Dispatch, the upcoming workplace superhero comedy adventure game with a strategy layer from a group of ex-Telltale developers, is coming to PC and PS5 on Oct...
There is a demo out on Steam, if anyone wants to try it.
Edit: So, I played the demo. Takes about 30 minutes. The game has a lot of charm, but that much was clear from the trailer. The gameplay is… basic. There is a map on which missions pop up. You choose the hero to send there, based on their skills. You get some hacking minigames and every now and then you can choose what your character says or does in a cutscene.
If I had to critique something else besides the basic gameplay, it’s the lack of feedback after a mission. You get a voice line and a little graph that shows how well your chosen hero’s skills matched the requirements of the mission.
Also some missions were clearly meant to be done by one specific hero, but if they are on cooldown or already busy elsewhere you have to send someone else. Made me feel like I did something wrong. I think the game will be its strongest after you have already played it once. Knowing who to send where and being aware of character specific missions. But at the same time, a lot of the charm of the game will be gone by the second time you play it, since you already saw most of the very well done cutscenes.
The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.
Exactly my experience. I tried 3 runs, bat was on cooldown for “his” mission on the first one, he was in the wrong form in the second one, and I failed the rng on the third one, like, I just wanted to see the good outcome from that mission (:
It does have some replayability on the map section by just sending different people to different jobs to see different unique dialogs (eg: sending someone good at dealing with fires to the “shit’s on fire yo” mission, or sending the Pyro that caused it), but I’m not sure it’ll entice a second run if the game is mostly a linear story.
There is a demo out on Steam, if anyone wants to try it.
Edit: So, I played the demo. Takes about 30 minutes. The game has a lot of charm, but that much was clear from the trailer. The gameplay is… basic. There is a map on which missions pop up. You choose the hero to send there, based on their skills. You get some hacking minigames and every now and then you can choose what your character says or does in a cutscene.
If I had to critique something else besides the basic gameplay, it’s the lack of feedback after a mission. You get a voice line and a little graph that shows how well your chosen hero’s skills matched the requirements of the mission. Also some missions were clearly meant to be done by one specific hero, but if they are on cooldown or already busy elsewhere you have to send someone else. Made me feel like I did something wrong. I think the game will be its strongest after you have already played it once. Knowing who to send where and being aware of character specific missions. But at the same time, a lot of the charm of the game will be gone by the second time you play it, since you already saw most of the very well done cutscenes.
The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.
Exactly my experience. I tried 3 runs, bat was on cooldown for “his” mission on the first one, he was in the wrong form in the second one, and I failed the rng on the third one, like, I just wanted to see the good outcome from that mission (:
It does have some replayability on the map section by just sending different people to different jobs to see different unique dialogs (eg: sending someone good at dealing with fires to the “shit’s on fire yo” mission, or sending the Pyro that caused it), but I’m not sure it’ll entice a second run if the game is mostly a linear story.