Telltale Games burst into the public’s eye in 2012 with The Walking Dead as a point-and-click adventure game driven by a grim “choices matter” narrative. Wikipedia calls this genre “episodic graphic adventure” but I’m the one writing here so we’re sticking with “point-and-click”. After The Walking Dead‘s success Telltale immediately bit off far more than they could chew by getting as many licensing deals as they could get their hands on and just six years later had to be shut down. Telltale’s death effectively killed this style of game as well but the community interest lingered and now the former developers have returned in two separate companies: LCG Entertainment (dba Telltale Games) and AdHoc Studio. The “return” of the genre was the new Telltale’s launch title The Expanse: A Telltale Series, which was good in its own right but didn’t capture the hearts and minds the way AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch has. As such we’re going to dive into Dispatch and see if it really is worth all the hype.
As a reminder: a typical Telltale-style game post-The Walking Dead usually follows the same formula: you have an extended cutscene with dialogue choices, followed by a short section where you can walk around the environment and interact with objects or characters that are rooted in one spot (hence the point-and-click). Then there’s another extended cutscene with more dialogue choices and maybe a quicktime event, followed by an even shorter section of environment interaction, and this pattern repeats until you get to the end of the episode where there will be a seemingly polarizing choice that will in theory have BIG IMPLICATIONS for the rest of the game. Usually these choices include leaving one character to die over another, making out with one character over another, etc and while the choices rarely impact how the story actually ends it at least affects your own personal experience within the narrative as certain characters treat you differently or aren’t there at all.
The reason we all might need a reminder is that Dispatch is actually only 75% of the usual Telltale experience, as while the extended cutscenes with dialogue options and binary choices are front and center the actual GAME part of this video game is something else entirely. As the title implies, Dispatch is more along the lines of This Is The Police or 911 Operator in that it is a strategy and resource management game where you play as the “guy in the chair” for a team of super heroes that have to be deployed to various alerts throughout the city. The catch is that this is a team of former super villains trying to reform in the “Phoenix Program” and you’ve been brought in to either sink the whole program or help inspire them to be better than they are.
The way this actually plays out is you’ll be given a static map of the city with timed alert icons flashing over the area and little hints about what kind of strategy will be needed to tackle each problem. For example you might be asked to protect a VIP with the hints of needing a character that’s personable and is able to take a beating. Each member of your team has points in several kinds of attributes including charisma, speed, and toughness, so in the example here you’d take someone with a high charisma and toughness score. Then that score is checked against the difficulty of the mission to determine if you succeed or fail that particular task. Success or failure can lead to different types of missions throughout the rest of the day (failing to stop a fire initially leading to needing to rescue civilians trapped in it) but you want to succeed so your heroes earn more XP and aren’t injured on the job, which limits their stats for the rest of the day.
I haven’t played much in the way of “dispatcher” games but from my limited experience with This Is The Police I can say there are a number of things Dispatch does better. For one there is less RNG with how the day to day plays out, as this is a heavily scripted narrative game so you won’t have something like This Is The Police were RNG decides from one day to another which characters call in sick or decide to quit working for you entirely. Fun fact, I actually quit playing This Is The Police after reloading a day and seeing a completely different number of cops call in sick, as the randomization just soured me on the title indefinitely. For another the characters are all unique and interesting, with clearly defined stats and super powers that influence their ability to handle certain situations instead of just being generic people. What this means is that you can craft your “science hero” or your “jack of all trades” hero to be a go to response to threats, or utilize abilities that empower each other as heroes sent together on calls stack their stats. Characters can also gain synergy with each other which increases their stats and odds of success more, but the pairings don’t always make sense and each hero can only synergize with one other.
One point of frustration in the dispatch scenes comes from the back half where, like so many other games, they decide to add a curve ball that may undermine how you’ve been playing so far. Namely instant-fail states where if you send a character that’s too strong, too tough, or too charming the mission they’re on is guaranteed to fail. This becomes a problem if you try to make too many of your characters well-rounded, because then if you have a mission that you need two or more heroes to complete their total strength stat will probably push them all into instant fail territory. Which means you send one character and hope for the best or just give up on that call and let it expire. It’s a really questionable idea for design that punishes you if you don’t want a team that’s super niche, and I almost wish the game auto-leveled your heroes stats instead so that you weren’t punished just for trying to make a character a little tougher.
Outside of these dispatching gameplay moments, a few sporadic inconsistent quicktime events, and a hacking mini-game that isn’t worth mentioning, the entire rest of the game is just unskippable cutscenes with dialogue choices sprinkled throughout. The story follows Robert Robertson AKA Mecha Man who has no super powers but instead has a large robot suit that he uses to fight crime. After the suit is destroyed Robert is convinced to join the Superhero Dispatch Network or “SDN” (a heroes for hire subscription company) as a dispatcher to help train/mentor the struggling Phoenix Program of villains turned heroes. This story grabbed me immediately with its villains trying to be heroes angle because of my love of Marvel’s Thunderbolts comics, but in practice it’s more like a more family friendly Suicide Squad or Secret Six where the villains in question continue to do villainous things in cutscenes while saving people is a day job. That being said the story is very much NOT family friendly as it takes plenty of cues from other Critical Role projects where there is nudity and sex jokes every fifteen minutes, with an especially notable spike in episode 4 of the eight episode “season” when the game pushes you to chose a love interest.
Without going too much into spoilers I want to briefly talk about the story’s relative shortcomings. Overall it’s a fine experience that is well voice-acted and will maintain the illusion of “choices matter” long enough for you to reach the ending, which is all that you can expect from this genre. Former villain Invisigal is the main focus of the story, both as a potential love interest for Robert and a linchpin of the successes and failures of the Phoenix Program, and while she is amazingly voiced by Laura Bailey I can’t help but feel that it limits Dispatch‘s potential. You have a team of half a dozen other characters, at least two of which have huge personalities and definitely need help of their own, but the lens zooms in on Invisigal because this is an eight hour game and we’ve got to keep the plot moving. There are excuses for leaving the rest of the team behind, such as certain pep talks being overheard by the others and a few “team bonding” moments, but I would have appreciated more focus on the other characters with supporting Invisigal being just ONE of the things you get to do. More like an RPG or an ensemble cast than “these are the main characters and these are the secondary characters.” It doesn’t help that while you work in the SDN offices you’re surrounded by voiceless NPCs that you essentially never engage with and they move at a completely different frame rate than the main characters. At least have Robert say hi to someone he passes on the way into work or something.
The world of Dispatch also feels only partially well thought out, at least in terms of how the characters address existing within their own lore. SDN is specifically only heroes for hire meaning that you’re only dispatching to crimes that affect people who pay you, and nothing is ever said about the crimes without subscribers or the heroes who operate without SDN’s budget. We know these “freelance” super heroes exist because that’s Mecha Man’s whole motivation for working for SDN: resources to rebuild his suit that he didn’t have before, but we never hear about or run into them during the game. There’s no moral debates about “we should be helping people that don’t just have the resources to call us for help” which you would think the hero who used to just be helping people would say at some point during his early tenure. None of this is a deal breaker of course, and there’s nothing wrong with characters just existing in a world without expanding upon it. But I’m thinking of a character like Spider-man (independent hero with a chip on his shoulder but a heart of gold) being drafted into an environment like this and lasting more than five minutes without asking about the non-subscribers and I just don’t see it.
The end result is that Dispatch is a game that feels more disconnected from you than some other Telltale style titles but gets the core down with “good story with good characters,” and frankly that’s all you can really ask for in games you barely play. If you like super heroes, stories about accepting ones own value, and don’t mind buying something that is essentially an eight hour interactive movie with occasional mobile phone games sprinkled throughout then you’ll probably love Dispatch. The avalanche of cursing, sex jokes, and occasional nudity might be off-putting for some but there is a censorship option to remove the nudity and while the game’s QTEs can be turned off too there doesn’t appear to be a way to fail them so they’re more just there so you don’t fall asleep during action scenes. If you’re still sick of or never played well with the Telltale formula then there’s nothing here that’s going to change your mind, but if you’ve never played one before this is great introduction.
