episode, actually, is the only worm in this otherwise wormless apple. Not only does it feature the only truly out of place humor in the game, it also features the weakest writing. 

There's just too many turns one after the other, and it comes across as completely noncommittal and desperate to be an emotional climax. This character will be a double agent but not really but then they are again and then they were only being that because they were trying to help you, then one character's power will actually be something other than what was presented, and these are just two of the variables that get turned on their heads over and over again during this climax. It gets a little exhausting.

Despite all that, the final episode actually does some things better than any Telltale game. The big thing is the stakes. 

In a Telltale game, if you fail a quicktime event or something like that, you just get a game over screen and have to start from a checkpoint again. The same is probably true in Dispatch, but it doesn't feel that way. During the stress-filled final gameplay segment, I was convinced that if I didn't come out on top, I was going to get a bad ending. In hindsight, that's silly, because these kinds of games don't really do that...but the stakes felt high enough to put that bit of rationality out of my mind. So even at the game's weakest points, it still has dizzying-enough highs to make up for these weak points. 

On the subject of gameplay, there's a lot more than you'd find in this team's past projects. This is more of a management game than an old-school puzzle game. 

Essentially, each of your heroes has a set of stats: combat, vigor, mobility, charisma, and intellect. Each of those should be self-explanatory. 

Invisigal, being able to turn invisible, has high mobility. Golem, being a giant, well, golem, has high vigor. Punch-up, given his name, has high combat. It's all pretty intuitive, but each character has some points in stats other than their big ones as well. 

In every shift you work, calls will come in with parameters for success. These parameters will have certain words highlighted that serve as hints for what stats to prioritize for who you send to handle this task. But here's the thing: the highlighted words are never the whole story. They're simply guidelines that will give you a higher chance of success. More on this in a second.

Tasks will have one to four slots available, and your goal is to slot in heroes in as many slots as necessary to handle things. When you slot a hero in, their stats will show up on a pentagon as an area graph. Each corner of the pentagon is a stat, so if you send in a hero with high charisma, the graph will point further in the general direction of the charisma corner. If you add another hero, their stats will be added to the graph within the pentagon, making the covered area bigger and bigger. Hopefully that makes sense, and if not, the plan is to use a picture of these graphs for this section. 

Each task has a hidden area graph of its own. Since you can't see this, the highlighted words in the parameters give you a hint as to where a majority of the graph lies. If the parameters seem to suggest that high charisma is needed, then the implication is that the hidden graph points heavily in the direction of the charisma corner. So, sending in a high charisma hero can potentially cause a lot of overlap between the two graphs. 

That overlap is exactly what you want. This is because success or failure is determined by how much overlap exists. Once a job is done, a little ball will bounce around the area of the hidden graph, and in order to succeed in the job, the ball must land within the area in which the two graphs overlap. 

But as I said, the parameters only tell part of the story. If there are a lot of slots available for a job, for example, that might imply the area of the hidden graph is much bigger than just the directions the parameters suggest. So the most obvious path to success is to fill up the slots with as many heroes as possible to maximize your graph's size (if your graph envelopes the entire hidden one, that's clearly a 100% success chance). 

However, would this really be a game with stakes if that were always an option?

Heroes can't be reassigned once sent on a job, and each job takes a certain amount of time to complete. Once the job is done, the hero will take some time to return to base, and then they'll need a little bit of time to rest. What's more, once a call comes in, there's only a certain amount of time the caller can wait until the situation explodes (literally, in some cases). 

Now, you tell me: what happens if you send out all your heroes on two calls so you can have a 100% success rates on them and then three or four calls come in at the same time? You'll most likely fail all three or four of those calls because all your heroes will either be busy or resting. You don't know when calls are going to come in, so finding the right balance of chance and commitment is paramount to success over each episode's two-ish shifts.  

There is a way to somewhat mitigate these challenges: leveling up. With each job a hero is sent on, they gain experience. You already know how that kind of thing goes. When a hero levels up, you get to put a point into any of the available stats. So by the time things are starting to get more complicated, you may be able to cover more ground in your side of the success graph if you've invested stat points in a single hero wisely. 

Of course, all of this is ignoring certain wrenches that story events throw into the works...but those are better left experienced blind. 

One last bit of gameplay to discuss is the hacking minigame. Some have expressed frustration with this...but I don't agree. You basically just guide a rolling block of geometry across semi-linear pathways looking for nodes to do quicktime events on, with more and more obstacles being put in your way each time (such as timers or antivirus sentries that'll send you back to the start). These aren't going to set the world on fire or anything, but I found them inoffensive even at their hardest. Your mileage may vary on that, though. If you can't stand hacking minigames like this, there's no way in hell this one is going to change your mind, and they're crucial to succeeding in certain story jobs...I think. 

With basically nothing to say on the technical front, we've reached the conclusion! I find it hard to believe there's a person out there who hasn't yet heard of Dispatch. With a star-studded cast of both beloved actors and Youtubers, people are bound to stumble across this game by word of mouth alone. 

There is one thing that I imagine has kept folks from actually committing to purchasing this, though: the management gameplay. That's what kept me away for quite a while. I enjoyed The Alters, but micromanagey management simulations really aren't my jam. Still, I eventually got too curious about the great story people were talking about, so I gave in. And I'm here to tell you, dear reader, that if I didn't venture outside of my comfort zone for this, I would've missed one of this year's best stories. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since the credits rolled, and the temptation to go for a round 2 is creeping in more and more every day. 

So, if you're on the fence (oh...and if you aren't extremely averse to nudity and other sexual content), this is your call to action. 

Let us review:

Story/writing problems in final episode - 0.5

The final score for Dispatch is...

9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece

Excellently done, AdHoc Studio, excellently done!