Dispatch Review – IGN

The rest of your time is spent working at the SDC as a Dispatcher, assigning superheroes to a variety of jobs. Using your mouse and your wits, you’ll monitor a city map where hazard notifications periodically pop up with a timer, alerting you to various jobs the SDC needs to handle efficiently. Each hero under your command has a stat matrix, similar to that seen in Pokémon. You’ll receive a verbal description as a job appears, with your own task being to match your best hero, or in some cases heroes, based on their stats and personalities. You’ll be told very soon after whether you’ve passed or failed, with success earning you experience points that lead to a permanent stat boost for each hero. Failure, on the other hand, can lead to your heroes getting hurt or, worse, being taken out of commission for the shift. Managing their individual skill sets as multiple clocks tick down in front of you is a surprisingly stressful task that compelled me to lock in.

On top of stat boosts, the Z-team can also earn special skills that impact how efficiently you operate. The superstar-turned-superhero Prism can use her powers of duplication to extend the timer on jobs, carving out precious moments to find a resolution. Elsewhere, Invisigal can utilize her lone wolf status to increase her speed if sent solo. All these moving parts compound over time and meld together well, creating a satisfying feedback loop that complements the complexity of the surrounding story without overwhelming you.

Aspects like team morale, along with how you impact poignant story beats, shape how effectively the Z-Team will perform, too. During one shift early in the series, the heroes are fighting against one another, hoping to avoid being cut from the team. This argumentative overtone bled into the dispatching minigame, with each member acting on their own accord rather than on my explicit orders. While I was frustrated by this at first, hoping to overcome the challenge with my wits, these moments of disobedience did well to integrate the interactive segments into the overarching story, with AdHoc effectively conveying Robert’s irritability by ensuring you feel it firsthand. It’s one thing to write an emotive character for me to play as, it’s another to actually make me want to quit a job I don’t really have in the exact way they do.

A secondary hacking minigame is also part of your day-to-day activities, as Robert flexes the only superpower he has left: his mind. Here, you’ll roll a 3D object through a cybernetic maze as the clock ticks down, using directional inputs to forge a path towards the end goal. On top of the clock, you’ll also need to evade undulating anti-virus orbs and transfer power sources between light blocks to unlock new paths. It can be overwhelming at times as the difficulty scales over the course of Dispatch’s eight episodes, and muscling through these puzzles sticks out as some of the least compelling moments in a game that is otherwise full of them, which is a shame.

Still, despite all the roadblocks I faced at the hands of the Z-Team, I found myself defending them at every point, like a parent going to bat for their misbehaving children. The concept of ethically murky superhumans has been explored across film and TV before, but Dispatch often subverts expectations through a steady mix of dark humor and sincere interactions that kept me on my toes.

For example, while celebrating a win at one point, Robert and his team visit a villain bar, but the Thing-like Golem is forced to sit outside due to their humongous size. At this point, I’d taken quite a dislike to them and their attitude, and yet watching them slumped on the gutter with their earbuds in made them appear more human than rock monster. Just like that, a switch had flipped inside my head, and I was putty in the palm of AdHoc’s hands.

What makes Dispatch’s redemption story so effective is how it portrays its villains as emotionally complicated souls who may have lost their way rather than one-dimensional brutes. This empathetic lens makes it enticing to peel back the layers of the group, no matter how horrible they’re being or how petulant they seem. That’s not to say every character is worth forgiving, but instead, if you’re willing to make a risky dialogue choice, you may be rewarded with precious lore that could sway how you react in future situations, or what kind of ending you will receive.

All this drama is delivered through incredible vocal performances that bring Dispatch’s most profound moments to life with finesse, from the main cast of heroes to the background characters as well. Laura Bailey’s Invisigal masterfully dances between bratty and sincere, often encouraging me to break the rules with her flirty, if not threatening, style. Erin Yvette, on the other hand, subtly switches between Blonde Blazers’ heroic prose and dorky banter with sharp precision. Notably, Aaron Paul’s Robert is more than just Hollywood stunt casting – he’s a standout here, delivering a nuanced performance as a man struggling to hold onto his optimism while reconciling with who he is outside of his giant mech suit.