Analysis of Dispatch, an “interactive series” of superheroes that enters the Olympus of 2025

The formula of narrative adventures that gave Telltale Games so much success returns with renewed strength with Expeditionto the point of turning this game into one of the most interesting of the whole year. And that arrived almost without making a sound.

Shipping takes place in a superheroic universe created for the occasion. In the game we control Robert, a human who lived as a superhero thanks to his Mecha Man Exoarmor (in a clear homage to the Iron Man comics).

After a fateful fight, Robert has to retire and be content with being a operator of an agency that tries to turn villains into heroes Let them save the city.

That’s where the real story begins. In typical style “movies about misfits“, we have to try to form the team out of a brooding Were-Bat, a foul-mouthed invisible girl, or a guy who breathes fire, hates us, and has anger issues.

The game’s narrative is divided into 8 episodeswhich have actually been released two by two in recent weeks, but now they are all online and therefore you can live the full experience.

This episodic structure means we are always encouraged to play (Each episode lasts about an hour.depending on how we play) and that, in addition, the events are very well narrated, there are surprises or the inevitable cliffhangers at the end.

The gameplay is divided into two parts. Strategically, we have a city ​​map, where requests for help reach us (from defeating a supervillain to queuing up at a coffee shop) and we have to choose which hero or heroes we will send to solve it.

Each case is different: if you need to defuse a bomb, it’s better to send a hero with intelligence, for example. If it is necessary to resist attacks, we send one with more resistance…

Each character has its own statisticsbased on 6 key elements: intelligence, charisma, attack… Furthermore, each one has their own character and background (Malevola knows sects and demons, for example), which we must take into account in the context of the task.

Inside you there is a star. If you want…

After we choose who will be in command (we can send from one to four characters), they take a few moments to arrive, a few moments to complete the mission and a few moments to return to base and rest.

This is important because we don’t know when the next mission will appear and we may be caught with several heroes unavailable… You have to manage the times.

Missions are only available for a few seconds and if we don’t send anyone they will be considered a failure… Although it is very difficult to send heroes to each of them.

When we complete the mission, we have to see the result: A graph shows what qualities were necessary to fulfill it and what we contributed. Based on this, calculate a success percentage.

That’s where luck comes in: we can fail a mission with a 75% chance of success, but it’s unlikely. A mission with a 100% chance is an automatic success, of course.

If we fail the mission, our heroes may lose morale and be less effective or even injured.

What if we win? In this case, they accumulate experience, which can lead them to level up. If this happens, we can give an extra point to one of its characteristics, to mold it to our liking.

Also, if it’s a team mission, you can Synergy between colleagues improves.

As they and we level up, we can have more help: coffee to reduce rest time, unique abilities for the heroes depending on the order in which we place them… The strategic possibilities increase.

Each episode has some moments of strategy, but what we see most is the narrative part, built based on video scenes (moved in real time with wonderful cel-shading) that change depending on our decisions.

On many occasions we have to choose answers against the clock. It can be simple things like making a joke or more important things: do we fire a hero who made a mistake or do we give him another chance? Shall we kiss that girl who seems to “want to talk”?

As you can imagine, many of these decisions affect not only our relationships with the characters (we’ll see messages like “this character will remember this”), but also They branch the story until they give rise to very disparate experiences. from one game to another.

The game wasn’t made for us to try to find the “right path” to convey the story to us, but we must be aware that our decisions change what happens.

This is where experience especially shines, because there are very interesting plot twistsas well as characters who, regardless of their powers, are very human: sometimes they don’t know how to express what they feel, they get frustrated with some things we say, they joke…

Oh captain, my captain

It’s inevitable that you’ll end up liking your stories. and see them increasingly as people who are like you and me: they have aspirations, they have frustrations and, of course, they need human contact, each in their own way.

At the end of each episode, we see the typical credits and, next to it, we can see statistics on how many players made the same decisions as us or how successful we were in sending heroes. It’s as morbid as it is fun to see this.

All this does let’s get hooked on its episodic format as if it were the best series on TV, only here who chooses the destination. We won’t say anything more, but it all leads up to some incredibly intense final episodes.

You will certainly notice similarities with films or series like Invincible. Yes, they exist. Here it also appeals more to the adult audience, with reflections on death, but also many sexual references and humor about drugs and other addictions.

The narrative is more of an “office comedy” at the beginning, to gradually gain drama as events progress, but we always see the characters from a close-up perspective.

In this sense, the dubbing of great actors like Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) any Jeffrey Wright (Western World).

They do a magnificent job of voicing animations that are also very human, although of course, These voices are only in English.

The subtitles in Spanish are very goodbut in an experience so based on what the characters say, Reading subtitles can be a burden for some players.

The gameplay is finished with some very basic moments of quick time events (based only on a few buttons and the stick), but they require good reflexes, especially in moments of fight.

Finally, we have some hacking minigame in which we have to take an object to a key node, avoiding antivirus, discovering passwords against the clock… Like the rest of the elements, it’s nothing new, but it’s all very well implemented.

And that’s it Dispatch has a great rhythmwhich goes from routine coffee moments to life and death battles almost without us noticing and while we let ourselves be carried away by magnificently constructed dialogues.

On a visual level, its clean and colorful style makes us enjoy that fusion between comics and reality.thanks to artistic designs that seek direct identification with superhero codes, with a small touch of modernity.

Briefly, Dispatch is one of the last big surprises of 2025. He doesn’t invent the wheel, but his method is so polished that it’s hard not to be hooked from start to finish.

This story tells us that not all heroes wear capes and that those who wear them are people too. Bravo, Estúdio Adhoc.