Dispatch
Telltale Games is dead, long live Telltale Games.
Adhoc Studios, founded in 2018 after the collapse of the original Telltale games, was hired on by the newer incarnation of Telltale Games to help develop The Wolf Among Us: Season 2 - and when THAT went south, they set out on their own to make an original IP. Fast forward to 2024, and we get our first view of Dispatch - yet another attempt to bring back the Telltale style game taking place in a superhero-filled alternate universe Los Angeles. And I suppose I'm giving away the game a bit here, but I really enjoyed it! What I'm less sure about is the why - the character writing is great, to be clear, but the last time I played a game like this is all the way back in 2014 with the original The Wolf Among Us (maybe 2015 if you want to count the original Life is Strange, even though it's a slightly different style). How much of that enjoyment is "Yeah, they've still got it after all this time!" and how much is the novelty of actually playing a game in this style for the first time in a literal decade?
Dispatch itself is broadly broken into two-and-a-half-ish gameplay styles. The first is what you typically think of as the "Telltale-style game" - a series of cutscenes play out, and occasionally the game will prompt you to make a choice potentially changing the story. This is occasionally interrupted by a fight scene, which are almost entirely handled via QTEs and are universally garbage. I recommend leaving them on for the first episode just to see how it works, and then turning it off for the rest of the game because it genuinely does not add anything to the experience. As for the second type, after a brief tutorial at the end of Episode 1, all proceeding episodes will have at least one 15-20 minute section of, well...dispatching gameplay. You're given a bird's eye view of LA, occasionally problems pop up, and you decide which of your 6-8 superheroes are best fit for the job at hand. The more you send them out, the more they level up and increase their stats, and occasionally jobs feed into each other so you get a little sense of narrative progression. Finally, you also occasionally get a hacking sequence where you roll a sphere around on a grid and have to do inputs to make new paths appear, dodge security robots, etc. It's pretty much exactly what you're expecting when I say there's a hacking minigame, and while they do some neat stuff with it (especially later in the game), it's still very much the third-string gameplay here.
Of course, no one is actually here for the dispatching or hacking stuff. The story is the star of the show here, as we follow Robert Robertson III - or as he's better known, Mecha Man. Mecha Man is a long-standing hero in LA, as both his father and grandfather were also Mecha Men, but Robert's time in the suit is cut short when he attempts to track down Shroud, the supervillain who killed his father. After following him to an abandoned warehouse, the fight goes south and the mech suit is destroyed, leaving Robert to drown his sorrows at the local superhero bar. From there, he gets picked up by Blonde Blazer, the face of the local SDN chapter, and offered a choice: SDN has the the resources to fix his mech suit, but in the meantime he'll be mentoring the "Z-team", a group of former villains who are trying (poorly) to reinvent themselves as heroes.
And for most of the game - from episode 2 to about 6 - this is what the plot lingers on. You get small snippets of Royd working on the suit here and there, but majority of the runtime is dedicated to Robert figuring out who he is now that he isn't Mecha Man, trying to wrangle his team into something that resembles respectability, and his relationships with Blonde Blazer and Invisigal. This is genuinely good stuff! Robert has clearly never had to consider who he is outside of the suit, and while he's clearly not happy about his career change, he DOES take it very seriously. After a messy first day, Episode 3 opens with Blazer giving Robert an ultimatum: whoever has the lowest score at the end of the day is going to get cut, and while they (predictably) sabotage each other at the start of the day, Robert eventually drags them into an all-hands-on-deck meeting, after which they actually start working together! It's cliche as fuck, sure, but it works! A similar moment takes place at the end of Episode 6: Robert (as Mecha Man) has some history with some of his team members, and if you choose to reveal that Robert is Mecha Man, they blow their top and attack him - only for the other members of the Z-team to defend Robert, with the attacker storming off in frustration afterwards.
As for Blazer and Invisigal, that's where things get a little more complicated. Ostensibly, the two serve as equal love interests, but it becomes very clear very quickly that Dispatch is a fundamentally a story about Invisigal and her relationship with Robert. Not in a romantic sense (though you certainly can go down that road), but Invisigal is most directly emblematic of the Phoenix Program's goals, and Robert's interactions with her (in both conversation and gameplay) are the largest determining factor in which ending you get. One of the earliest scenes that set the stage for this is in Episode 3, where she admits how jealous of Blazer she is - her powers are clearly villain-coded, only suitable for being a thief or other espionage, and she doesn't really know HOW to be a hero. If Robert trusts her, helps her during her combat scenes, and sends her on successful dispatches, then she gains the confidence that she needs to make that step. If not, things get...complicated in Episodes 7 and 8.
Beyond the narrative implications, I have to say that I wasn't particularly impressed with either of the romantic options. Now, some of this obviously depends on how you choose to play Robert himself; I chose to have him focus on the well-being of the Z-team over everything else, which starts with an anti-Blazer tilt (both because most of the Z-team are assholes and because Blazer demands one of them be fired) but eventually tips over into more of an anti-Invisigal lean (for spoiler reasons), making it a lot harder to justify maintaining an active romance with Invisigal when the rest of the team wants her kicked out. But even beyond that, there's a lot going on here: Blazer is both A) his boss and B) coming off of a big breakup of her own, Robert himself has basically zero personality beyond having a dog, and Invisigal is...well, she's a lot. Even putting aside that Invisigal is Robert's subordinate - which is not nothing, to be clear - she's an ADHD asthmatic who's kind of a bitch, but underneath that exterior she's a romantic at heart who acts out to appear more confident than she actually is, she genuinely does mean well despite her rough edges, and most importantly of all, she LOVES Sour Patch Kids. Is it fair to hold it against her that she's very obviously someone's wish fulfillment character? Probably not, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't doing it all the same.
The other major point of contention with the game is how its censorship was applied - I played on Switch 2, which is far and away the most compromised version of the game (since the censorship is both larger than the PS5/PC version AND forced on at all times), and yet the only thing I can really take away from it all is a shrug and "That's it?" Make no mistake, it is dumb and it does ruin some of the jokes - chief among them this instance in Episode 4; the image is never described in any way, so the joke is just gone now. Fuck you, make your own joke. But beyond that, it's pretty much everything you'd expect to see covered up: dicks, tits, the occasional ass, and (hilariously, in a sad way) a few middle fingers - and like, 90% of it feels completely superfluous. Now, we should be clear, Dispatch is a raunchy game and I am not surprised that it has nudity. Nor am I saying that it should not have nudity, as there are several gags that would not work without it, including one genuinely important main plot scene. But I would be lying if I said that I never felt like my inner puritan was making a convincing point sometimes - that it sure seems like they occasionally show you a dick or a pair of tits for the sake of doing so, and it could have been swapped to literally any other joke without losing much (or anything). And while the nudity and related censorship is very much a point upon which your mileage will vary greatly, I generally found it to be..."distasteful" is too strong, but I did find myself rolling my eyes when the camera lingered on Toxic for the sole purpose of allowing Robert to make a bad dick joke.
And that's most of what I have, really. I enjoyed the setting a lot - as straightforward as "superheroes are everywhere and are just normal people like us who have shitty days and need to blow off some steam at the bar" is, it works wonders to ground this world, especially in comparison to something like the Marvel universe. The Z-team members are all great; Malevola and Sonar are definitely my favorite of the bunch, I love that they finally do get to be the big damn heroes at the end of it all, and everyone is animated really well, especially in the more hectic fight scenes. I do wish the game was maybe a little bit longer? Most of the episodes (aside from the finale) are about an hour long, but they all have AT LEAST one dispatching segment which eats up 15-20 minutes of the runtime, and it would be nice to have that time added back in for more story scenes.
To circle back to my initial question, I don't know that there's an answer to that in my experience with Dispatch itself. "Right time, right place" is an infuriatingly tricky beast to work around, and I imagine that a hypothetical near-future Dispatch Season 2 will be judged more harshly simply by virtue of having something to quickly and easily compare it to. All I can say is that for whatever combination of factors you want to ascribe it to, I had a good time and would happily spend another 10 hours with these dipshits, whenever that is - and that's good enough for me.