Robert Robertson III is the third person in his family to take on the persona of "Mecha Man," using a powerful mech suit to fight crime. During one particularly tricky battle, he suffers a crippling defeat to the evil Shroud. His suit is put out of commission, and he is instead recruited to work for the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN) as a dispatcher, using his knowledge of superhero tactics to help the dysfunctional guys and gals of Z-Team work better together. But Robert is also working hard to repair his mech suit and bring Shroud to justice, once and for all.
Twenty-two years ago, veterans of the LucasArts adventure game team regrouped to found Telltale Games, a company dedicated to furthering the adventure game genre, a genre rooted in good writing and storytelling. Thanks to the massive success of their 2012 Walking Dead game, Telltale went on to enjoy a prolonged period of success. Unfortunately, the company ended up over-exploiting their style of gameplay with increasingly limited innovation, and the company almost completely fell apart as disillusioned developers left. One such group of devs founded AdHoc Studio to carry on the Telltale style of gameplay, but also being bolder in how they would approach the genre.
Their first game, Dispatch, has been a deserved, high-profile success. The premise is simple: an ex-hero becomes a dispatcher, basically a 911 (or 999, in the UK) call receiver who determines what help to send. There's a lot of different, competing priorities, forcing the player to make hard choices when they can't solve every single problem simultaneously. This premise also gives the game an interesting structure we haven't quite seen before: a key gameplay loop as well as the interactive storytelling the team had perfected back in the Telltale days.
The game is divided into eight episodes, with each episode usually spanning a day and a night. Each episode has lengthy, high-quality, professionally-animated sequences that look as good as any modern 2D cartoon, as well as gameplay sequences using a map of the area showing where crimes are taking place and what heroes are available to deal with them. The gameplay sequences are relatively basic, but do increase in complexity as the game goes on, with Robert having to not only send heroes to trouble spots but sometimes has to more directly intervene to provide assistance through hacking surveillance networks or disabling the bad guys' tech. As the game goes on, the roster of heroes changes (sometimes due to Robert's actions, such as deciding which under-performing heroes to fire or which potentially useful ones to recruit), and their suite of skills and synergies with other heroes accordingly.
This core gameplay loop is interesting, but perhaps a little under-developed. It feels like you could flesh out these mechanics and make a more in-depth and interesting game entirely out of this stuff, but they wanted to retain their traditional adventure format as well. This requires taking part in conversations, choosing replies which may or may not make characters feel well-disposed towards you, navigating possible romances and trying to make the best calls to bring the team together, rather than driving them apart.
The episodic structure gives the game a pacy feel, with each episode presented as an episode of a TV series, roughly an hour long (a bit more for the finale), with a different story and character focus in each episode whilst also furthering the overall story arc. Plot and backstory revelations follow at a steady beat, with some fun twists to the story and characters. The writing is humorous without being too contrived, and the humour falling on the slightly darker edge of the spectrum is refreshing. There's some smart writing choices, and the old Telltale problem of the game not fully responding too all of your choices granularly is there but not as big an issue. There are several major choices you can make resulting in different endings, different rosters of heroes and even different missions appearing as the game goes along. Voice acting is excellent throughout, as I think is now widely-known, and at a bit under nine hours, the game has a decent length without outstaying its welcome, but is short enough to welcome replays to see other story outcomes.
This is an adventure game where the story is the main focus, rather than the city crime-solving gameplay, and sometimes the latter has a tendency to end just as it's getting interesting, which can grate a little. The game could also perhaps flesh out the team a bit more. As it stands, it feels like three or four of the characters get a ton of development, two or three more get a moderate amount and the rest can feel a little under-used.
But it's hard to criticise Dispatch (****) too much. The game is fun, funny, well-written, well-acted and has a lot of heart, even if it's not a game you're going to be sinking hundreds of hours into. The game is available now on just about every platform going.
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