‘Dispatch’ Is Better at Superheroic Redemption Than Romance

AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch wears many hats: per its general pitch, the narrative adventure game has you deploy reformed supervillains to deal with problems around Los Angeles, making strategic calls for who to send where, followed by dialogue choices during conversations. This is all done in a TV-like episodic structure, right down to the title cards, and the game happily embraces this blend of the X-Men, DC’s Suicide Squad, and the Fox/ABC series 9-1-1. Does it work? Enough of the time, but where its biggest faults lie is in the handling of its choice-dictated love stories.

As Robert Robertson III, the former superhero Mecha Man who takes up dispatching to get resources to rebuild his mech suit, the story has players choosing between two possible romantic interests. There’s Blonde Blazer, who approaches Robert about taking a dispatcher gig, and Invisigal (née Invisibitch), a member of the misfit “Z-Team†crew who can disappear whenever she holds her breath. Each episode has at least two interactions that, were this a TV show, would be a “ship moment,†like Invisigal checking out Robert’s butt and making inappropriate comments or Blazer inviting him to dinner and trying to get him to handle her ex, Phenomaman.

The writing in these moments is generally solid, and they’re well performed, even if it feels like Aaron Paul is intentionally underreacting as Robert so it doesn’t clash against (or overemphasize) the reactions of the player and streamers. Yet as things progressed, the more I began to not entirely dig what Dispatch was asking of me in this regard. I didn’t really feel like Robert had done anything to earn the affections of two women with whom he had pretty different power dynamics other than just being in proximity to them. To continue the TV metaphor, it felt like the game made a mistake common in many shows with a romance element, overestimating my potential investment in these potential relationships and not entirely doing the legwork to make them stand on their own merits.

That’s not to say I wasn’t seeing the signs or that I dislike romance in my games. It just didn’t fully agree with me, particularly on Invisigal’s side of things. I like the character and Laura Bailey’s performance, but she feels pitched younger than the other Z members. It’s a surprise when her in-game profile reveals she’s 27 when that doesn’t come across in how she’s written, and it seems she’s meant to fill the “kid sister†role in the group’s dynamic. Whatever else you can say about Blazer, she feels like she’s positioned to be around Robert’s age and on generally equal footing with him, and the game is more measured in how their potential relationship plays out. That’s not really the case with Invisigal, since episode four’s cold open makes very clear with her wet dream involving Robert that she’s into him, and the apparent tension is so thick one character comments later on that a conversation between the pair feels like an HR violation in the making.

Several Dispatch episodes end with Robert guiding Invisigal in taking down a crime syndicate or giving her a pep talk. Through her, AdHoc asks whether the Z-Team—whose past crimes collectively include murder, arson, theft, and stalking—can be good people. Things are bit more complicated for her: as we learn in the final two episodes, she was there the night Robert lost his suit fighting the season’s chief villain, Shroud. Whether you romance her or just want to be friends, it’s a nice complication, but her feelings for Robert feel too soon from a character standpoint, even if he’s been warming up to her since their paths unknowingly crossed.

Invisigal is the game’s deuteragonist, and she ends up wearing too many hats that clash with similar vibes found within the game. A Z-Teamer with tangled connections and feelings about Robert? You can find that in the team’s pyro, Flambae. Have untapped potential and unsure if they actually belong here? Waterboy specifically, and the whole group as a whole. Even Invisigal’s potential turn to villainy at the end if you don’t trust her in the finale isn’t that far removed from Sonar or Coupe teaming with Shroud, depending on which of them you cut earlier in the season.

From all these various conflicting dynamics and the team’s own interpersonal relationships, there’s some potentially fun mess to be had here a la the X-Men, who are famously one of the messiest superhero groups around. But AdHoc has finite resources and can only do so much, and should the studio get to make another season, I hope for a plot more evenly spread among the various Z-members.

My favorite Dispatch episode is its fifth, which sees the Z-Team clock out and meet up at a supervillain bar, where they get into a bloody, chaotic fistfight with the other patrons. As the team nurse their wounds and eat some late-night tacos, Robert can choose whether or not to reveal he was Mecha Man, and doing so leads to most of the others revealing their real names. It’s a good moment, and the second half of the episode put everyone on equal footing in terms of character development, which made the finale, where they and their allies fight Shroud, work as well as it does. The game excels when it lets its misfits be buds and heroes at the same time. When it’s about the fate of who has your heart? Not as much as it thinks.

All eight episodes of Dispatch are out now on PC and PlayStation 5.

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