It’s been a while since a video game made me laugh out loud. Sure, Baldur’s Gate 3 had me snicker a few times, but a full out bellow must have been Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
Dispatch is a game where you play as Robert, a dispatcher on a superhero-for-hire call center. Distressed citizens of Los Angeles calls in and you dispatch the most appropriate hero for the mission.
From the looks of it, I expected the game to be a visual novel, but there’s enough gameplay elements to take it out of that category. The dispatching, the hacking and the eventual quick time events make this more interactive than what you would call a visual novel, but I do believe there are accessibility settings to make it less interactive.
What I love about this game is the writing. The characters are really well written and the banter between them is hilarious. The overall story is good, not fantastic, but the animation is excellent, matching the characters and the setting perfectly. The dialogue system is fun and satisfying even if it’s a bit tricky to see where a particular answer will take the conversation. Also, you get far too short time to respond, but I guess I could change that in accessibility settings if I were so inclined.
I don’t care much for the game play elements. I think the dispatching is okay, I don’t like that there’s luck involved if your heroes succeed or not in their missions, and I found the map quite tricky to navigate. It is the banter between characters that makes the dispatching fun.
The hacking mini game is neither my cup of tea. It’s not hard, I think I only failed two in the last episode, but they aren’t much fun and I miss the characters while doing it. It feels almost like they added that in late in the development cycle because they felt they had too few gameplay elements.
Over all, the animation, the story, the writing makes me craving more. I hope they’ll make another season of it. I rate this game as GREAT.
Replay 