It’s very rare for me to do a game review, in fact my last one was nearly 5 years ago, and I’ve only ever done 4 (3 of which were my reviews of Mass Effect, the other is Spider-Man: Miles Morales, if you’re wondering). It takes a special type of game to grab my attention, I generally play a lot of Football Manager or Fortnite really these days. When I started to see a lot of discussion on X about Dispatch, it eventually caught my attention, and then, when looking into it more, I knew it was going to be a game I’d enjoy and had to see for myself what the hype was about.
Dispatch is the first game from AdHoc Studios, a studio founded by veterans from the industry that worked for TellTale Games, Ubisoft and Night School Studio. The game follows Robert Robertson (voiced by Aaron Paul), a superhero who is forced to give his crime fighting days a break after a battle with Shroud (voiced by Matthew Mercer), the villain that killed his dad. Robert Robertson is recruited by Blonde Blazer (voiced by Erin Yvette) to work for the Superhero Dispatch Network, in which Robert would have the role of dispatching his team of villains turned heroes to fight crime across the city, while the evil Red Ring gang rise.
I’ve played several TellTale games throughout the years. The Walking Dead Collection is one of just 3 games that I’ve platinumed, and I’ve played an episode of their Game of Thrones and Batman games as well. The Walking Dead particularly shot the studio to the highest of heights, I remember people talking about it at school, which at the point it was only ever people talking about Fifa, Call of Duty or GTA. It particularly jumped out to me, as someone who has always gravitated towards story games over online multiplayer games. And the genius of what TellTale were capable of producing, were these fantastic story driven games, with not only fantastic writing and unique animation, it also made you as the player feel like you had an impact on the game and what was going to happen (we all know there wasn’t any huge impacts). I think where they started to stagnate was purely that they got too big, and started taking on more projects with bigger IP which ended up with the games being more rushed, and the impact that they were able to hit with The Walking Dead wasn’t there and interest faltered.
The beauty of Dispatch is that it certainly feels like we’re exactly back to what made this team good in the beginning. The writing and world building of the characters is fantastic, and the biggest strength of this game. The game quickly fleshes out the world in a seamless way without dragging you down in heaps of backstory and gets you into the action. Your team of misfits is pretty perfectly balanced in their skillsets and makes them fun. The writers manage to perfectly nail the tone a game like this needs, balancing the serious with lighthearted, laugh out loud moments.
Comparatively to The Walking Dead, you do a lot less exploring of the world, but I don’t mind that at all, particularly when it ultimately was clunky movement and difficult to navigate scenes. Between the dialogue scenes where from time to time you choose what you would like Robert to say and do, you also spend a decent chunk of each episode playing what is essentially a mini game, where you watch calls come into and dispatch members of your team to the scenario, having to be careful to pick the right person for the right job in order to improve your success rate. If the job is successful, that hero gets some extra XP which eventually lead to points where you can upgrade the team in certain areas. This part of the game I thought would get monotonous and be in the way of me getting to the story, but I actually really enjoyed it, and thought it was one of the biggest strengths of each episode. The team who create the scenarios for the game deserve a lot of credit, there’s a lot of fun ones there and they’re all different.
Overall, Dispatch is a huge hit, which is perhaps too late to make a play for the GOTY awards in a months time, but at the very least has won the hearts of players, and has people desperate to get a second season. The story wraps up in a way where they clearly didn’t know how it would do, so wrap up the story of this season, but leave enough there to go back to if the demand is there. It’s surely only a matter of time before it’s confirmed to return. Before then, I’ll go out of my way to finish the other TellTale games I never completed or didn’t play.
What did you think of Dispatch?
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