AdHoc Studio is a development team led by some ex-Telltale Games talent, and it really shows in its debut game, Dispatch.
It’s a workplace comedy starring superheroes, and by and large, it looks as though it plays out in much the same way as titles such as Tales from the Borderlands.
Dispatch is a mostly linear, narrative-focused adventure game, segmented into episodes, and features branching dialogue options that affect characters and their relationships with each other throughout the story.
The scenario is a good one: Robert Robertson used to be known as Mecha Man, a superhero who used a giant armour suit to fight crime. However, after the suit is destroyed, he’s unable to fund its repair and is forced to retire.
He lands a job at the SDN (Superhero Dispatch Network), where he’s tasked with being the handler for a team of ex-villains. If he does a good enough job, the company promises to help him fund and rebuild the suit.
In a hands-off demo, it appears that the writing is sharp and there will be plenty of opportunities to influence the story through dialogue choices.
The game has a super premium feel. The team mentions several times it’s aiming for a prime time animated TV series vibe, and through the excellent art and animation and some great voice talent fuelling the characters, it’s nailing that brief.
However, what makes Dispatch a slightly more interesting prospect is that it throws in management missions.
You have to do Robert’s job, basically — identifying issues throughout the city, and assigning the hero best suited for the job.
Each member of your team (affectionately called the Z Team) has their own unique stats, abilities, and traits you’ll need to keep in mind when calling the shots.
An example in our demo is a caller who wants a balloon rescued from a tree. Ideally you need a hero with high mobility (to reach the balloon in the tree) and charisma (to not distress the child). Your hero’s stats are compared with the stats required for success on the task, and depending on where they differ, your success rate will change.
You can also fail distress calls that you don’t get to in time, and heroes can be injured or otherwise put out of action. Missions take a little time too, so you’ll rarely have all team members ready to go, meaning you might have to dispatch heroes that are less than ideal.
It looks fairly fast-paced, and you probably won’t be able to get to everything, so you’ll need to prioritise as best you can during these sequences.
As well as sending out your heroes, you’ll sometimes have to make decisions as situations in the city develop.
While you’re navigating through all this, all your heroes are able to chime in and talk, so there’s plenty of banter between them and Robert.
The mission we get to see is his first day on the job, and Z Team all laugh at his name immediately, and joke about how fast he’ll quit. Again, it’s well executed thanks to solid writing and voice work.
Management doesn’t end there, either; each hero will earn skill points you can put into their stats, levelling them up and improving them for future jobs. It all looks quite elegantly done, and obviously fits the context of the game perfectly.
It looks like these management segments will lead into scripted moments as well. The demo continues as Invisigal (played by Laura Bailey) investigates a donut shop, where the proprietor has been knocked unconscious.
Here, Robert helps by observing from security cameras. When he needs another one, he has to hack into it with a mini-game. This involves moving across nodes, building pathways between them at certain points and finding passkeys. It seems quite straightforward, though sometimes there will be time pressure or other obstacles adding to the complexity.
The game’s two sides seem to blend together in a very natural way, and it makes Dispatch stand out. As we mentioned earlier, you can really tell this has some of that Telltale DNA, but with more involved gameplay segments, a fun, original story, and excellent presentation, it looks like a cut above.
Granted, we’ve only seen a small portion, but if it can build on that with meaningful character interactions and an impactful narrative, this could be fantastic.
The game is now confirmed for PS5 and is releasing episodically, starting in a few weeks’ time. You can read more about that here:
