Dispatch

 So I finally got around to playing through Dispatch over the weekend. It's been on my radar for quite a while, though the episodic releases made me hold off.

Story and characters - I kind of love 'em. There are plenty of things I could nitpick about the world building, but it's sound enough to suspect disbelief for the 8-ish hours of run time. There are few choices that really seem meaningful in the end, but the overall trajectory of the story works. The characters are pretty flavorful and can be memorable. There's some good emotional beats woven in too.

I can be more critical of the gameplay, though. The (optional) QTEs and dialog/story choices are there, but don't make for much of a game. The 'game' consists of the dispatching shifts and little hacking minigames. The latter works to break things up a bit without being very notable. 

The dispatching... actually has a fair amount of depth built in. Characters level up with XP to get better stats that you assign. There are opportunities to train them to unlock additional abilities. There are synergies between characters that increase effectiveness. And all that comes together to compare the stats of who you sent on a mission against the stat requirements of the mission. There's a sound tactics/puzzle setup there.

But it's also all done under time pressure. You have limited time to send people on a mission, so if your ideal picks are on another or resting between, you may have to send someone else. There may be more missions up than people to deploy. The pressure adds challenge, but it also blurs the very depth I was just referring to because you don't get time to consider those factors thoroughly before having to make a decision. You're almost prevented from engaging with the system as created. On top of that, you've got 1 or 2 dispatching shifts in each of the 8 episodes, which ends up being not a lot of time with the game part of the game.

Some specific observations:

• I didn't realize Malevola could heal injured people until far too late.
• Movement speed increases seemed largely useless... until (surprise!) the last dispatching session, which opens the map up a lot more.
• Golem gaining the ability to fill out other hero slots with duplicates that increase his stats made him my go to "I'm short on people and need to get this done" choice for any physical challenge.
• Sonar changing alternating his stat spread with each mission was annoying - I wanted be able to rely on his intellect stat.
• I really didn't want to cut Coupé or Sonar, as much as the whole team are still jerks at that point.
• Robert may not have a super power, but he has action hero physical endurance.

So... I really like Dispatch, but I think you could watch a playthrough an get almost the same experience (to get everything of note might take 2-3 playthroughs or specifically looking for variant scenes).