Dispatch has just aired its final two episodes, concluding its first “season” that may be followed by a second, given the unexpectedly huge success of the game.
Now that I’ve finished the story, I can say that Dispatch is cemented in my top 5 games of the year, and that’s in a very crowded year full of excellent releases. This is almost entirely because of the story and voicework, and less because of the gameplay, which I’ll get to in a minute.
This is going to get into spoilers for one specific ending. There are many, many variants of these by the end, depending on both your choices and in some cases, luck, but this is how mine shook out:
- Cut Coupe
- Never cut Invisigal
- Romanced Blonde Blazer
- Supported and trusted Invisigal after her nonsense
- Killed Shroud
I would consider this an overwhelmingly “happy” ending, minus one annoyance where I was not given the chance to “forgive” and bring back Coupe to the team, presumably because I did not beat her during the “Siege of LA” mission.
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While dispatching heroes as a mechanic grew on me over time, I still found it annoying that so much of it was based on luck, which in that case, included a story point. I was about to send four heroes to definitely beat Coupe, but time ran out on one last crisis I couldn’t get to, and so I couldn’t. I would not say I played especially poorly or hadn’t leveled my team up, but I lost a bunch of 70% and 80% chance of success missions, so I failed mostly through luck. Frustrating, and in the end, I’m just not sure about how I felt about the one aspect of gameplay in this entire game (minus a few seemingly pointless quicktime events and the occasional hacking minigame, which is also not great).
I do think that Dispatch sort of herds you into a “correct” ending with the entire Invisigal storyline. While we learn that A) she was secretly Red Ring, B) she was the one who actually blew up your suit and I guess C) that she was still technically an infiltrator in your team even after all this, the game really wants you to give her the benefit of the doubt and trust her implicitly. That’s what I did, and sure enough, hey, she saves you and is good in the end. I know if you reject her that she will in fact turn bad, but I mean, obviously, right? The ending here felt a little by the numbers, even if in the end it was the “happy one” with a tight Z-team (minus Coupe) and me making out with Blonde Blazer on the hood of a car (well, Mandy, in any case).
I am tempted to go back through the game one more time and make entirely opposite decisions, which will no doubt end in fire and flames. I thought that dramatically, the ending I got really worked, but it also reinforced the notion that I thought this would have made a better TV show, as the “choices,” aka picking what is clearly going to be a disastrous path, were a little too obvious to me.
I loved Dispatch. I cannot wait for season 2. With a month and a half to go, it is firmly planted on my Best Of 2025 list. Just a few things bothered me here and there. Not enough for me not to recommend it to literally everyone I know, however.
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