Dispatch's Best Surprise Is In Its Name
Quick-time events, despite everyone’s best efforts to spice them up, remain pretty meh.
When you first begin Dispatch, the new episodic superhero adventure game from AdHoc Studio, you’re asked if you want to enable quick-time event prompts as an optional game mechanic. It says something that these QTE prompts only really appear in the first and last episode of Dispatch’s eight-episode run. But if you’re worried the only input you’ll have in Dispatch is pressing a button at the right time, or picking the different narrative choices that affect the game’s story, you should know AdHoc has a more compelling, non-optional gameplay hook that deserves as much attention as the game’s charming storytelling. And it’s in the title of the game itself.
Set in a fictional version of Los Angeles, California where superheroes are real, Dispatch centers on Robert Robertson III, a former hero turned dispatcher for SDN. It’s a private security and service company, except instead of sending paramedics out, SDN (or Superhero Dispatch Network) sends out caped heroes to tackle clients’ problems big and small. This serves as the basis for Dispatch’s core minigame, and it’s one that could honestly be a standalone game in and of itself.
