Like many people my age, I grew up playing . They aspired to make your choices matter while presenting stories in a televisio🍰n-like episodic format, and while they weren’t perfect, they were undoubtedly a key part of revitalising the adventure game genre and creating more emphasis on player agency across the medium for years to come.
AdHoc Studio draws on the talen♌t of a number of directors and developers from Telltale Games, and its first game, , attempts to take that choice-focused gameplay and elevate it. From the Steam demo I played, it feels like it might have nailed it.
High Quality, High Potential
One thing that the Telltale games never managed to do was make an experience that truly felt seamless. The writing and voice acting were usually on the money, but the games could feel a little janky, especially visually – the animation quality was understandably not always great, considering the resources and technology these games were made with. Apart fro💮m graphics, they aimed to emulate television by integrating quicktime events into real-time gameplay so you had to keep the action moving, but dialogue between different characters often overlapped and took you out of the immersiveness of it all.
What’s really impressive about Dispatch is that it feels like you’re watching an animated series. Part of that is its incredibly smooth animation, which is high-quality and gorgeous. The game has been described as playabl🗹e Invincible, but I’d argue that Dispatch looks better. Character movement is incredibly smooth and lifelike. The facial animations are evocative while still maintaining a realistic subtlety. The way that light reflects off hair and surfaces is so beautiful that it could bring a tear to my eye.
But another major part of that is its stacked cast. Aaron Paul is utterly convincing as the wry, kinda depressed Robert Robertson, a former superhero who loses his suit in battle and has to take a job dispatching rehabilitated supervillains to emergency situations. Decorated actor Jeffrey Wright is hilarious as Chase, a former superhero and friend of Robert’s who curses a lot. The ensemble cast💟 is made up of other recognisable names like Laura Bailey, Erin Yvette, Matthew Mercer, Jacksepticeye, MoistCr1TiKaL, and Alanah Pearce, among others. It’s harder to judge the quality of the acting from the ensemble characters, given we don’t get to see all that much of them, but listening to them banter as I dispatched them only made me want to hear more.
What’s more, the game is at times laugh-out-loud funny, in a wonderfully irreverent way. It’s an incredibly dry humour that works well with this kind of anti-hero premise, but it has the potential to lead to off-colour jokes that don’t quite land. What I saw landed for me, but in a way that made me clap my hand over my mouth in shock – kind of like when a comedian says something you’re pretty sure they shouldn’t, but it’s so funny that you can’t help but laugh anyway. It’s easy to stray in thಌe wrong direction, but we’ll only know if Dispatch sticks the landing when the full game is out.
Dispatch Look🌌s Like A Telltale Game ⛎From The Future
The debut൩ game from AdHoc Studio is bringing that Telltale magic back🐬.
A Telltale-Style Game With Actual Gameplay
Another thing the Telltale Games were often criticised for was a lack of gameplay. The games were largely entirely ♓narrative – no combat, very little input for action on the player’s part, and all choices. Dispatch addꦓresses that criticism by having Robert’s job as a dispatcher entail playing what is, essentially, a management sim.
Considering that this has been a weakness in the genre for so long, I wasn’t expecting all that much from this core gameplay loop going in. Maybe that’s why I was so impressed at its depth, even so early into the game. Each member of your supervillain-turned-superhero team has their points distributed into five different stats – agility, charisma, intelli🐓gence, you know the ones. Each also has passive abilities that you discover as you send them out, like working better alone or having boosted stats when dispatched with specific characters.
For example, Invisigal works faster on her own.
This leads to some surprising strategic depth as you fiddle with the order of characters and try to balance matching the skills and synergies of your available characters with the emergencies that need tending to. Then there’s also the fact that your team members have minds o💝f their own – your arsonist might run off and start a fire somewhere for no reason, or your local genius might try to talk you into putting him on a specific job so he can pursue his own agꦗenda of… selling your client crypto.
The demo itself is fairly short, and it’s hard to say if this impressive slice is really representative of the whole game. If the humour plays well throughout, the management gameplay continues to get more complex, and your choices fe🦄el like they actually matter, there’s a good chance this could♌ be one of the coolest games to come out of 2025. .
Dispatch
- Released
- 2025
