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dkirschner's Dispatch (PC)

[August 17, 2026 10:03:12 AM]

I was a little unsure about Dispatch because I typically don’t care for superhero media and because I doubted that it would be much different than other Telltale Games games (which had long since peaked). Luckily, my hesitation was unfounded. Dispatch is incredible, the best Telltale Games style game since peak Telltale era, even surpassing The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us in some areas. The writing is smart, funny, and it’s more adult than I imagined, also with more dick jokes than I imagined. I loved the extremely creative characters, their relationships, the voice acting, music, animations, gameplay mechanics, everything. It stumbled a little when some choices didn't seem to matter. For example, sometimes the game really wants to keep alive dialogue options that I didn't choose. Other characters will refer to something I didn’t say, not necessarily as if I said it, but as if I wanted to say it. And I had some issues playing this on Luna (choppy, lagging, freezing, and even crashed on the last boss fight) and with a controller (input lag, which was Luna’s fault, and it kept switching to keyboard input, possibly because of Luna lagging, all of which was very annoying during dispatch, hacking, and QTEs). Luckily, a narrative game is still playable with those issues. Thank goodness it wasn’t a soulslike or something!

The main difference between this and older Telltale games is the addition of the “dispatch” gameplay. The story (basically) goes that you are a superhero forced into a temporary hiatus, and you go to work as a dispatcher for a larger superhero organization. You get a roster of heroes whom you manage, upgrade, and send on missions from your office computer. The heroes have five or six character stats, plus a couple special abilities, and as they level up, you allocate points in character stats in order to have a well-rounded team. So, for some heroes, you’ll want to dump points into strength and vigor, while for others, you might choose intelligence and charisma.

Each stat is useful for a range of scenarios in missions. You don’t necessarily know what stats (and therefore which characters) will be ideal for each mission, so you try to figure it out by interpreting key words in the mission description. For example, a mission might say that there is a hostage situation and that you should send heroes to protect innocent civilians, reason with the attackers, and convince them to release the hostages. “Protect,” “reason,” and “convince” might be bolded in the description, which means they are key words that associate with character stats. If you ever need to “protect” people, keep people safe, defend, withstand an assault, that kind of thing, then you’re looking at the vigor stat. If you need to do anything that requires thinking, logic, reasoning, figuring stuff out, and so on, you are dealing with the intelligence stat. Persuading, convincing, making a good impression, being suave, that kind of stuff is the charisma stat. And so on. It’s not always obvious. Key words sometimes seem like they could be multiple stats. Part of the fun is getting better and better at figuring out which kinds of actions each stat covers. Anyway, you have 1-4 hero slots per mission, and after missions, characters have to return to base and rest. So, you have to use all your characters, and this part of the game really becomes about resource utilization.

Sometimes during dispatch, you have to hack security cameras and stuff. This minigame was pretty fun and has several challenging elements, such as “viruses” that kill you if they touch you, locked ports that require you to find and memorize key codes, etc. Hacking isn’t a really big part of the game, but you will occasionally have to do it. My main critique of the hacking minigame is that I would really like to be able to scroll and see the whole hacking map. Later on though, the game used "not being able to see ahead" as a challenge, which I appreciated, but sometimes it was annoying not to be able to see what was ahead. Also, that was the main part of the game that sucked with Luna’s issues, because you are moving around this grid and there are viruses chasing you and time limits. So the game lagging, or the input switching to keyboard, messed me up a couple times.

The verdict on Dispatch is that it’s a must-play. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, it’s available for free on Luna right now. Take advantage of it!