[Seong Chan-eol’s Comic Books] Meet Your Own Team of “Loser Heroes” in Dispatch

This week, I’m taking a brief detour to introduce something other than a comic. Still, it’s closer to animation influenced by comics, so I can promise comic fans will find plenty to enjoy. It’s the 2025 game Dispatch. For Koreans, the title might immediately bring the entertainment industry to mind, but this game follows a dispatcher who sends superheroes where they’re needed. Though it’s a game, with its story told largely through cutscenes, it could just as easily be called an “interactive movie.”

Dispatch is set in a world where superheroes operate and an organization exists to manage them. Of course, not every superhero is all that “super.” The protagonist, Robert Robertson III, is the third generation of his family, after his grandfather and father, to go by “Mecha Man.” An ordinary human who fights crime in a mech suit, Robert attacks Shroud, the villain who killed his father, only to be counterattacked and have his suit destroyed. As he prepares to retire without getting his revenge, the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN), an organization that manages and deploys heroes, offers to repair his mech if he works as a dispatcher for one of its teams. The catch: the Z-Team he’ll be handling is made up of former villains.

Against this backdrop, 〈Dispatch〉 shows an animated cutscene, then puts players in Robert’s shoes to carry out dispatch missions before returning to another animated cutscene. The game has eight chapters in all. As a superhero story, Dispatch is rooted more firmly in comic-book sensibilities than in movies. It tells a chaotic story of growth, but its characters are either heroes who regularly tangle with criminals or former villains turned heroes, so they have plenty of salty banter. True to its adults-only rating, F-bombs and sexual jokes fly constantly. They may seem to hate each other enough to kill, but their distinctly Western, coolly delivered exchanges make the influence of comic-book-era superhero stories unmistakable. Playing it, you can’t help thinking of superhero stories aimed at adults, such as Suicide Squad or The Boys.

That doesn’t mean you simply watch it like a comic or animated series. As you settle into Robert’s role of coaxing the Z-Team along and helping it grow, you can’t help becoming fond of teammates who once seemed downright useless. Between the cutscenes that move the story forward, Dispatch hands players Robert’s job: sending heroes out on missions. Completing a call requires dispatching the right hero for the type of incident, so players must learn each teammate’s stats, strengths and weaknesses. Along the way, they’ll feel themselves growing attached to these characters. Successfully matching heroes to calls also lets you improve teammates’ stats, a progression system that gives you even more reason to care about them.

Another thing I like is how much personality the Z-Team characters have, thanks to the “former villains turned heroes” premise. There’s Punch Up, who has the strength of 10 men but has shrunk to 1 meter tall; Prism, an influencer whose fashion resembles flamboyant stage costumes; and even Golem, a cutie(?) born from mud and construction-site debris. The creators show a knack for giving familiar-seeming ideas a slight twist and turning them into distinctive characters.

Because it is, at heart, an interactive game, part of the fun is bringing a bit of yourself to the story. Not every choice is designed to rewrite the plot, but small changes in how the characters interact add their own charm. Quite a few choices do alter the story’s major course, giving you a reason to return to the world of Dispatch even after reaching the end. One fairly significant drawback for an interactive game remains, though: even now, quite some time after release, it still doesn’t support skipping cutscenes.

Dispatch has been released across platforms, including PC, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. I recommend it if you want a different kind of superhero experience.