Dispatch’s eight-episode run is over, and I stand firm in my belief that the best moment in AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy comes in episode five, “Team Building.” As the title suggests, protagonist Robert Robertson III takes his staff of reformed villains out for a night at a bar. The problem is, they’re headed to a villain bar. Robert certainly doesn’t look the part, and the bar’s goon and lackey patrons are ready to start a fight when they see him there. What happens next is probably Dispatch’s best use of the old Telltale house style, and it’s got players popping off and covering their eyes in equal measure.
The fight begins with Robert getting a blow to the back of the head, then waking up with his team outside a fast-food joint. At first, you think Robert was knocked out cold and his team got him out of there, so now they’re all just crashing at the local, legally distinct Taco Bell. But then, the group starts to hand Robert his food, and suddenly, you have a QTE to stick your straw in your soda. All right, seems an odd moment to introduce a QTE given that the game uses those pretty sparingly, but—holy shit, I just stabbed a man in the face with a handful of darts!
No, Mecha Man did not simply go down without a fight, and the Z-Team wasn’t about to let their boss get made a fool of at their favorite watering hole. So now we swap back and forth between the quiet calm of Z-Team’s late-night snack run and the comically violent excess of their earlier bar brawl. Folks, it’s absolute cinema. The whole fight is set to Thot Squad’s “Hoes Depressed,” a catchy-as-hell cheerleader-style hip-hop bop performed by Prism, the Z-Team’s light-manipulating influencer. As the bass bumps through the bar, Robert and co. are making the Red Ring thugs regret even glancing in their direction.
There are so many standout gags, I don’t even know where to begin. Prism using her light powers to swat away a man who dared to interrupt her performance, causing him to cover his face and scream that she “temporarily” blinded him, only for her to retort, “Fuck you mean, ‘temporarily’? Bitch, you blind foreva!” is a standout. I also love when the devilish Malevola opens a portal outside the bar, allowing Golem, the team’s giant mud monster who had been exiled outside the establishment, to come in like a bull in a china shop. Punch Up using his short stature to run around below most people’s line of sight and give everyone a fist to the nads is also pretty fun. Those individual character moments are great, but the most effective parts of the whole sequence are the QTE-driven transitions between chilling at the not-Taco Bell and Robert doing some of the most violent non-lethal things he can do to a low-level grunt.
Every time Dispatch went back to the restaurant and the Z-Team started giving each other shit about the way the night went, it went on just long enough to lull me into a sense of familiar ease, having forgotten the carnage I had just watched unfold. Then, someone would hand Robert something inconspicuous, like a hot sauce packet, I’d tear the packet open—and immediately be thrown into a scene of Robert yanking the cybernetic implants out of someone’s skull. By the time I was actually biting into the food I’d ordered, I knew not to let my guard down and braced myself for the game to leap back and show me what Robert bit into back at the bar. In addition to being very exciting to play, those moments have been some of the most entertaining to watch people react to, because even after Dispatch has established this trick, it still manages to catch players off guard.
The whole ordeal does end up accomplishing what Robert set out to do, at least. The team becomes a lot closer, and, depending on your choices, will trust their boss more than ever. Sometimes, all you need to bridge the gap between heroes and villains is a good bar brawl.
