Dispatch’s episodic format respects your time and that’s a relief
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, chief among them being 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 moving forward.
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I went into **Dispatch** fairly cold, having only seen some promotional images. I was almost instantly dazzled by its polished animation style, which 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 turns 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 I expected would require a lot of time to get through.
Instead, the credits started rolling on the first episode, I looked at my phone, and only an hour had passed.
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I felt like I had experienced a full story, some satisfying gameplay sequences, and a perfect tease for what’s next — all in just 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 walking around Robert’s apartment, dispatch headquarters, the bar, 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, and interacting with every object. That 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. They were where these games dragged, sometimes for tens of minutes at a time before the story continued.
**Dispatch** doesn’t do that. There are no exploration sections at all, so the story keeps flowing.
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Instead, **Dispatch**’s gameplay focuses on the titular dispatch system, which involves sending out individual heroes or teams from an available roster to citizens in need. It’s an elegant system that incorporates both story elements and additional gameplay ideas, such as hacking mini-games.
These gameplay sections last just long enough to set the table for the next part of the story and no more.
There are fair questions about how much the dispatch success rate really matters, but that’s a discussion for the full review.
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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, reducing overall runtime without compromising the satisfaction that comes from the narrative.
There are still big choices to be made, gameplay sections to tackle, and those memorable “watercooler moments” that made the best Telltale games so classic.
Now, they’re executed so well that two episodes can be played in a single night.
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This is a big change from later Telltale games or modern Telltale-style titles. I’m someone who loves and swears by the *Life is Strange* series, but the shift to full $50 self-contained stories made their newer efforts feel a bit 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 clear that AdHoc is fully aware of the current gaming climate.
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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 upon dozens of hours.
There are only so many hours in a day. So it feels like a huge plus that a game like **Dispatch** can tell its story satisfyingly and wrap up in just a few hours.
It knows what it wants to be, gets in, gets out, and ideally makes everyone happy.
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So far, everything has been great.
The final episodes are set to release next week, and I’ve carved out the exact time to play them. Even if they don’t live up to my expectations, I appreciate that **Dispatch** respects my busy life.
Hopefully, more games like it will follow suit in the future.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146700/dispatch-episodic-format-time-short-sessions
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