Dispatch Full Review

The first and a half paragraphs are copy-pasted from my initial impressions back when the game first launched. I left them as-is since they good intros to begin with.

Setting a superpower narrative within the backdrop of a contemporary office space, be it from a retiree or the everyman, isn’t that unique - even before the revitalization of the superhero boom, Marvel toyed around with the idea through Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’ Marvels miniseries, plus Dwanye McDuffie and Ernie Colón’s creation Damage Control - but its reuse stems from its reliability. It becomes easier to set the world or tell a specific theme of (super)heroes if you start within a smaller sect, then work upwards for the more climactic battles or character resolutions, and for the Dispatch’s first batch, that means settling in on familiar stylisms after a a second wind, while trying to sew in a fair bit of new tricks via a different source of comedic timing/ideas.

Although working off the bones of Telltale Games’s formula - right down to having some alums such as Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette, who worked The Walking Dead Season 1, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales From The Borderlands, i.e. the "good" ones¹ - there’s been a shift within the usual Point & Click mold they’re known for; you still have to select certain dialog choices² and do QTE prompts (or let them all play out via a toggle option in the menus), but not only is the latter sparsely available, the bulk of the loop is now centered around the titular dispatch mechanic that’s vaguely reminiscent of Weappy Studios’ This Is The Police duology, or perhaps a severely simplified version of Introversion Software’s Uplink; read the description, do your best job at parsing which stat is the most important (thankfully doable, since the diction and phrasing are all consistent with what you will initially read it as), get the results. Interspliced with these segments are a hacking minigame of sorts that pops up occasionally, either within their own separate missions or as an option should you be indecisive about which. Checking each Z-Team reformer's tab details their idiosyncratic abilities necessary for proper rollouts, and their personalities chitters sparsely through the intercoms, staving off the feeling of seeing these as just numbers. Compounded by branching choices cropping up - a few of which could also ask for a specific character to do their unique option if they were sent - and being allowed build opportunities to hone dedicated workerbees to suit one or a few jobs in order to keep the momentum going.

In fact, as the game escalates, so too do these mechanics, even if they're only done in unique circumstances: your dispatchers will sabotage each other just so that they won't be at the bottom of the boards in Episode 3; picking up Phenomaman or Waterboy in Episode 4 is the difference between an immense glass cannon that will crumble if you fail just once, or a meek all-rounder that can easily slot into any 2-4 call slots to give the stats an extra wedge one way or the other; as you progress, you'll be able to hit stat points that either give extra XP, or will immediately fail the mission, thereby necessitating stricter point distribution and/or team balancing to make sure the odds are in your favor; even hacking becomes more involved, as you soon face frequency follows, security drones hovering towards you, and energy sources that are needed to combat the former and power up separate nodes to hastily complete them. are pointedly mentioned due to the prior three names being mentioned as their key works, it isn't just those that you can feel remnants of the previous company's fingerprints on. After a point, you start to feel a relationship dynamic and choiceplay strongly tied to what The Batman Series: The Enemy Within was dabbling with, which really surprised me. Sure, a lot of these are blatant, but the way these "game" and "story" proponents inform one another is exciting, and thus makes it the most involved TTG-style narrative adventure of its ilk in the modern era, least from what I've dabbled in thus far.

On that note, the emphasis on the key players - Invisigal, the delinquent that’s as troubled as she is loud, Z-Team itself, and the Torrance Superhero Dispatch Network branch that main character Robert Robertson works at (who, more specifically, interacts with superhero manager Blonde Blazer, Chase AKA Track Star, and Royd the buff techno-geek) - does well to keep the “illusion” of choice making in check, because what’s said to them informs the reactions after that point. This is something I find a lot of people tend to miss about TTG choicemaking, and even most of the heavy leaning to that sorta thing back in 7th Gen: what made the choices have weight to them, even after the facade faded, was that it focused on the aftermath from another person’s POV, not just your own. Clementine in TWD S1 is the best example, but even that game’s final villain explicitly names this out onto you, and there’s cases like Snow White in TWAU and the Loader Bot, Sasha, and Vaughn for TFTB. This, by itself, is already commendable, but it’s made better by the interactions each faction has that elevates these decisions into something more. Choosing one of the ladies as your preferred love interest is as seamless as it is just establishing platonic rapport, and cutscenes are changed accordingly to keep each one’s arc and place within Robert’s desire of what he truly wants after heroing takes his toll somehow doesn’t contradict or break kayfabe - it’s all part of the morals and information available since day one! Sure, for writing in other forms of art this doesn’t strike too hard, but in video games, where this aspect has always underdelivered, being able to provide satisfactory kinship between these two at all is astonishingly tight, let alone the fact that you can still be able to keep the friendship intact after aborting any romance paths.

I've had some minor to moderate quibbles that's been largely consistent throughout, such as the TTG "Staples" of hit-and-miss voice acting and some animation quirks, but even these aren't too damaging in the long run - whoever was the voice director made sure the worst of Cr1tikal's acting were kept at a minimum, while also having JackSepticEye and Alanah Pearce's contributions work to establishing some of my favorite characters (Punch Up and Malevola respectively), and not only are the rare animation missteps rare (the most notable ones are during scenes where they were clearly storyboarded to handle one choice outcome but not the other), any involved and spectacle-heavy action choreographies and setdressing during the prerendered cutscenes are met with appropriate care and budget/focus. With all of that said, and after messaging about it with YoDoops on Discord, both of us reached the same point: our major issues laid within Episode 8 - specifically, its second half. Little spoilers will be mentioned, but I will generally keep to vague descriptions of what occurs.

After the first half of holdouts, immense rectification, and Choices Mattering in, it begins a stark and unusual shift towards the mundane elements that it mainly steered clear from: all the hacking minigames and the buildup in intricacies for them are thrown out for a series of QTE prompts that could likely mean nothing if you played your cards right; the main arc for Invisigal's inner conflict is tepidly rushed through despite (or because of) constant reinforcement about how her predicament is paralleled to Robert's should he have been treated harsher and/or differently growing up, resulting in a Final Choice that's equal parts warranted as it is abrupt; all the choices critical to success, and would likely serve as strong deterrents to the immense defense that happens at this point in the end, made during the mission calls are eerily absent, harkening back to the common complaint that what you end up doing will no longer matter when push comes to shove; Shroud's thematic and moral coil within coming to our own, as well as how the decisions we make are largely "figured out" by a higher, obsessive power made within a metasense³, as well as being the person who kickstarted the whole plot, feels largely inconsequential within his own showing, as though he's mainly a stepping stone for a bigger, tougher bad that Torrance SDN will face, and the ramifications that come during and after his spiel feels more like footnotes than a large-scale sweep of what everyone will feel moving forward.

There's two aspects to this final batch that are particularly damning. The first is that, simply put, I did not care enough to explore the differing and intriguing options that my second file was explicitly made for, given that the path to The Best Choices was clearly laid out for me. It was strange, since there was a tight balancing between making sure these two weights were roughly in equilibrium, but now it has the nagging sense that I must be making the Good Choices by poignantly mentioning them in dialog. The second is the transitory and culminating period between Everyman and Heroism being stilted in execution - it's believable that the Z-Team's efforts and camaraderie enabled them to participate in a Marvel/DC Power Hour event, no matter how you prioritized stat/training distributions, but it's strikingly odd that Robert, and thus myself, ever felt pushed to the brink in the penultimate playing fields. As previously alluded, there's a stunning lack of friction and tension when you're still without the Suit, but it quickly brushes them all out within 5 whole minutes after the invading forces close in to the Torrance SDN branch. I understand that it's kind of hard to do so given how the final hour is supposed to play out, but between what was specified before and the events that make up the bulk of the narratives are like, I can't help but feel there's a bridge between these two that AdHoc simply didn't take.

Still, I should stress that this doesn't necessarily ruin the experience for me. The finale overall was nonetheless fulfilling to witness and closed most of its threads (and left a few, smart ones open) in a satisfying manner, either emotionally or thematically. As well, it's not as if the game completely drops what made the entire package so captivating and reminiscent of what I greatly enjoyed of The Wolf Among Us (my favorite TTG game to this day), and once again smartly reinforces those themes and impact when it needs them most. Those setbacks didn't really deter me from being a little teary-eyed, that these gang of misfits managed to do right by everyone, let alone me, and the rest of the writing praises I mentioned before were still there regardless. Compared to finales within and outside TTG's repertoire that I can immediately recall, this is more of a case of missed opportunities than a long, sour, brown note.

If you're relapsing for this style of narrative game again, or haven't really tried one out before, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. If you never liked TTG's formula to begin with, or just don't really buy into it anymore, I seldom believe this will assuage your anxiety and doubt, but I do still think there's some interesting nuggets within the writing to make it just enough to give it the college try. Nick and Aaron were on record for thinking about and wanting to do a sequel season, and while I appreciate the openness to try this as well as branch out into other ideas - one of the them being a collaboration with Critical Role - I'm hoping they don't become overambitious in chasing these ideas. We wouldn't want a repeat of history now, do we?