Dispatch full season review – the telltale signs of a narrative gem

All eight episodes of Dispatch are out now, as a number of former Telltale developers present a brand new tale of adult superhero drama.

In its time, Telltale Games was renowned for producing episodic adventures based on many famous franchises, from The Walking Dead to Back to the Future. Presented in an idiosyncratic cel-shaded art style, the games favoured conversation and consequence over action. Many of the original staff worked at LucasArts and games like The Wolf Among Us came across like old school point ‘n’ click adventures, but without any puzzles or traditional gameplay – beyond the odd QTE sequence.

With all the games, what you chose to say to another character could have significant ramifications on their relationship with you and their future actions. It gave everything you did an unusual sense of weight, as did the fact that many of your decisions had to be made against the clock.

The studio folded in 2018, and while the Telltale brand was bought and relaunched, a number of their former developers set up AdHoc Studio, whose first game is Dispatch. You can feel the spirit of the old Telltale in its grown-up themes, cartoon good looks, and snappy dialogue – a sense cemented in the opening scenes and the first time you’re told a character ‘will remember that’. For Telltale fans this will be like coming home.

For those new to the concept (which was copied and arguably bettered by the Life Is Strange games), what you’ll find is a superhero adult animation presented across eight discrete episodes, where you get to choose some of its outcomes. These episodes were released in batches of two, starting in October, but now the final two have been released, to complete the season.

Technically you don’t need to interact with the game at all though, you can switch off QTEs in cut scenes and simply ignore dialogue options, which eventually resolve themselves – but the pacing and disarmingly human characters are best enjoyed by engaging with the game’s fiction and role-playing as its hero, Mecha Man.

Unfortunately for him, the Mecha Man suit gets completely destroyed right at the start of the game, leaving him as plain old Robert Robertson, a man with no innate superpowers, who’s spent every last penny he earned or inherited maintaining his robotic alter-ego, which is now damaged beyond repair. Feeling depressed and useless he publicly resigns, only to be approached at his lowest ebb for a job with SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network.

They’re a corporate outfit that sells superheroic protection to businesses and rich people. They also rehabilitate supervillains, giving them jobs that help get them on the road to redemption, setting aside their nihilistic ways by refocusing them on defending law and order in the coastal community of Torrance, Los Angeles. In the game, it’s a hot bed of crime.

As its title implies, you’re taken on as a dispatcher, triaging incoming emergency calls, and sending an appropriate hero or group of heroes to sort them out. Each of your team has stats for combat, charisma, intellect, mobility, and vigour, which in Dispatch equates to defence. Your job is to match their attributes and superpowers to jobs as they come in to the SDN call centre.

While there are plenty of serious crimes being committed, you’ll also be managing calls about lost pets and fielding heroes for talk radio debates and school speech days. It’s definitely not all about beating up perps, and ensuring your squad has people with charisma and intellect is just as important as those with high combat and mobility.

You can assist with that by boosting specific stats as characters level up. Earning experience by successfully completing jobs, you can add a single extra point per level, as ensuring a good balance across your heroes makes it easier to find matches as emergencies come in. That means ensuring you send someone with extra mobility when there are criminals to be chased, and superior intellect if they’ll be diffusing bombs or taking part in a TV debate about the efficacy of superheroes.

Or at least that’s the plan. In reality Robert’s put in charge of SDN’s Phoenix Program, which recruits ex-supervillains, giving them a second chance in life. Inevitably that transition is rarely a smooth one, and you’ll find members of what is cheerfully called the Z-Team are belligerent, uncooperative, and have a tendency to disobey orders and do their own thing.

If you suspect, in classic buddy movie style, that this bunch of misfits might find they have more in common than they first thought, you wouldn’t be mistaken. However, Dispatch mostly gets away with its clichés by being funny, exceptionally well written, and by hiring first rate voice talent. Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad) as the sardonic Mecha Man is instantly likeable, as is Laura Bailey as reforming supervillainess, Invisigal, but they’re just two standouts in an unanimously stellar cast.

Between the dialogue and its delivery you genuinely start to care about your team, and their travails are leant extra weight by the apparent effect your actions have on their progress. That includes having to hire and fire heroes, and decide who Robert will get romantically entangled with, or whether just to rebuff all advances.

It’s feel good stuff, and while it has a strong propensity for ‘believe in yourself’ cheese, it’s always cut through with cynical humour and volumes of swearing, although despite its positive underlying message and superhero subject matter, this is not a game for children. You can expect nudity, brutal drunken bar fights, and a welter of sexual innuendo that must be a nightmare for SDN’s HR department.

Importantly, your role in all this feels deeply consequential, with some of your choices proving truly agonising. However, the reality is a little less inspiring. If you replay one of Dispatch’s episodes after completing the game, deliberately flubbing QTEs and Robert’s hacking mini-games, while selecting antithetical dialogue options from the choices you’d normally make, many of Dispatch’s events play out in the same way, regardless of your input or lack thereof.

Not everything does though, and when you’re not deliberately testing the game’s systems, the impression of choice and consequence is compelling, sweeping you up in Robert’s story through a combination of voice talent and clever writing. The gamier parts, where you play as the dispatcher, are well designed and the interface for managing your team in the field is never less than a pleasure to use, clearly indicating how heroes’ expanding abilities interact with one another.

The game has great music, countless cultural references – which tellingly tend to be film rather than video game based – but it’s far more interested in emotional resonance than the usual gaming mores of gunfights and tests of dexterity. Dispatch’s eight, roughly hour-long, episodes are engaging and highly entertaining, zipping by in a narrative that does a great job of making you feel as though you’re driving it.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £28.99
Publisher: AdHoc Studio
Developer: AdHoc Studio
Release Date: 22nd October 2025 to 12th November 2025
Age Rating: 18

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