Anyone Available To Get Some Kid's Cat Out Of A Tree?

At the risk of initiating a vortex of anticlimactic disappointment, I'm going to begin with the best and work back. Seems like a bad idea until you consider the very real possibility that events, circumstances or just good old ennui could see leaving the best 'til last turn into leaving the best 'til never. 

Dispatch was, by a number of country miles, the best of the six demos I downloaded and played for this June's Next Fest but it would have been one of the best in any batch. As a demo it could hardly have done a better job of giving a glimpse the game good enough to make me think it was something I needed to see in full. 

Structurally, the demo seems to be an early, although possibly not the opening, sequence taken from the finished game, the kind of slice a lot of developers lift out to put in the shop window, with varying degrees of success. It works exceptionally well here for the simple reason that it's a very solid and entertaining introduction that slips its tutorial functions in almost unnoticed. Demos that are basically just the tutorial rarely convince.

The whole thing only takes about twenty minutes but it packs an enormous amount in without ever feeling overwhelming. The first half is a visual novel with the looks of a quality animated movie or TV show and the script and voice acting to match. The characters are immediately relatable and recognizable, the dialog is witty, the jokes land and the whole thing just rips along.

There's a fair amount of player-interaction in the form of dialog choices, all of which come with a timer. You have to pick one of three responses and, depending on your reading speed, you only have just about enough time to read them all and consider the implications for a moment before you need to pick one. This sounds as if it might be stressful but I didn't find it so in the least. I generally dislike timers but in this case it added a sense of welcome urgency to what can sometimes feel like a fairly rote and purposeless process.

It did raise two issues, however, both of which occurred to me almost as soon as the mechanic appeared: do the choices affect later gameplay and what happens if you don't pick one in time? 

As to the first, according to the description on the Steam Store page "In Dispatch, every decision you make influences the unfolding narrative. From banter in the breakroom to life-or-death situations in the field, your choices affect your relationships with the heroes, their allegiances, and the path your own story takes." That's quite fluffy, I'd say. You could easily have all of that inside a purely linear narrative. There's certainly no way to know for sure from the demo how much, if at all, any of your "choices matter", to use the infuriating jargon of the genre.

The second, though, what happens if you dither so long you time out on the response, I really should have tested it while I was playing. It's a big mark in the demo's favor that it never even occurred to me to do it until after I'd finished. I was much too invested in the story to start messing around with the controls for science.

Luckily, the demo still works even though Next Fest has ended, so I just re-ran the first few minutes to try it out. All that happens is the choice defaults to whatever's first in the list. You could just sit back and watch it all play out in front of you like a movie if you wanted.

At least, you could until you got to the second half, which is when the game comes in. Unlike a lot of visual novels or walking simulators, there really is a game here, one that requires you pay attention and click buttons at the right time.

The set-up for Dispatch is that you play an ex-superhero, one who used to have a mechanized suit that gave him powers but doesn't any more, although how he came to lose it is not disclosed in the demo. You're now reduced to taking a job at what is effectively a superhero call center. Your new job (The demo shows you arriving on your first day.) is to sit in an open-plan office in front of a screen and field calls from the public asking for super-heroic assistance. 

The jobs vary wildly, from PAs for businesses to pet rescue to armed robbery. You assign available heroes from your roster and send them to do the job. All your team have different powers, skill sets, aptitudes and red flags so fitting the right hero to the right job is crucial. So is managing them as they do it. 

Sometimes you can leave them to get on with things on their own but on some jobs you need to be available to take their calls and provide specific advice in real time on tactics such as whether they should go for a full frontal assault or sneak round the back. When they've succeeded (Or in my experience made a complete hash of things.) its down to you to review their performance.

And that's it, in the demo anyway. It's a lot harder than it sounds because the calls just keep on coming and pretty quickly it all starts to fall apart. Every job has criteria that ought to be met but good luck with that! It goes from a thoughtful selection process to a juggling act to a series of compromises and finally just comes down to sending whoever the hell is available.

Or it did for me. I imagine the idea of the full game is that you get better at doing your job as you gain experience but by the end I was just glad to be able to send anyone to stop the bar fights or get the little girl's cat down from a tree.  

It was almost always obvious which hero would be best-suited to a job but I'd usually find I'd already sent them out on the previous call and they were still on it. Or they'd messed up and were recovering, because they may be superheroes but they still need time to decompress after every mission. And then sometimes they'd just go off somewhere without telling me where or why...

It's the kind of gameplay I generally dislike but I thoroughly enjoyed it here, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was funny. The heroes are, frankly, not the cream. They all have issues. Some of them have more than others but there's not one that you'd really trust to go where they're told and do what they're asked without close supervision. They all chatter on comms all the time and none of them is at all impressed with you, your history or your performance.

The humor made it feel like fun but the main reason I didn't find it stressful in the way I would have expected was I couldn't see how my performance mattered. There didn't seem to be any penalty for screwing up that I could see so after a while I just leaned into it and stopped worrying that I was sending the ex-thief who can turn herself invisible to go deal with the robbery at the jewellery store. I can only assume that how well you perform in your role as a dispatcher does matter in the full game but it doesn't seem to mean much in the demo.

The doing-your-job segment lasts most of the second half. Then there's a brief return to the visual novel before a final montage sequence kicks in as a kind of coda. It's full of what I assume must be scenes from the full game and it makes it plain there's some sort of over-arching plot and narrative and that the visual novel aspect isn't merely a framing device for a superhero-skinned office sim. 

And the clips in the montage are really good. They're like scenes from a movie and it's a movie I'd like to see. I went straight to Steam after the demo ended and wishlisted Dispatch immediately.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the demo is professional and the game looks to be the same. The people behind it include writers and directors of Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us among others. They know how to do this sort of thing. 

If the writing is good, the graphics are easily its equal. The character design is excellent and the aesthetic is exactly right, all clean lines and flat surfaces like a good superhero show ought to have. The UI is uncluttered and intuitive and there's a wealth of lore and background material, all presented in a very approachable and attractive style.

Altogether a first-class demo for what looks like it could be a first-class game. Especially if you're a superhero fan. 

Or a fan of low-status, poorly-paid office work, I guess. I bet someone is.