Dispatch

Choose-your-own-adventure Suicide Squad

Why

Why Not

Impressions

Robert (Aaron Paul) is just a dude. Albeit a dude who's a renowned hero with a giant flying mech suit. Until his pursuit of revenge lands him without the suit or its macguffin power source, but with responsibility of dispatching his team of "reformed" villains to resolve the ills of SDN's paying subscribers.

Your crack squad consists of an arsonist himbo, chill pile of mud, edgy ballerina assassin, white-collar criminal bat-man, buff leprechaun, combative pop star, the Devil from Down Under and best/worst girl. Later on you also get the opportunity to add a janitor with social anxiety or depressed Superman to the team, and I picked the janitor legitimately expecting him to be more useful.

Contrary to what you might expect from the description so far; the game is not just a big ball of "lol look at me I'm so quirky". It does come pretty close to my personal tolerance for juvenile humour, but it also has some pretty clever moments and the more juvenile bits are very in character. These are (at least to begin with), genuinely bad people, but I couldn't help liking them. It really does feel like you're the new guy dropped into an existing group of, if not exactly friends, at least people who've been stuck together a long while.

Speaking of characters, it's amazing how invested in them you can get from banter during the dispatch gameplay and a few (nicely animated) story cutscenes. By episode 2, when I had to make a decision guaranteed to hurt one of them, I really agonized over it. And the next day, when the friend of the guy I decided against was mad at me, I felt guilty again. Everyone in the main cast is astonishingly well fleshed out considering the surprisingly limited time you spend in cutscenes.

I came into Dispatch thinking it'd basically be a TV show with some dialogue options, but the balance of time in game actually tends more toward active gameplay. Robert's job is essentially be a taxi dispatcher for the Z-team, taking calls from customers and figuring out the best hero/combination thereof to send. Seems simple but the requests come in pretty thick and fast at times, and your heroes have mandated rest periods, petty feuds and their own ineptitude to take them out of the action. There are a lot of judgement calls to be made on whether to sacrifice your chances on one call to increase your chances on the next, and most sessions introduce some new wrinkle to contend with. There's also a cool little hacking minigame that allows Robert to take a more active part in missions; locating information or creating distractions to aid the dispatched hero. Much like with the rest of the game I think they got the balance just right here, though I was so bad at it (consistently bottom 20% according to the post-episode summaries) that I always wanted another try immediately when a shift came to an end.

Dispatch is short but sweet, made more than just an interactive TV show by its gameplay but entirely worth the entrance fee even without it. If the ~8 hour runtime really puts you off, I at least was definitely keen to start another playthrough immediately after my first, to do better and see how making different choices would pan out. If it looks at all interesting to you definitely give Dispatch a try, I highly recommend it.