Dispatch Review – The best-written game of the year

Telltale Games set a precedent with narrative-driven games like The Walking Dead, and the bulk of the team, now under the AdHoc Studio banner, proved that they’ve still got it with Dispatch, which has greatly evolved the formula.

All the recognizable traits of fantastic storytelling we experienced in The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead are still here, elevated through glorious animation and acting that is on par with the biggest Oscar-worthy Hollywood productions.

Everything is in its place, and even the gameplay bits have evolved into something much more fun than just quick-time events. But the story’s grandiose narrative, subplots, and character relationships deserved a lot more runtime, and this lack of track significantly impacts how it is perceived and paced, ultimately bogging down an otherwise phenomenal game.

Here is our full review.

Super heroes, ordinary people

Dispatch puts you in the shoes of Robert Robertson, also known as Mecha Man, following his fall from grace after an encounter with a supervillain called Shroud. The villain had been a long-time nemesis of his father, the previous Mecha Man, and the game immediately forms this strong connection between our protagonist and antagonist that permeates much of the story.

Robert is a broken, tortured, and conflicted man, trying to reconcile his own failing life with the great successes of his predecessors. During an opportune moment, he is picked up by Blonde Blazer, a Superwoman-like hero, who offers him a job at the SDN, where he’ll work as a dispatcher for villains-turned-heroes, aka the Z-Team (somewhat like a Suicide Squad).

He must navigate a wide array of personalities and characters, from barely reformed destructive forms of nature to those who are genuinely trying to grow and be better. The game unfolds as much as a TV show as a video game, meandering between gameplay snippets where you actually do take on the role of a dispatcher, quick-time events, and dialogue choices whose consequences can substantially alter the narrative.

Playing as a dispatcher is surprisingly satisfying. You have your team of heroes and send them on various assignments, judging from the descriptions of each mission as to who’d be best for the job. Jobs can be failed or successfully done, and are oftentimes small stories of their own that can have different outcomes depending on who you send in—and I’m not talking only about the win-lose outcomes.

The dialogue choices allow you to take full control of Robert and whip him into shape. He can either be a caring person, reserved, or outright authoritarian, caring little about the Z-Team’s feelings and seeing them as little more than small-time villains. He can fall in love with Blond Blazer or Invisigal, be indifferent to either, and so on.

Everything Robert does is your prerogative and will change the story for each player depending on what they decide. This opens the game up to a ton of replayability, as you can go back and make various different choices and be met with radically different outcomes every time, making this eight-hour story into a rich gameplay experience.

All the characters are fleshed out, well-written, and fun to be around, no matter how grumpy or evil or whatever else they may be. A lot of thought and heart went into the script, and I have seldom seen characters as realistic and grounded as the Z-Team and others in the story.

I’m not one to glaze superhero stories (not a fan at all, actually), but Dispatch truly does a great job at showing us who the people behind the masks and capes are. What’s more, every character feels distinct and separate, and all of them meld beautifully and share a ton of chemistry, which further elevates the already amazing vibes they give out individually.

However, even though Dispatch does a tremendous job at both offering fantastic gameplay, incredible writing, and a solid overall story, the game falls short when it comes to pacing and how much time is dedicated to each subplot, making a second season almost mandatory at this point.

Wasted potential (and time)

Almost everything in Dispatch is perfect. Hell, I would even love to see a standalone roguelike-esque game mode that lets me just play the dispatcher minigame. It’s so fun that I can’t even describe it, and the many quips the Z-Team drops, alongside fantastic interpersonal communication, just make the mode that much more fun to play.

But I feel like the game spent too much time on smaller, more intricate stories and almost completely ignored the overarching narrative about Robert’s quest to become Mecha Man again and, eventually, fight Shroud. The antagonist is almost absent from the story in the first six episodes, save for his brief appearance and somewhat omnipresent nature.

Time is allotted to fleshing out the characters and building up the Z-Team’s chemistry (as well as letting Robert decide who he’s falling in love with). And that’s fine and good. The writing is amazing enough to make every story bit interesting. But coming out of the blue with this apocalyptic Shroud-related event at the very end in the final two episodes did not sit well with me.

It felt sudden. Too sudden. Shroud is gone for six episodes, and WHAM! he’s now the main villain and problem. If every episode were as long and substantial as the eighth, this game would’ve been perfect. As things stand, the pacing is off, and there are two good hours of story missing from the story that would’ve allowed it to spend just enough time on everything it wanted to tell without compromising any part.

The episodes themselves are generally short. Too short. even. Some of them are downright fantastic, like the fifth and the eighth, but every time I was sinking into the game, the credits would roll.

I get it, this kind of game has short episodes, and it isn’t like older AdHoc games hadn’t had this “problem.” But in The Wolf Among Us, for example, I never felt I was being led into subplots that don’t connect directly to the broader narrative. Everything that happened was connected to the Big Bad (not the wolf), but in Dispatch, a lot of times we diverge and digress into these substories that don’t necessarily circle back into what’s going on with Shroud or the Mecha Man suit.

Unfortunately, these digressions take time away from the core story, and while they are good individually, they are detrimental overall.

Still, I have to argue that despite these time allotments and inefficiencies, Dispatch consistently remains top-level in its quality of writing and gameplay. Never did I feel like one part was better or worse than another. Sure, there’d be more or less tense moments, more and less emotional ones, too, but none were ever “worse,” in terms of the dialogue or the narrative choices.

They did, however, sometimes lead to outcomes you would not expect from the prompt given. You’d choose one thing, and Robert would say something completely different, which did cause me to reload the scene a couple of times. That’s a small gripe, though.

Overall, Dispatch is a great game. It has amazing characters, voice acting that is out of this world (not least because it has freaking Aaron Paul as Robert), and an animation and art style that is worthy of an Oscar nomination.

If this were a TV show, the whole world would be buzzing about it, and we in the gaming sphere are more than lucky to have this game on our hands, which will, hopefully, inspire both AdHoc and the revived Telltale to make more like it.