*Movie Trailer Voice*

“In a world where everyone is a horned-up alcoholic, one normal guy will rise to the occasion. Armed only with his depressed sarcasm and the art of seduction through not even trying, will our hero be able to beat his demons and beat off his officemates? Coming this Thanksgiving season, tune in to the episodic drama known as Dispatch and find out.”

Cough, cough. Okay, enough of that.

Dispatch is the long-awaited release from AdHoc Studios, stuck in development limbo since 2020 and finally crashing onto the scene with a workplace romance/superhero mashup told through classic Telltale-style narrative design. The “gameplay” is lighter than your average action title but heavier than a standard visual novel, and every snarky comment you throw out into the office ether feels like it might come back to haunt you. Your colleagues will remember everything.

There will be minor spoilers for the early episodes here, but I’ll keep things light on the big twists.

The Rise and Fall of Mecha Man

You play as Robert Robertson, son of Robert Robertson, third in a proud line of ironclad himbos. Your family business is simple: suit up as Mecha Man, defend Los Angeles, and keep the Astral Prism humming along as your power source. Three generations of Mecha Men have kept the city safe, with each new suit getting more gizmos, gadgets, and reasons to avoid therapy.

When Dispatch opens, you’re mid-mission, hunting the supervillain Shroud. Shroud is a former hero turned villain with a nasty habit of murdering Mecha Men; your father’s blood is literally on his hands. Wielding the power of Nerd Math, he uses probabilities and percentages to predict your every move like a sentient Excel spreadsheet of doom.

Naturally, you track down Shroud’s lair. Naturally, you get your ass handed to you by a squad of superpowered henchmen. In the chaos, Robert doesn’t notice the bomb planted on the back of the Mecha suit. The explosion that follows leaves the suit annihilated and Robert barely alive. The legacy of Mecha Man? Gone. The suit? Scrapped. The guy inside? Just a normal dude with a stupid name cosplaying as a hero.

In a press conference, Robert publicly reveals that the Mecha Suit is toast and can’t be repaired. Still clinging to some leftover hubris, he tries to stop a group of colorful, masked robbers at a nearby electronics store. Outnumbered and unpowered, he’s quickly stomped into the pavement… until he’s saved by the all-powerful Blonde Blazer.

Welcome to the Superhero Defense Network

Blonde Blazer runs the Superhero Defense Network (SDN) for the LA area. Think Uber, but for capes: normal citizens can subscribe to have superheroes show up when things go sideways, for a nominal fee and probably a disturbing amount of data harvesting.

She wines and dines Robert at a local dive bar, where you meet three ex-villains: Punch Up, Coupe, and Flambe. There’s clearly some pretty serious bad blood between Robert (still in the Mecha Man costume) and Flambe, and things escalate quickly into “do we fight or flirt?” territory. Once the tension calms down, Blonde Blazer whisks Robert away to a billboard overlooking the Hollywood sign for a little rooftop recruitment session.

It’s here that her real plan is revealed: she wants to hire you.

Handing you a very advanced VR headset, she drops you into the core “gameplay” of Dispatch: working as a dispatcher for SDN. Your job is to drop heroes into various crimes and crises around LA, using a skill tree and limited information to decide who goes where and who’s likely to succeed.

This is where Dispatch steps away from just being “a story game with QTEs” and gives you a surprisingly engaging system to chew on.

Gameplay? In 

My

 Telltale-Style Game?

Each hero has five core stats: Speed, Charisma, Intelligence, Body, and Fighting. Missions come in with short descriptions and a few hints about what might be required. Need someone to smooth over critics of SDN at a community meeting? You’ll want a hero with high Charisma. Chasing down criminals or racing a bomb to its destination? Better bring Speed. Running into a brawl in a back alley? That Fighting stat is going to matter.

Sending a hero who is well-suited to the scenario increases the odds of success; stack multiple heroes, and the percentages get even better. It’s never fully guaranteed until you hit 100%, but you can sway things heavily in your favor once you know your squad.

There are tradeoffs, though. Heroes can’t be called back once deployed, they need time to travel back to HQ after missions, and they require rest periods between jobs. You’ll often be juggling a board full of crises, trying to decide whether to send an exhausted hero out for “just one more run” or risk a lesser fit with fresher legs.

Failing a mission has consequences. The first failure typically injures a hero, lowering their stats but keeping them functional. A second failure can down them entirely, temporarily removing them from the board. As you succeed, you gain XP, level up your heroes, and unlock new skill points to pour into your squad.

On top of that, you earn one-time-use boosts for each dispatching shift: skipping a rest period, instantly reviving a downed hero, and more. These recharge each in-game day, nudging you to actually use them instead of hoarding them “for later” (and then forgetting).

The system has some nice wrinkles:

• Some heroes have signature missions where they’re practically guaranteed to succeed.
  
• Some characters have synergy with each other, giving you better odds when they’re deployed as a team.
  
• Unique abilities unlock as you dig deeper into each character’s arc.
  

It’s a lot more involved than the usual “press X at the right time” you’d expect from a narrative-heavy game. The extra layer of planning makes you more invested in your squad and turns quiet downtime between story beats into tense little management puzzles.

There’s also a hacking mechanic, which… exists. It’s a more traditional minigame that never quite reaches the same highs as the dispatch system. At its best, it’s a mild change of pace. At its worst, it feels tacked on and a little like busywork. I didn’t hate it, but I definitely wasn’t playing Dispatch for the hacking.

Meet the Z-Team

Blonde Blazer doesn’t hand you the A-list. Instead, Robert gets saddled with the Z-Team: the absolute dregs of SDN, made up of ex-villains, weirdos, and HR’s worst nightmares.

Your new coworkers include:

• Flambe – A pyromaniac with fire powers and a history with Mecha Man that’s anything but friendly.
  
• Punch Up – A smaller-than-life strongman with impervious skin and a chip on his shoulder.
  
• Coupe – A winged assassin who is absolutely not trying that hard to pretend she’s not still evil.
  
• Golem – A massive construct of goop who looks like a walking OSHA violation.
  
• Malevola – A literal demon and designated dommy mommy for you Karlach degenerates.
• Prism – A light bending pop star with a tendency to permanently blind people.
  
• Sonar – A bat-human hybrid with a cocaine habit and the dulcet tones of MoistCritical.
  
• Invisigal – Your central love interest, with zero interest in love, and the power to turn invisible (shocking, I know).
  

It’s a stacked roster of hot messes, and Dispatch gives each of them enough screen time, jokes, and emotional beats that they all feel distinct. The game leans hard into the idea that these are people trying (and often failing) to pull their lives together between world-ending emergencies and workplace happy hours.

Press F to Romance

Outside of dispatching, the real heart of Dispatch lies in the conversations, choices, and branching relationships. This is where the Telltale DNA really shows.

Your choices matter… or they don’t… depending on what the writers have in mind. Some dialogue options open up entirely new scenes later on or twist existing conversations into different shapes. Others fizzle out quickly, serving more as flavor than divergence. If you’ve played this style of game before, that push-pull between illusion of choice and actual consequence will feel familiar.

The good news is that the writing is strong enough that even the “fake” choices feel fun in the moment. The story is genuinely solid, with a lot of care clearly put into mapping out branching paths, building character arcs, and planting red herrings. When the game does call back to something you said three episodes ago, it lands.

The voice cast does a lot of heavy lifting here:

• Aaron Paul brings a weary, bitter, but still weirdly hopeful energy to Robert.
  
• Laura Bailey nails Invisigal’s mix of aloof, guarded, and quietly vulnerable.
  
• Erin Yvette gives Blonde Blazer just the right amount of charisma and menace.
  

Even the goofier casting choices, like MoistCritical as Sonar, work surprisingly well. Every character feels fully realized, and their banter ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to uncomfortably real in that “wow, this feels like my office” kind of way.

The cinematography (yes, for a video game) deserves a shoutout too. Camera angles, lighting, and framing make a lot of scenes feel more like an interactive TV show than a typical game cutscene. The standout moment for me is the bar fight set to THOT SQUAD’s “HOES DEPRESSED.” If you know, you know. It’s stylish, chaotic, and perfectly sums up the tone of Dispatch in about 90 seconds.

Final Thots—Sorry, Thoughts

Dispatch wraps clever writing and a surprisingly fun gameplay mechanic into a tidy 8–10 hour package. I kept finding myself thinking about my choices between sessions, wondering what would’ve happened if I’d sent a different hero, picked a different dialogue option, or maybe not flirted with every breathing entity in a ten-mile radius.

The game knows exactly what it wants to be: a horny, funny, emotionally messy superhero office drama where saving the day is only half the job. Aside from a few minor story hiccups and a hacking minigame that never really justifies its existence, it absolutely nails that vision.

That’s why Dispatch gets my Top Shelf Game award.

The potential audience here is huge. Do you like superhero universes? Do you like Telltale-style narrative games? Do you like workplace drama, romance, and jokes that toe the line between “haha” and “HR violation”? Do you like fun?

If you answered yes to any of that, there’s a spot waiting for you on the Z-Team. By the time the credits rolled, I was genuinely satisfied—and already hoping we’ll get a Season Two so I can dive back into this disaster of a workplace and see just how much worse (and better) things can get.