DISPATCH

Superhero management in the Telltale mould

- Ian Evenden

For those who've ever sat watching a superhero team-up movie and thought it looks like a logistical and HR nightmare - and we know you're out there - then AdHoc Studio has got the game for you. In Dispatch, you're the guy who decides which hero attends which calls for help.

It's not a new idea, but one that gets a fresh presentation from some visual design that makes it look like the best superhero TV show you've never watched, and a Telltale-style gameplay loop that sees you spending as much time talking to your hero team as you do sending them to get cats out of trees.

Funnily enough, several members of AdHoc Studio worked at the original Telltale Games on the Walking Dead games, and while the developer famous for The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands folded in 2018 to be replaced by a studio of the same name with different founders, its spirit clearly lives on.

Dispatch makes use of a 2D art style that's so smooth that it could be part of the crop of recent superhero cartoons on streaming services. It makes great use of body language and facial expressions as Robert Robertson, formerly the superhero known as Mecha Man, becomes a dispatcher at SDN after losing his suit in an unspecified manner that will probably all become clear later in the game, especially as a screenshot of Mecha Man in his suit has been released.

The heroes themselves, for all their occasional familiarity, have clearly been a lot of fun to design. Robertson's team is made up of the usual selection of misfits and malcontents we've come to expect from any X-Men-alike, and some of the inspirations are pretty clear too. One is a man who's also a bat. One of them is a red lady with pointy ears, horns and muscles.

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