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. But if you’re worried the only input you’ll have in Dispatch is pressing a button at the right time, or picking the different narrative choices that affect the game’s story, you should know AdHoc has a more compelling, non-optional gameplay hook that deserves as much attention as the game’s charming storytelling. And it’s in the title of the game itself.
Set in a fictional version of Los Angeles, California where superheroes are real, Dispatch centers on Robert Robertson III, a former hero turned dispatcher for SDN. It’s a private security and service company, except instead of sending paramedics out, SDN (or Superhero Dispatch Network) sends out caped heroes to tackle clients’ problems big and small. This serves as the basis for Dispatch’s core minigame, and it’s one that could honestly be a standalone game in and of itself.
Whether that’s rescuing a cat from a tree, breaking up drunken tailgates, or rescuing people from a collapsing dam, there’s no job SDN won’t help out with so long as you’re a paying customer. And while the superheroes out in the field get most of the credit, Dispatch’s true heroes are the team of behind the scenes blue-collar dispatchers who match the right heroes with the right crisis, or at the very least, try to.
The actual mechanics of dispatching heroes takes the form of a full-on minigame that you play at least once per episode. As Robert sits down at his work station for another day of work, players assume a first-person perspective at SDN’s proprietary dispatching program that shows a map of South LA, various crimes that appear in real time, and a menu full of heroes waiting to be dispatched.
The key to success is dispatching the right hero for the job. For example, if there is a cat stuck in a tree, you’d want to send a speedy hero who can fly, not someone who solves problems with their fists, who’d likely have a lower success rate of rescuing said cat. Likewise, if a gang of grunts is robbing a bank, then you’d send in some bruisers to take care of business. The initial description of each mission clues you in to which skills are best suited to the job at hand, and each hero has individual stats with strengths and weaknesses — your success will depend on how well you line up the heroes’ skills with the task at hand. The less overlap there is between skillset and problem, the less likely your hero is to succeed. But get the right hero on a crime, and they’ll solve the problem and level up while they’re at it.
There are real emotional stakes to dispatching as well. Failure is a very real possibility, especially during rush hour when heroes become unavailable due to exhaustion. This means you’re racing against the clock to try to save as many people as possible, and when you find that you can’t help everyone, Dispatch makes that emotional burden feel very real, and very disappointing thanks to the feedback you receive in real-time from your team of superheroes. And when Robert doesn’t get flak from the team, he’ll also cry out in frustration if a job goes poorly.
What I found truly surprising is how this dispatching minigame fits into the burgeoning subgenre of labor simulators. That is, games that revolve around basic, blue-collar jobs. PowerWash Simulator, for example, is about powerwashing dirty surfaces, and it’s one of the most popular games around. In the same way, the dispatching minigame feels very much a part of this microgenre thanks to some clever design choices that put you, as Robert, directly into the action.
The entire dispatching minigame is played directly on Robert’s ’90s-era workstation PC, which you interface with in first-person. You might as well be sitting in the cubicle at SDN yourself. Plus, get good enough at dispatching and you’ll find that you can enter a flow state: a very real state of being when you find yourself becoming particularly adept at instantly diagnosing a crime and knowing already the best hero for the job. It made me wonder if I could actually be a dispatcher in real life, though I will say being unemployed means I find myself wondering if I could do most jobs in real life these days.
All this is to say, if you’ve tried choice-based narrative games before and find yourself wishing there were a little more meat on the bones beyond just quick-time events, one of this year’s most popular games has a full-blown sim tucked inside it that is very much worth playing for its own sake.