The Shacknews staff was aware of AdHoc Studio, a team comprised of former developers from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, and others. Still, *Dispatch* is a game that caught most of us by surprise. With a release calendar filled with heavy AAA hitters and indie darlings, AdHoc’s debut almost slipped under our radar.
It took Donovan Erskine jumping into Slack one day and asking if anybody else on staff had played it for the rest of us to start taking notice. Well, it took him a few tries. By the third time he asked, I finally said, “You know what? Enough people are talking about it, why not? Let’s give it a shot.”
There were many reasons why I’m glad I did, and chief among them was that catching up with *Dispatch* hardly took any time at all. That’s a big difference from many of its companions and, honestly, should be the model for these types of stories going forward.
I went into *Dispatch* fairly cold, having only seen some promotional images. I was almost instantly dazzled by its polished animation style—one that looks like it would be at home on YouTube or the average streaming service. It looked like standard Telltale fare but set in a world of superheroes.
After a lengthy cold open sequence, the story’s focus turned to Robert Robertson living his post-superhero life and eventually being recruited to act as a dispatcher for reformed supervillains. The introduction, the press conference scene, the subsequent bar scene, the meeting with Blonde Blazer, and its aftermath are all sequences that I would have expected to carve out a lot of time to get through.
Instead, the credits started rolling on the first episode, I looked at my phone, and saw only an hour had passed. I felt like I had gotten a full story experience, some satisfying gameplay sequences, and enough of a tease for what’s next—and I got it all done in a matter of minutes.
Part of that can be attributed to AdHoc cutting one of the most time-consuming aspects of these games: exploration. There’s no time spent wandering around Robert’s apartment, the dispatch headquarters, the bar, the crime scenes, or anything else.
In the past, I was one of those people who would explore these areas thoroughly—checking every corner, talking to every NPC, interacting with every object—which could take 10 to 20 minutes. Even when Telltale was at its peak with classics like *The Walking Dead*, *The Wolf Among Us*, and *Tales from the Borderlands*, these exploration sections often ground the story to a halt. It was where these games would drag, sometimes for tens of minutes before the story would continue.
*Dispatch* doesn’t do that. There are no exploration sections at all, so the story keeps flowing.
Instead, *Dispatch*’s gameplay revolves around the titular dispatch system, which involves sending out individual heroes or teams from the available roster to citizens in need. It’s a system that flows elegantly and incorporates both story elements and additional gameplay features, such as hacking mini-games.
These gameplay sections are timed just right—they’re long enough to set the table for the next part of the story and no longer.
There are fair questions about how much the dispatch success rate matters, but that’s a conversation for the full review.
Cutting out tedious exploration and refining the gameplay elements of a Telltale-style game is a major positive for *Dispatch*. It allows AdHoc to tell its story in a more streamlined way, cutting overall runtime down without compromising any narrative satisfaction.
There are still big choices to be made, gameplay sections to engage with, and those watercooler moments that made the best Telltale games such classics. Now, they’re executed in a way that lets you play two episodes in a single night.
This is a big change from later Telltale games or modern Telltale-style stories. I’m somebody who loves and swears by the *Life is Strange* series, but there’s something about it shifting to full $50 self-contained stories that makes newer entries feel a little bloated.
All apologies to Max Caulfield, but that runtime doesn’t have me rushing back to catch up—not when there are so many other games to play.
Add to this *Dispatch*’s weekly release schedule, and it’s fair to say that AdHoc is very aware of the current gaming climate.
There are so many games out there—many excellent ones like *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33*, *Hades 2*, *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, and others—that demand dozens, if not hundreds, of hours. With only so many hours in the day, it feels like a huge plus that a game like *Dispatch* can tell its story in a satisfying way and get players on their way in just a few hours.
It knows what it wants to be, gets in, gets out, and ideally makes everyone happy. So far, everything about *Dispatch* has been great.
The final episodes are set to release next week, and I’ve already carved out the exact time to play them. Even if they don’t quite live up to my expectations, I can appreciate that *Dispatch* respects my busy life—and I hope other games like it will follow suit in the future.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146700/dispatch-episodic-format-time-short-sessions
