Quick-time events, despite everyone's best efforts to spice them up, remain pretty meh. When you first begin Dispatch, the new episodic superhero adventure game from AdHoc Studio, you're asked if you want to enable quick-time event prompts as an optional game mechanic. It says something that these QTE prompts only really appear in the first and last episode of Dispatch's eight-episode run.
Dispatch feels like it harkens back to the early 2010s--a time when Telltale Games was creating incredible episodic adventure games inspired by graphic novels, superhero stories were beginning to fill to the brim with quips to counterbalance the angst of the genre in the 2000s, and office-based TV comedies were everywhere. If not for snippets of gameplay, Dispatch would simply be a great TV show that I would want to tune into every week.
We are saturated with superhero media to the point where even self-criticism has been done to death with franchises like Watchmen and The Boys. But with its debut choice-driven narrative adventure, AdHoc Studio has managed to find a unique angle for the superhero genre. In Dispatch, the story focuses on an office-based lackey and corporate manager of said superheroes, rather than the heroes themselves.
Dispatch, an interactive superhero workplace comedy from Adhoc Studios, is an ambitious project. The story has to balance comedy and personal drama, the animation needs polish worthy of a high-budget TV series, and the cast must be strong enough to support the lofty vision. When creative director Nick Herman and director Dennis Lenart were looking for a lead, one actor stood out above all the others: Aaron Paul, star of Breaking Bad and Bojack Horseman. There was just one problem.
