Dispatch review: gorgeous superhero story is slow to take flight

If you’re playing the episodic adventure game Dispatch with the nudity toggle on, there’s a flaccid yellow penis about 20 minutes into the first episode, attached to a supervillain who disrobes as part of their transformation sequence. In that moment, I was worried that Dispatch was going to be another piece of superhero media that revelled in being smug and grotty, one of those ‘not your traditional superhero stories’ that are so ubiquitous they no longer feel subversive.

In truth, there is a little bit of that vibe to Dispatch but it’s not as bad as I thought it might be. The first two episodes of Dispatch (out of an eventual eight) are slight but there’s scope for growth.

You play as Robert Robertson, who served until recently as Mecha Man, the world’s bulky equivalent of Iron Man. Robertson is the third generation of his family to pilot the suit but after a brutal battle with an old nemesis, he finds himself grounded, his suit destroyed and his finances ruined.

Thankfully, hero Blonde Blazer, a branch leader at the Superhero Dispatch Center, sees his potential. He’s offered a role as a hero dispatcher coordinating the infamous Z-Team, a superhero squad composed entirely of former villains who are looking to reform themselves. If he can succeed here, BB promises, the parent company will replace his mech suit, allowing him to take up the hero mantle again.

Interactive movie or game?

Dispatch is from AdHoc Studio, founded by former alum of Telltale Games. If you played Telltale’s greatest hits from back in the day, including The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, the central gameplay system of making dialogue choices and being told that the characters you’re speaking to ‘will remember that’ will feel very familiar.

Read: The Wolf Among Us 2’s status is a mystery, even to its writers

Those games sometimes felt closer to interactive movies than games and Dispatch blurs the distinction even further. You’re never actually in direct control of Robert during the game.

The advantage is that, because there’s no rendered world for you to move around in, Dispatch isn’t made up of cutscenes set into videogame environments. It’s just straight-up an animated series that you make choices in – and it looks fantastic.

The animation is wonderfully fluid. Compared to superhero shows like Invincible or Harley Quinn, its action sequences look far better. It’s clear the animation team was given the time, space and budget to really cook.

Dispatch chooses slower storytelling

With the storytelling, the early choices are bent more towards human drama than superheroics. By the end of the second episode, it doesn’t feel like any of the decisions you’ve made were necessarily super meaningful. When I replayed one scene and made different choices, there were a few lines of dialogue that changed but that was it.

Other decisions are framed quite explicitly. You’re given two choices about an action you can take, usually over a composed tableau that spells that choice out visually, but the game leans into a fairly contrived romance plot for these major choices early on.

One of the things I appreciated about the dialogue choices in the old Telltale Games is that silence was often an option. If you didn’t make a choice, your character would stay quiet. No such option exists in Dispatch and if you don’t make a dialogue choice within the allotted time, the game makes it for you. This is a shame. It makes your choices feel less important when you know that the game will simply continue on if you don’t make them.

In some instances, the differences between your choices also don’t feel that psychologically distinct. I found myself making choices more because I liked a turn of phrase, rather than because it was going to meaningfully shape my version of Robert.

The game is fairly system light. There’s an early action sequence with optional quick-time events and a basic hacking minigame that rears its head a few times, but by the end of the second episode it feels like we’re just moving out of tutorial mode.

Our hero Robert is played by Aaron Paul (Jessie from Breaking Bad) and his performance is a tad muted, but Paul is a talented voice actor.

The voice acting is generally good across the board. Jeffrey Wright is a standout as one of Robert’s office mates in his new job and it’s great to hear Australia’s own Alanah Pearce popping in as a hot devil lady.

The dialogue falls into that pattern of a lot of games these days, where there’s an attempt to find  naturalism by having characters stumble lines, trail off mid-sentence or mumble. It can be a little frustrating and speaks to a larger issue of identity.

The game’s Steam page calls Dispatch a workplace comedy, but the fundamental focus is on drama and conflict. There are amusing lines of dialogue, but it’s not a jokey game.

Dispatching the superheroes to fight crime

The second episode introduces the dispatch gameplay, which is, for now at least, quite straightforward. Robertson sits at a computer terminal looking at a map. As exclamation points pop up at different locations, you can click on them to see a crime in progress. Each crime comes with suggestions for how to handle it and it’s up to you to decide which available members of your team to dispatch.

Every hero has different stats, which can be levelled up as you successfully stop or solve different crimes, so some thought is needed to send the right members of your team to each job.

The tutorial of this dispatch system means there’s not a lot to these first episodes. While the embargo prevents going into detail about episodes three and four in any meaningful way, the dispatch gameplay does get more involved and satisfying.

So far, each episode takes an hour or less to wrap up. As much as I’ve missed episodic releases, it does feel like the game gets pulled away from you just as it’s about to properly start.

It’s difficult to judge a game like this based on how it opens, although The Walking Dead Season 1 managed to make a solid impression in its two episodes and went on to become one of my all-time favourite games. In this case, I have some concerns about whether Dispatch will let me have a meaningful impact over its story. There’s definite potential here but Dispatch gets off to a slow start.

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