I got the chance to attend an early preview of Dispatch alongside many other gaming press members. During this time, we all got an extended look at the game and asked questions of some members from the development team at AdHoc Studio. During this time, it really was nailed home how much Dispatch and AdHoc as a whole have the mission of becoming a better Telltale Games. After getting a better look at Dispatch, it looks like they are off to a solid start.
A Guy Just Trying to Get Through the Day
In Dispatch, you play as Robert Robertson, voiced by Aaron Paul. This guy is a superhero himself, going by the name Mecha Man, but unfortunately, his mech was destroyed in battle, and to make ends meet, he takes a job at the Superhero Dispatch Network with the idea that the company will help repair his mech for doing the job. Robertson was described to us as essentially Tony Stark if he were not rich or smart. His mech was a hand-me-down from his father, so when it goes out of commission, he has no way of getting it to work on his own.
From the look we got, Robert is a purely miserable person. You can tell by the way he handles himself and responds to others that he has no interest in being here, which is why it is so great that instead of dispatching a group of heroes, Robert gets to deal with ex-villains, who, as a collective, are known as the Z-Team. This group is filled with a bunch of misfits, who, as you might imagine, are a bunch of jerks. Looking at them, I got some very heavy Suicide Squad vibes, which isn’t necessarily surprising. It was said that various inspirations for Dispatch included shows like The Bear, Invincible, The Boys, and more. Anything that “sidesteps the superhero genre.”
As you might expect, the story is built on the relationships you make with various characters, and the choices you make throughout will decide whether they like you more or not. In some ways, that is great and exactly what the group of people playing this kind of game will want. For a different perspective, it feels like Dispatch will end up doing the same thing as Telltale, that while your choices do have an impact on the story, it’s hard to see them actually having a large effect on where the story goes. In those older games, sure, elements of the story can change, but all roads always led to very similar outcomes in the end. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if we have that again here, even with AdHoc saying there are multiple endings to the game.
A Different Take on Superhero Games
When describing Dispatch, co-founder Nick Herman said that AdHoc makes its games differently than other developers, who would focus on coming up with a gameplay mechanic and building onto it from there. Instead, Dispatch has been fully built on the foundation of the story. After settling the story and characters, they tried to find the gameplay mechanics and features that would make sense in that context.
The Desk Job Life
With that structure, you can understand how we arrived at gameplay outside of conversations revolving around you sitting at a computer. When at work, you are managing the roster of the Z-Team and sending them out to emergency calls. You are constantly hearing what the Z-Team thinks during these sections as you decide who is best to send to what situation. For example, one situation was a kid who lost their balloon in a tree. The requirements to get the job done are for the sent person to get the balloon from a 40 ft height and not make the child cry. In cases like this, sending the demonic-looking Malevola probably isn’t the best choice.
Your team is filled with people who all have different skills, stats, strengths, and weaknesses. Invisagal is a loner and will arrive at missions faster and have them done quicker if she is sent alone. When a character finishes a job, the needed stats for the game will overlay their current loadout, and a bouncing ball will decide if they passed or failed.
Sometimes, when a situation is handled poorly, your team member will become injured and receive a penalty to their stats. If they get injured again, they will be out of commission for the rest of that day. It was nailed home that no matter what you do and how many times a character gets hurt, there will be no deaths in Dispatch. On the other side, your team members will have a sense of progression to them, as they will level up and you choose where their stat points go.
The Special Missions
Most of the time at the computer, you will only be watching your team run around the city and handling their missions. However, we did see a special mission that included Invisagirl, voiced by Laura Bailey, who asks Robert to look over the mission from the cameras. She arrives at a donut shop with the owner unconscious on the ground. To look over the area, you have to hack into the camera network by doing a hacking mini-game.
Looking into the hacking mini-game, this was something that didn’t look too fun to me. You control a rolling ball on a string of nodes, finding passwords and opening paths to the desired hack. It didn’t look bad, particularly, but it looks like it takes too long, and if these situations are as plentiful as I imagine they are, I can see myself getting really tired of doing them pretty fast. Things might change with time restraints and anti-viruses chasing the ball, but I was not too impressed watching this be played out.
When the action started going, you really start noticing the difference between AdHoc and Telltale. Because Robert is stuck behind a computer, you won’t perform the quick-time events that were so prevalent in games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and more. Instead, when Invisagal got in a fight, Robert was given a chance to suggest how she approach the fight, but in the end, she ended up ignoring his advice. That could change in the future after building relationships, but I have a hard time believing too much will be affected by the way you handle your conversations.
While the hacking mini-game and the impact of your suggestions seemed questionable to me, I will say that I found the fighting scene to be quite well done. Without the QTEs of the past, I felt the scene played out much better than I remember in the more high-stakes times in Telltale games.
Preview Final Thoughts
Overall, I came away quite impressed with my look at Dispatch. I like the story and characters for the most part, though I found Laura Bailey’s Invisagal to be a bit obnoxious in that special mission. There were a few moments that made me chuckle, so I’m hoping that things stay pretty entertaining throughout. The hacking mini-game didn’t look too interesting to me, but the overall management side of this game looks like something I want to dive into.
As someone who really enjoyed Telltale games when they were being released regularly, I’m very happy to see the people of AdHoc not continue making all of the same downfalls their former employers did. The episodic nature of Dispatch is a mistake in my eyes, and I don’t think I’m alone, but at the very least, you know you are getting the entire game within a month, not more than half a year, plus there is more built onto the experience here. Hopefully, AdHoc can prove me wrong in that sense, but otherwise, Dispatch looks like a quality game that I can’t wait to get my hands on.
