# "Dispatch" Game Review > My take on Dispatch after one run on PC: the best superhero story I have played in years. The dispatch loop gives up its secrets a third of the way in, the hacking is thin, and the writing carried it. - Author: Antonio Rodriguez Martinez - Published: 2026-05-13 - Language: en - Canonical: https://notes.antoniwan.online/p/dispatch-game-review I just finished [Dispatch](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2592160/Dispatch/) on PC and I honestly don't know how many hours it took me, which I think is a good sign, because I wasn't watching the clock. I was watching the Z-Team, weighing the choices, and scum saving once in a while when a pick didn't land the way I meant it, before committing back to what I actually wanted. Same as with my [Crimson Desert review](/p/my-crimson-desert-review-after-200-hours), this is just one player's opinion, and I'd give Dispatch an **8 out of 10**, a _"Great!"_, or a **4 out of 5**, whichever scale you like. Why not a 9? Because once I figured out the dispatch mechanic I had kind of figured it out, and from there I was mostly staying for the story. I think that's the trade AdHoc Studio made (some of its founders came from Telltale): less mechanical depth, more narrative depth. I respect that trade, I really do, I just can't pretend the mechanics pulled the same weight the writing did. ## What Dispatch Is [Dispatch](https://adhocstudio.com/games/dispatch) is a narrative-driven game where you play Robert Robertson, aka Mecha Man, a superhero who has moved into the dispatcher's chair. The team you're dispatching is the Z-Team, a bunch of ex-supervillains trying, in their various and chaotic ways, to be on the right side of things now. You send them out to incidents based on their stats, you watch how the calls play out, you make choices between shifts, and the relationships you build (or neglect) shape who they become. It kinda feels like Invincible meeting The Boys, except the writers come across as normal, thinking people instead of psychopaths, with a little Superman mentorship holding everything together (or not, depending on your decisions, really). ## The Dispatch Mechanic ![Dispatch screen on PC: incident details and Z-Team assignments](/images/2026/dispatch-review/dispatch-pc-game-dispatch.avif) The loop lives on the dispatch screen, where you read an incident, match a hero's stats and personality to the call, and then live with the outcome. About a third of the way in, I stopped guessing and started reading the calls the way the writers wanted me to read them, and after that the screen felt less like a puzzle and more like a values check. Who are you willing to send into a mess? Who are you trying to protect from the kind of call that would break them? Once I figured out that's what the mechanic was for, I stopped trying to optimize it and started using it to decide who I wanted these people to become. The game keeps adding to the dispatching, though. Later on some dispatches get extra layers, where emotions and the relationships inside the team start messing with the calls. I won't spoil how, but it's super fun. ## Hacking, Honestly The hacking minigame is very simple, but the more time I spent in it, the more the rhythm of moving the mouse and hitting the keyboard in time with the screen started to feel like hacking (if you're a character in the movie Hackers, at least). It's like the team asked themselves how to make you feel like you're hacking without making you learn anything about hacking, and their answer was rhythm. Very cool, very creative. It's still thin, though, more of a beat between story scenes than a game of its own, and I'm fine with that, because I'd rather have a thin minigame than a deep one that keeps yanking me out of the story. ## The Writing Carries It If you stripped the dispatch screen out entirely, I think you'd still have the best superhero story I've played in years, and I only saw one branch of it. The Z-Team is full of people you start caring about whether you meant to or not. Some of them are funny in the Invincible way, casual brutality wrapped in charm, and some are tragic in the Boys way, where the costume is just a layer over somebody who got broken at some point. The dialogue is sharp, the voice acting is committed, and I kept noticing little beats land that had been planted two or three scenes earlier without me realizing it. The AdHoc team clearly knows how to tell a story with choices in it, and they made Dispatch their own. Superhero stories can lean Superman, or anime, or a dozen other directions, and this one landed closer to a prestige TV show for me. Days after the credits I'm still chewing on the worldbuilding, the factions and the news clips and the costumes and the powers and the decisions, working through lore when I'm not even playing the damned game. ## The Mecha Man Arc Is the Heart of It (Duh!) Mecha Man is so memorable, and a lot of that comes from the decisions and options the game gives you with him. He starts locked into extreme focus, where the cape is the identity and the mission is the identity and there's no oxygen for anything else, and then over the course of the game he loosens up. He starts actually living with the Z-Team instead of just leading them, he makes human mistakes instead of tactical ones, and the game lets him sit in those mistakes long enough for them to matter. Heroism in this game is about helping people, staying in relationship with whoever is standing next to you, and doing the right thing when the right thing is small and inconvenient. The kill, the power level, the lonely focus that grinds your humanity into nothing, none of that is the point. Watching him figure that out while I sat at the dispatch screen trying to figure out my own version of it was the most resonant part of the whole run for me. I saw myself in it, because the man who can't separate himself from the work is a version of me I know pretty well. The slow work of coming back to the table, to the relationships, the mistakes, the present moment, is work I recognize from my own life, so seeing it play out in a dude in a mech suit is a credit to whoever wrote him. ## The Choices and Scum Saving I'll admit it: I scum saved a few times. Not to chase the perfect ending, but because every now and then I'd pick what felt like the obvious choice and get the exact opposite of what I was going for. So I'd reload, figure out what I was actually pointing at, and then commit. I don't know if that counts as cheating. I'm calling it intent alignment. The choices branch in ways I didn't expect, and I'd rather take two extra minutes to make sure what I do matches what I mean than walk away from a moment going "wait, that's not what I meant." For the run itself I tried to play the dispatcher I'd want to be, compassionate when it felt earned, firm when it was needed, and patient with the people still figuring themselves out. That's how I try to move through my real life too, so it didn't make sense to become somebody else inside the game. ## The Ending I Got (Spoilers Ahead) I got what I'm calling the deadly ending, where Invisigal (or Invisibitch, depending on the day) went full villain. It was expected and unexpected at the same time. Expected, because I'd been pouring most of my attention into Blonde Blazer, who is the secondary lead, my boss in the dispatch room, a superhero in her own right, and the one who got most of my conversation time. Unexpected, because Invisigal was getting some attention from me too, just not the steady anchoring she needed, so she slipped back into who she'd been. Nobody on the dispatch side was paying close enough attention to keep her pointed at who she was trying to become. And her turn stings a little, because the Z-Team are ex-supervillains, and the whole premise is that they're trying not to be who they used to be. The dispatcher is one of the people keeping that effort alive, and I let one of them slip, so that one's on me. If I replay it (and I might), I want to anchor Invisigal and let Blonde Blazer drift, just to see the mirror version of my run. The fact that I'm even thinking about it probably tells you something about the replay value. ## The Art and the Polish The game is also really beautiful. A lot of frames look like comic-book panels, the characters read clearly even in the busiest group shots, and the animation and sound in the cutscenes carry a lot of the emotional weight. Zuleyka walked by once during a romantic scene, said "whoa, romantic," and kept walking, and when a non-gamer notices the craft from across the room, I take that as a good sign. Since I build software for a living, I also notice the quiet stuff: transitions that don't break immersion, menus that feel like part of the world, no obvious bugs across my whole run, and audio mixed right between dialogue, ambient, and score. It all looks and sounds as good as the writing reads. I came in expecting a fun narrative game and left with a new reference point for superhero stories. ## Should You Play It I'd recommend it if you care about story, characters, and choices that actually branch, or if Invincible, The Boys, and the deconstruct-the-superhero stuff is your lane. I'd maybe skip it if you're after mechanical depth. The dispatch loop is satisfying, but it's not a brain teaser, and the whole thing is kind of a story machine wearing a management game's clothes. That's exactly what I wanted, but it might not be what you want. If you're a City of Heroes veteran or came up on build-your-own-cape games, know that there's no character customization, no costume design, and the little power-picking there is mostly feeds the dispatch sections, not the story. You play Mecha Man, and the role-play lives inside characters who are already written. I think that focus is part of why the writing works, since a known protagonist lets the writers commit to a real arc, but it's a real trade and worth knowing going in. For me it was worth the time, and big thanks to the AdHoc team for making it. _If you've played Dispatch, drop your ending in the comments. I want to know which version of the Z-Team you ended up with._