Dispatch (PC)

During the 2000s and especially the 2010s, Telltale games made a name for themselves with classic point-and-click adventure games, as well as choice-driven narratives. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t last forever and eventually went bankrupt in 2018. Although the studio would come back soon after, some of their former talent rose from the ashes and formed their own studios, one of which was the LA-based AdHoc Studio, specifically formed with those who had worked on Telltale’s The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. Early on, AdHoc were hired to work on a live-action superhero workplace comedy, which got scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They didn’t want their work to go to waste, however, so they repurposed the idea into the choice-based narrative game known as Dispatch.

When I had first heard of the game at the 2024 Game Awards, the concept grabbed my attention enough that I played the demo when it released in early 2025. I loved it enough that I bought the game Day 1 on Steam, but couldn’t get around to it immediately thanks to my focus on Silent Hill f, so I didn’t get to really experience the episodic release schedule, two episodes a week for four weeks, in real time. When I did get to Dispatch, however, I thought that AdHoc had made a very strong first impression, one that can only improve from here.

In modern day Los Angeles, Robert Robertson aka Mecha Man is searching for Shroud, the supervillain who had killed his father, the previous Mecha Man. When Robert finds Shroud, the ensuing battle leaves his mech-suit destroyed and his future as a superhero uncertain. Following a press conference, he’s approached by the hero Blonde Blazer, who offers him a job as a superhero dispatcher at the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN) Torrance branch in exchange for getting his mech suit repaired. Due to his debt from maintaining his Mecha Man persona, Robert takes the job, but learns that there’s a catch: his job as a dispatcher also involves rehabilitating ex-supervillains.

Robert Robertson begins his life as a dispatcher.

As I mentioned, Dispatch is divided into eight episodes, originally released over a four-week period. All eight episodes feature the choice-based narrative system popularized by the old Telltale, with the possibility for your choices to affect the outcome of the story. Since Dispatch features one continuous storyline rather than a collection of episodic adventures, however, I’ll go over the entire story as a whole, starting with how it improves over the style set by the old Telltale. The release schedule is an immediate improvement, as the old Telltale style could easily leave people hanging for at least a month between installments (a pain I knew all too well from the Back to the Future game). I also found my choices in Dispatch far more impactful, as instead of presenting the illusion of choice, my actions actually felt like they affected Robert’s relationship with the other characters, including the Z-Team, as they also had an impact on the gameplay and even the ending. While certain events are destined to occur no matter what you do, it didn’t happen often enough that my choices felt meaningless. In fact, they made me wonder what would have happened if I had made a different choice in certain situations, as the consequences can hit hard several chapters later. I also appreciated that it let me play Robert as a true hero willing to help others and hold himself back from killing people (when any sort of morality system is in place, even an invisible one, I tend to play as a pacifist or seek the “best” outcome). You can even gain insight into your decisions by viewing your choice data weighed against other players at the end of each chapter.

It helps that the writing is very solid, with a fair amount of natural dialogue. The dysfunctional dynamic between Robert and the Z-Team, both in and out of the dispatching segments, led to a good amount of banter that had me laughing out loud several times. Although Dispatch is primarily a workplace comedy, the serious moments still hit hard, with enough twists that kept me invested, either out of interest or worry with what would happen next. At times, I even had to pause the game to think about some heavy decisions that I knew would come back later. I had already liked Sonar and Track Star based on the demo, but I grew to like the rest of the cast by the end as I watched them grow closer together as both a team and a sort of found family. Robert’s exact characterization depends on the choices you make, but I still felt attached to him and wanted to see him come back as Mecha Man and defeat Shroud.

One of many choices presented to Robert.

As much as I loved the story, setting and characters, however, I did feel its short length. You can beat the whole thing once in under ten hours, averaging about an hour or so per Episode. This does mean that it doesn’t overstay its welcome and that replays won’t take as long as they would with a longer story, but it’s clear that the breezy pace came with some hard decisions from the developers. These decisions meant that certain characters had more emphasis than others, including Invisigal from the Z-Team, which left most of the ensemble cast less developed and me wishing I could spend more time with them. Certain big decisions and moments, including some endgame twists, also felt rushed and could be mitigated with some tweaks to the pacing. You could argue that the developers could have taken potential alternate actions into account, though I’m aware that the reality of game development would mean that they couldn’t branch off into infinity and we wouldn’t be able to play the game within our lifetime, so I understand that they had to force players down certain roads at different points. Despite that, I at least appreciated that the game has great replay value, both in its story and gameplay.

During the narrative portion of the game, gameplay is rather simple, mixing cutscenes with quick-time events or timed dialogue choices. You can turn off the QTEs in the Settings menu, which I did through the Cinematic option, though you can sometimes tell when the cutscenes skipped them thanks to some telltale slow-mo. The real meat of the gameplay, however, comes from the Dispatching segments during Robert’s shift.

Dispatching plays out like a real-time management game, where Robert must answer timed emergency calls from around Torrance, CA by dispatching the right hero(es) from among a team of eight. Each hero has their own strengths and weaknesses, illustrated with a stat chart that’s always visible, as well as their own unique powers and gameplay mechanics that can influence how the call plays out. Emergency calls have different levels of intensity, represented with one to four available Hero slots (you may not need to fill every slot for a successful call). It’s up to you to choose the right Hero(es) based on the call’s description and placing Heroes in certain slots can have an impact on the call. If you’re unsure about which Hero to send out, you can view their profile at any time.

Make sure you choose the right Hero for the call.

Once the assigned Heroes reach their destination, they’ll take a certain amount of time to complete the call. However, they may face disruptions, which require Robert’s intervention. This most often means making a decision on how to proceed when they hit a snag. Each decision’s success is tied to a skill check, where your dispatched team’s combined stats are compared against the decision’s required stat. If you managed to send the right Hero or Heroes for the call, you may see new options where the related Hero can skip the skill check and automatically resolve the decision successfully. No matter how the decision plays out, the Heroes will instantly finish the call.

The other form of disruption is a hacking minigame, which may also show up as its own separate call or as part of the narrative segments. Only Robert can resolve these and they may be timed. Either way, hacking involves moving between nodes and entering the right button combinations or matching frequencies. Sometimes, button combinations are hidden behind key nodes, which the player must memorize to advance past a lock node. Later, Robert may also encounter Antibodies that remove one of his limited chances at a successful hack, as well as puzzles that involve moving electrical charges between nodes. Electrical charges can either open up certain pathways or destroy Antibodies.

Hacking may require looking around for solutions.

Once a dispatched team finishes a call, Robert must check on how they did before he can dispatch them again. This triggers a skill check, where a chart of the team’s combined stats is overlayed over a chart of the call’s required stats. If the charts don’t completely overlap, then the game calculates the odds of a successful call and a ball bounces within the overlap. Greater overlap doesn’t mean an automatic success, however, as it’s still possible to lose even with higher stats, but you can still potentially win even if you have a low percentage. Failure will injure each Hero involved in the call and reduce their stats by one while success can improve synergy between certain Heroes (e.g. Sonar and Malevola), making success more likely if they’re paired together in future calls.

Upon returning from a call, Heroes have a cooldown before Robert can dispatch them again. A successful call will also earn each Hero involved EXP, which can unlock Skill Points for upgrading their individual stats over time. If they came back injured, they won’t earn EXP and can only fail one more time before they are Downed, meaning Robert can’t dispatch them for the rest of the shift.

When Robert’s shift ends, he’ll undergo a performance review and earn EXP of his own based on the success rate of the calls he took. Earning enough EXP will increase his rank as a dispatcher and grant unique rewards, including a random Skill Point that he can assign to any Hero.

Performing well can reward Robert well.

Although the dispatching doesn’t have as much strategic depth as other real-time games can, I still found it addicting, as I viewed it more like a puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving around. Each time I figured out the right Hero for each call or managed to get a win with the odds against me, I felt a satisfying dopamine hit that kept me going. During shifts where things just weren’t working out well, I did my best to salvage it and managed to turn out okay. What helped me was leaning into each Hero’s strongest stats, with some evening out, and taking advantage of learning opportunities for new powers whenever I could. I liked how certain story events actually influenced the dispatching at times, which created scenarios where Heroes wouldn’t cooperate or even sabotage each other. While these new challenges did create some level of frustration, it felt nice when I successfully worked around them.

As much as I enjoyed Dispatching and wanted even more of it, I did have some notes on how a potential second season could improve on it. Sometimes, the description of the call or a choice doesn’t always accurately reflect what you think the relevant stat would be, which can make calls end with unexpected losses. They wouldn’t need to necessarily tell you the correct stat right away, but at least tweak the wording a little. During Episode 5, the game also introduces a new mechanic where reaching a certain point on the stat chart while selecting Heroes can either provide double EXP or automatically fail the call. I didn’t mind this mechanic on paper, but introducing an automatic failure mechanic that late into the game feels unnecessarily punishing, as many players would have dumped a lot of points into certain stats and can hit that part of the stat chart a little too easily. This does force a bit more creativity with Hero selection, but would be better introduced early so that players can think ahead with Stat Point distribution.

What helps make up for some of the game’s issues is the incredible talent on display in both the visuals and sound. Dispatch has a very attractive art style that does a good job at capturing the look and feel of Los Angeles while contrasting flashy superheroes with old school tech in a grounded setting. You can tell that a lot of work went into not only crafting a unique and consistent style, but also making sure that the narrative segments looked great in motion. Fight scenes are also very clean in that you can easily tell what’s going on even when large groups are present. The characters really come to life both through the natural dialogue and the talent behind them. Though all the voice actors did a great job, Aaron Paul worked well as the voice of Robert Robertson, Charles White aka MoistCr1TiKaL was actually cast well as Sonar and Harvey aka Thot Squad delivers Prism’s lines with a good level of sass and comedic timing. Similarly, Dispatch has a great score, but one of the most memorable tracks, “Shift”, is perfect for the dispatching segments.

If you buy the Digital Deluxe upgrade, you also gain access to a digital artbook and four exclusive comics; each chapter in the artbook and each comic unlocks on completing two Episodes of the main game. I personally found this upgrade worth the additional $10, as I like seeing behind-the-scenes insights and the comics themselves either flesh out more the relationships of the characters or show events that are only mentioned in the main game, though they are not required to understand what’s going on. If I had any real nitpicks it would be that the covers for the comics don’t necessarily match the interior art and, as of this writing, AdHoc doesn’t sell physical copies of the comics in their store, a move I would have considered a slam dunk for a superhero property (even a trade would suffice).

For their first game, AdHoc really knocked it out of the park with Dispatch. I’m eager to see what they come up with next and wouldn’t mind a second Season of this incredible world, though I would hope that they take the right lessons from this Season.