Dispatch Left Me Wanting More

I adored a lot of the original Telltale games, they were definitely of the era they were made in because of how frustratingly annoying they controlled and how they’re incredibly difficult to replay, but I still really enjoyed them. Add in the game that gave me a ton of amazing moments, Life is Strange, and you have multiple episodic games that I adored. But the experience of playing it with months in-between was exhausting and it was always best to play it all at once after the final episode. A feat I didn’t manage to do for the ones I liked.

Then, back in October, came Dispatch, a game about Robert Robertson who has to work as a superhero dispatcher with a colorful cast of characters doing super hero things. It’s an episodic game that strives to fix the problems with the old episodic format, while keeping the best part of experiencing the game slowly as a community, by having the episodes come out in 2 episode batches weekly for 3 weeks post release. This worked well, from what I read, but because of my past experience with the episodic format I decided to view this from afar (I like to binge games not play them piecemeal like when I was in my teens and early 20s).

Still though, I bought it post finale and after finishing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 (review here) decided to dive in unsure of what to expect. I found a game that made me feel confused about how I felt about it. A game that simultaneously had me wanting to know more about the story and also had me yearning that it was similar to another game I adored. A game that had me frustrated with a core aspect of the gameplay while also had me still enjoy that core aspect of the gameplay. A game that had characters that I truly loved to see develop and had romances that were difficult to really start. I just feel all around confused by the game. I don’t know what to think. So let’s just dive right into my thoughts.

The Premise

Dispatch is the first game from AdHoc Studio (a place started by former Telltale devs and among them is the original writer for the Wolf Among Us who wrote this game) where you play Robert Robertson, a sort of superhero who has been forced, by circumstances beyond his control, to sit out of the hero game for a time. Instead he gets a job at the SDC, a company or something that dispatches Heroes around the city of LA in order to address problems from their subscribers who pay monthly for their help. Essentially like a security system for your home or business or self... or the city in general. There he meets a whole cast of characters as he takes charge of Dispatching the Z Team, a team of reformed Super Villains who are there to try and become...well...heroes. Will they succeed? Will Robert find awkward love with his boss or with his subordinate? Will he find a way to be a hero again? And of course, will he ever get furniture in his apartment because it looks like a serial killers place?

The Good

Let’s get this out of the way right at the top. I adore a good story about underdogs and morally not the best characters. Dispatch fit right into what I wanted when it came to providing characters that were both assholes and genuine people. Characters that I enjoyed listening to and that I thought did shitty things. It was so well written that I loved to see the different members of Z-Team fight and loved to see them come back together. The characters of Dispatch are just top notch. The story is also pretty good, but it’s really just fueled by them.

I really enjoyed the strategy of which hero to send on which mission, of strategically waiting to select a mission until the heroes are rested and available meaning I often picked a mission in the last second it was available, of upgrading the heroes so you could place them together with certain heroes to either help that hero or do that mission especially well. For instance, I got Bruno, the Golem character, an upgrade that allowed him to duplicate and fill all the other hero slots in a mission. So I could send him on a four person mission alone and he’d often succeed because it was basically 4 of him. It was great and the upgrades for the characters were all similar where they all played together really well and allow you, the player, to be even more strategic with how you go about dispatching. It was great fun even if I had a frustration that I will go over in the next section.

There’s one particular thing that I really appreciated what Dispatch did that enhanced the experience for the episodic nature of the game. It often hid when you were making big choices that would decide the future of the characters and the path things would go down. For instance, there’s a character that thinks they would be better as a villain, that that is what they were made for. Over the course of the game the decisions you make when talking to them decide what kind of direction they go in their life. It’s really interesting. Especially when you compare it with other games of similar type like prior Telltale games, or the Life is Strange games, or even Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical, that all kinda prompt you or make it obvious when you’re making a big decision. Some much more than others. Dispatch hides that shit away so you don’t know what you’re gonna do that changes thing and it makes the whole experience a lot more of an unknown and I appreciated that. This can backfire for some replaying if you make a few different decisions but still somehow end up with a rather similar experience, but overall it’s still really well done.

The game really nailed the episode format. There’s another game that I played earlier this year that has an episode format that just put them all out at once, Life is Strange Double Exposure (review here). That had me at the edge of my seat for the first two and a half episodes but very quickly afterwards started to fall apart. Meanwhile, Dispatch feels like a slow burn where it just got better the further into the story I got. The first two episodes were...fine. But once I got to half way through episode 3, and then to episode 4? That really nailed what an episodic game’s structure should strive for, at least when it comes to story development. And best of all because of the relative shortness of the episodes, only about an hour, I didn’t have the experience so many other games have where it “gets good about 10 or 15 hours in”. It took 3 and a half hours for me to be hooked and while that is longer than id like, it’s also similar to a lot of shows in recent memory and since this game is mimicking a show I think it makes sense to compare it that way.

The Bad

I often found myself frustrated with how the game was designed. I wanted to explore the building, to talk to the other characters for more info. I wanted to have genuine moments where I felt like I was directing the game instead of just playing along. I was constantly reminded of the game that I adored when I played it a year ago and have also already brought up, Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (review here). In that I’m able to ask more questions of the characters, get to know them outside of the main point of talking to them. You’re able to decide different areas you go to when you end up at a new location or go between people to talk to. Like when you end up at a nightclub and can go back and forth from character to character to get more and more information. This is something fundamental that I thought Dispatch was sorely missing. Stray Gods didn’t allow you to walk around the space so Dispatch wouldn’t have to either.

I also think the romance was written much better in Stray Gods. Or, rather, the romance I was able to see in Dispatch. There’s a lot of reasons why but, particularly, because it was obvious what you were gonna say was expressing interest. In Dispatch, I ended up not romancing anyone because of two reasons, the above reason I gave where I couldn’t tell which options expressed interest most of the time, and because it was just so... awkward. The idea of this guy coming into this workplace and very quickly romancing his coworkers, including one that he literally has power over for whether he will cut her from the team and the other being essentially his boss, is just uncomfortable and weird. There was also only a couple of opportunities outside of the office to express the interest that you can express. I did end up having Robert go on a date with Invisigal at the movies because it was obvious and made some sense. The problem was that was the only real time that kind of thing showed up. It was bothersome that it both didn’t happen more and that that still didn’t solve my key issue that it was still awkward having this kind of relationship with your, essentially, subordinates. We also recently found out that there were multiple cut romance scenes in the game because when you’re an indie studio you often have to kill your darlings.

In Mass Effect your companions could technically be called subordinates but often they weren’t replaceable and had fully decided to be there and you needed them there too so you wouldn’t be kicking them out. You just didn’t have much power over them (I think the Virmire survivor is the most subordinate-like character in the entire trilogy that you can romance). More so, you had moments of talking to them and expressing interest in them as people, getting to know them, before you could romance them. While here in Dispatch you only had a couple of those moments and many felt awkward or like you were forcing yourself in places you didn’t belong. I think if you were able to talk to the individual people outside of the main storyline then it would have made more sense even if it might have interrupted the flow.

Both of the above issues likely just go back to the game being in the episode format and feeling more like a TV show as opposed to a full game or even at all close to a Telltale game. Which is where a lot of the developers came from. I just didn’t like the lack of control in these episodes. Expand them out a bit allowing us to have some amount of control over talking to some people and learning about different areas of the world and it’d be great. It’s definitely got many better aspects than the Telltale games of old, while introducing these new issues as well. Just. Frustrating.

Speaking of frustration. While some of the gameplay is enjoyable, I think I was constantly frustrated with how random some of the final outcomes can be for the missions. There were several times when the little bouncing ball thing would all of a sudden slow momentum for no reason causing me to fail the mission. It’s not that failure is a problem, just that I hated how it seemed like it wasn’t really random and the ball bouncing around was all for show. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the ball was more consistent and not doing the “let’s randomly slow down despite the fact that the previous momentum that I had would end me in the success area. Because that makes sense I guess”. It just needed better and more predictable momentum during the pathing.

The Ending - Detailed

Okay, obviously with this kind of game the ending will often be slightly different for everyone so this is my version of it and things will likely be different for you if you play it. With that covered, here’s my ending.

**Start Spoilers**

Welp, Shroud is attacking the city and eventually, after a ton of Dispatching, gets to the SDC branch everyone works at. Once there, a massive fight commences with all of the characters you know and love. You discover Royd and Invisigal fighting because she was looking at the Mecha-Man suit and while he goes off to defend the SDC I chose to trust Invisigal. This allowed me to become Mecha-Man again and wreck some shit around the branch. It was great fun and lead to some truly amazing visuals.

After a ton of kicking ass, Chase comes back from the Dead using Blonde Blazers power jewel (because apparently she wasn’t born with powers either and gets them from her jewel and, at the last moment, manages to down Shroud. Unfortunately, you start to celebrate too early until we discover the unthinkable has happened, Shroud has taken Beef Hostage, either give him the Astro Pulse or Beef, and the rest of the team who is surrounded by Shroud goons, will die. So you fly up and while up there and talking with Shroud he reveals that Invisigal is on his side, that she’s been a plant from the beginning. She then is “embarrassed” and goes invisible (maybe to climb up to the roof where you and Shroud are). You’re then given the option of giving him the prototype Astro Pulse that we know is fucked up because of an early episode, or the real one. Or both of them. I chose both.

Seeing Shroud say “What the fuck is this shit” (essentially) was fucking perfect. The asshole who had believed he could predict everything couldn’t predict Robert doing that. It was great. He then has to pick which to use. He picks and it was wrong causing him, and all of his buddies, to start vomiting. He gets pissed and shoots at Robert only for the bullet to hit invisible Invisigal, who has been convinced that she is capable of heroism by the conversations you had with her over the course of the game, in the shoulder, but doesn’t hurt Robert since it had slowed due to her body being in the way. You then get to run at him and start punching only to choose whether or not you decide he’s has enough or if you should kill him. I killed the fucker (don’t mess with the Beef).

Invisgal is alive and not a traitor and by saving Robert she kinda saved the day, Chase is alive, Z Team are literal heroes that saved the city, and you were the one that helped them do it. You also get given the option to forgive the hero you cut at the start who went over to work with Shroud, in my case Sentry, which I did because he didn’t deserve to be cut anyway. Then you celebrate with Chase flying you around and dropping you into the group so they can throw you up and catch you repeatedly while a picture is taken with everyone (including Chase, Royd, and Blonde Blazer not just Z team) in it. Including Invisigal who is injured and threw herself into the photos as she made herself visible despite the fact that she really should be in the Hospital by now. Freeze frame and Credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I honestly adored the ending. I don’t think there was a single thing I had significant issues with, besides the romance stuff I’ve talked about already. Having the twists, the tension, the sacrifices, the “what the fuck” moments. It was great and really stuck the landing, a tough feat in an episodic game.

The Conclusion

I am just so unsure of what to think of Dispatch. While I definitely enjoyed my time with it and know it’s a very good game, the flaws bothered me and just made me think of playing a different game. It’s hard to score something when I’m constantly comparing it to a similar type of game (minus the episodic nature of Dispatch). Finding out that there were removed Romance scenes helps somewhat but that doesn’t change the general vibe. I think scoring it based on my experience with it outside of thinking about a different game because I feel like that’s probably an unfair comparison since there are definitely distinct differences between the two and they are from two rather distinct developers with different former attachments (Stray Gods with Bioware and Dispatch with Telltale).

Overall, Dispatch is a really good game with mostly great writing, but the romances feel underbaked and uncomfortable so I wouldn’t go into the game with that as a focus in your mind. If you want a great superhero comedy/drama with Telltale like choices, some interesting gameplay, very well acted and humanized characters, then Dispatch is the game for you. Just also check out Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (Steam page) afterwards cause that one deserves a playthrough as well.

Meow,

Cat