I’m not really into superhero stories–as a tedious literalist, they often feel like metaphors for human struggles when I’d rather just watch regular people deal with that stuff. But the Steam demo for Dispatch is light on the parts of superhero media I like the least, instead focusing on learning the ropes of a new job, if that new job involved sending superheroes out to fight crime.
Dispatch follows Robert Robertson, a superhero who inadvertently destroyed his mechanical suit and has now been relegated to a desk job at the Superhero Dispatch Network, where he sends other heroes out on rescues. The members of his team have all committed crimes, and they’re all hostile to the whole setup, as well as to Robert. Alongside all this city-saving and superpowers, Robert deals with regular new job problems, like meeting his coworkers, office bathroom etiquette, and his own feelings about being behind-the-scenes instead of on the front lines.
Dispatch is made by AdHoc Studio, which contains folks who previously worked on games like The Walking Dead and Tales From The Borderlands. That pedigree shows through in the game’s quippy dialogue, though the demo is refreshingly largely free of the Whedonspeak that plagues the superhero genre. There are also some dialogue choice moments and even a “so-and-so will remember that” that hints at deeper relationships.
The dispatching aspect of the job takes place on Robert’s computer, where crimes pop up on a map of the city. You get a description of the mission–a hero is needed to climb a tree to get a kid’s balloon, and also not make the child cry–and then you have to pick which of your heroes would be best for the job based on a visualization of their stats. Picking the right hero to send is then a little puzzle of parsing the call’s description: in the balloon case, you'd want someone with good mobility to climb the tree, but also good charisma to handle the child. Once the mission is complete, you’re shown a visualization of the stat distribution the mission actually required, and you see how well your chosen hero’s stats lined up. If enough of your hero’s stat shape overlaps with the mission’s, you succeed.
This is made more complicated as more calls pop up, necessitating waiting for characters to return from missions and rest up before you can send them out again. At a couple points in the demo I didn’t have the best person for the job available, so just had to send someone and hope for the best. There’s also a pretty simple hacking minigame, and characters also have special attributes that didn’t figure too much into my demo experience but will surely play a role in the full game: characters who get stat boosts if they’re alone, a character who transforms into a monster and reverses some of his stats after coming back from a job.
It’s a lot to cram into a very short demo, much of which is taken up by table-setting dialogue about Robert’s backstory and the other characters at the Network. Being thrown into the deep end of the gameplay was a good way to get a sense of what Dispatch actually is, but also felt for me like a lot to take in at once. The lack of clarity regarding what stats a mission requires is a good way to keep the dispatching from just being some kind of fancied-up matching game, but a little more visual clarity might also help to keep things from feeling too much like guesswork and keep track of your team's stats better. But trying to make decisions with limited information and remember the details of your team, all while new calls pop up and Robert’s team argues with him and each other in the background, is hectic in an enjoyable way.
Currently, to replay the dispatching you’ll have to restart the demo and sit through the (well-written and well-acted) cutscenes again, something I hope the demo tweaks if it stays up past the current Steam Next Fest. I’d like to see if I could do better on my calls, managing my team more efficiently and making better decisions on the calls that require more hands-on participation than just choosing who to send. I’m intrigued by what Dispatch is shaping up to be, and the demo definitely got me excited to see more of it. It’s set for a 2025 release.
