Dispatch

Written by Eric Hauter on 11/12/2025 for PS5  

The folks at AdHoc Studio don’t need me to write a positive review of Dispatch. For that matter, neither does the gaming public. Dispatch, the recently wrapped episodic superhero game, is a runaway hit. Currently sitting at over 1,000,000 copies sold, and almost 25,000 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam, there is no question that AdHoc Studio swung hard and hit their first game out of the park in Babe Ruth style, with swagger and confidence. It seems that everybody—including a large subsection of the Gaming Nexus bullpen—loves this game.

And I will make no bones about it, nor will I make you wait until the end of the review. I also love Dispatch, so much that I’ve been proselytizing the game to anyone that will listen. I even bought a copy on Steam and gifted it to my 25-year-old son, just because I was worried that he wouldn’t take my word for it and buy Dispatch for himself. Suddenly,  shockingly, a Telltale-style narrative game made by former Telltale developers (among others) is back at the forefront of the gaming conversation, completely capturing the zeitgeist. I don’t seriously believe that Dispatch has a shot at winning Game of the Year, but I will argue to the grave that it belongs in the conversation.

For those few not already in the know, Dispatch is a new eight-episode game that has been releasing at a cadence of two episodes a week over the last month. The game has now wrapped up, allowing new players to binge the game all the way through, which might be a double-edged sword. Sure, you get to move right from the game’s carefully planned cliffhangers to the next episode, but on the other side of the coin, you’ve missed out on all the great conversation from the last month while we all compared notes and theories on where the story was going.

Dispatch follows the adventures of Robert Robertson (voiced by Aaron Paul, who has done a bunch of cool stuff beyond Breaking Bad, including the most disturbing episode of Black Mirror ever). Robert is a former superhero that has fallen somewhat from grace. After inheriting the family MechaMan suit (kinda like Iron Man, but bulkier), Robert spends years in the superhero biz until finally the suit is damaged beyond his ability to repair it. Left without powers and somewhat financially bereft, Robert accepts a job at a superhero dispatch center, manning a desk and deploying heroes to hotspots around the city.

But Robert’s team is no ordinary group of superheroes. Team Z is a group of recovering degenerates—villains that have fallen on hard enough times that they had to resort to taking a day job to make ends meet. They are a collective pile of anger issues and bad attitudes, with very flexible interpretations of ethics and the law. They immediately begin taunting Robert in his new job, performing poorly on purpose and frequently flat out refusing to perform the tasks he assigns them.

Of course, Robert is no ordinary dispatcher, and it becomes clear pretty quickly to the player and the Z Team alike that although Robert is without his suit, he is no pushover. He refuses to be bullied, regularly standing up to this malformed group of malcontents, choosing to inspire them to be greater than they thought they could be. Over the course of the season, Robert forms relationships with the team…and that’s all I’m gonna say about that. Let’s just say that, as the player, you have a lot of options as to who you interact with and how you interact with them, which will impact the pathways the story takes.

In addition to Robert’s interpersonal relationships, there are other story arcs that play out over the course of the game’s eight episodes, the most important of which is the attempted reconstruction of Robert’s super suit, and the recovery of the McGuffin that powers it, which was lost when the suit went kaboom. An organization known as the Red Ring—led by Robert’s arch-nemesis The Shroud—is after the same super-powerful widget, which sets everyone on a collision course in the game’s wild final episodes.

As someone who always enjoyed Telltale’s games back in the studio’s heyday, I was hoping that I would enjoy Dispatch at least on a nostalgic level. But I was not prepared for the game to feel so modern, nor was I ready for the level of animation and writing quality.

Things have come a long way since those first episodes of The Walking Dead – which were impressive in their own right. Dispatch looks and plays like an interactive high budget tv series, which is probably what led it to becoming such a cultural phenomenon. For a first-time game from an indie studio, Dispatch screams AAA polish. I was frankly stunned by how good this game looks and sounds.

What is on display here is every bit as enthralling as such popular television series as Invincible and The Legend of Vox Machina (Critical Role played a part in Dispatch, contributing both writing and voice talents to the mix). The story and animation are so rich that I would frequently forget I was playing a game, becoming so sucked in that I would be startled when the game suddenly wanted me to participate.

That participation is somewhat optional, with players having the choice to turn off quick-time events in the game. I immediately did so, but as the game wore on, I started to get the sneaking feeling that opting out of QTEs was removing some agency from me storywise. In the last episode in particular, it felt like some choices were being made for me that resulted in some outcomes that I wasn’t quite happy with.

 

That wasn’t the only place where I lost the thread of my influence. Though the game played out seamlessly as I steered Robert’s actions, I was entirely unclear about how some of my early choices impacted events in the late game. For the most part, Dispatch felt like a game on rails; my choices could cause me to go down one of several side routes, but all players were going to end up in the same place regardless of what they chose.

But the credits of each episode have a fun little feature that shows the percentage of players that shared your choices and outcomes, and the last episode showed me that things were not as cut and dry as I thought. It seems that somewhere along the way, I made some choices that had further reaching impact than I suspected. I’ll have to go back for another couple of rounds, I suspect, to really hammer out how to get what I now think of as the “good ending.”

And lord knows I could use a few more runs to work on my actual Dispatching. I have heard that there are people out in the world that are crushing the Dispatch minigame (not that it matters; I’m fully convinced now that the game marches on no matter how much you suck). I’m jealous of those that see success; I was a consistently bad dispatcher, frequently ranking in the bottom percentiles of my gaming peers. I don’t really take much credit for that—I strongly feel that the actual dispatching in Dispatch is a total mess.

Maybe you are good at this. If so, I'm jealous. I found it to be borderline impossible.

It feels weird to complain about a part of the game that seemingly has zero impact on the actual flow of the story, but in a game that doesn’t have much game to it, I feel like it must be mentioned that the dispatching minigame constantly pulls the rug from under players. I would consistently think through each scenario and send what I thought were the best heroes for the job, just to have the game interrupt the characters and shift the needs of the mission sideways, resulting in a failure. I’m sure this is meant to simulate the unpredictability of dispatching superheroes, but in a video game, it was just frustrating. Likewise, some of the player’s failures are clearly scripted, but it is unclear when that comes into play whether the game is forcing you to suck through scripted events, just stacking the deck against you so most players end up sucking, or whether you just personally suck.

A lot of the minigame stuff seems purposely obtuse, which didn’t really work for me. Many of Dispatch’s mechanics, character powers, and icons on the screen are very poorly explained. If you only plan on playing through each episode one time, don’t retain high hopes that you’ll do well here, because the conditions for success are constantly in flux and the interface is hot garbage. I can’t tell you how many missions I missed entirely just because I lost track of where my cursor was and I couldn’t get the correct icon on the interface to highlight.

And the most frustrating part of that whole experience is that it just doesn’t seem to matter. I would have probably enjoyed Dispatch much more if it went one of two ways: either ditch the Dispatch interface and just be a story game, or make the damn thing work in a way that is consistent and comprehendible. But…like I said above, it just doesn’t matter. The confounding Dispatch interface is ultimately just another way to deliver story and character moments, and if you look at it through that lens, it works just fine.

So where does that leave me? I hate directly discussing why I settled on a score, but I have to indulge in the navel-gazing for this one. Dispatch is possibly the best, most exciting narrative game ever made. If we are only counting story and production values, this is a clear 10/10. But the game is also saddled with frustrating minigame moments that don’t work well but ultimately don’t matter in the overall scheme of things.

Ahh, to hell with it. Let’s call it a 9 and be done with it. Dispatch isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to get the job done. Just like the Z Team, come to think of it. See you in Season Two.