Dispatch Delivers Exactly What It Needs To … Then It Does More

I almost entirely dodged PC gaming as a kid. My parent’s office PC was all I really had access to, so I was limited to some sick-ass games like Age of Empires 2, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, the original Ray-Man, and some weirdly memorable pinball games like Monsters, Inc. and Jurassic Park. My main flirtation with narrative-based point-and-click games were the Humungous Entertainment games like Spy Fox and Putt-Putt. So when Telltale first walked into all of our lives with the original Telltale’s The Walking Dead, I was pretty blown away. 

It was a peak time for The Walking Dead show, and it was just a month after my beloved Mass Effect series ended. I, like everyone else, loved it. But even so, The Wolf Among Us came out and I missed it completely. And then The Walking Dead game’s second season disappointed me. So even as the studio would continue to put out games I would probably love, like Batman, I found myself getting excited for trailers only to say “ah, it’s Telltale,” and then moving on. 

I haven’t really played anything in that “interactive movie” genre since – outside of the Supermassive horror flicks like Until Dawn and The Quarry.

When I first heard of Dispatch, I was curious because of its ties with Critical Role (which I love) and Aaron Paul (who I also love). But even so, there’s a lot of actual Critical Role I still haven’t seen. And as much as I love Paul in Breaking Bad and other roles, his most notable voice performance for me – Todd in BoJack Horseman – isn’t my favorite (more of a Todd problem than a Paul problem, admittedly). I was skeptical, basically, but happy for folks who couldn’t wait for the return of “the Telltale game." Despite the initial buzz for Dispatch in late October, I waited. I waited like I’m currently waiting for Pluribus’ first season to release, and like I waited for both seasons of Shrinking to start watching. I wanted to binge it. So when the final two episodes were released on Nov. 12, I started Dispatch. And then I devoured it.

What Dispatch needed to do was revive a genre that I’d completely lost interest in about 13 years ago. What it did was much, much more than that.

If you’re unfamiliar, Dispatch takes place in a world where superheroes are common, and many people are born with powers. It’s not exactly My Hero Academia, where 80% of the world’s population have some kind of quirk, but it’s not not My Hero Academia either. There’s a lot of random-ass superheroes running around with powers that range from Superman With Severe Depression to Eager Lad Who Barfs Water. 

You play as Robert Robertson, a Rusty Venture type, but where the childhood trauma made him a little bitter instead of … Rusty Venture. Anyway, Robert is a hero, but notably one without powers. He, like his father and grandfather before him, is Mecha Man, a thin guy in a bodysuit that also pilots a pretty sizable mech. Think the original Iron Man armor before Tony makes it all sleek and sexy, or Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist.

In a world of powers, not having them and choosing to fight crime anyway is pretty stupid, and it’s gotten all of the former Mecha Men killed. The game starts with Robert on the trail of his dad’s former partner – a villain called Shroud – who betrayed and killed the previous Mecha Man. Robert gets ambushed, things go bad, his suit and power cell are essentially destroyed and stolen, and his body is broken. But the first episode ends with a proposal from a fellow hero: work at a hero dispatch center, mentor some up-and-coming shit-tier heroes, and earn the chance to be Mecha Man once again.