How this guide is built: Dispatch is two games at once — a choice-driven story where your decisions quietly shape three different endings, and a strategy game where you assign superheroes to emergencies. The internet is already full of two kinds of page for it: choice-by-choice transcripts that spoil the story beat for beat, and flat “best hero” lists. We’ve done the more useful thing. First we teach the strategy layer the game barely explains — how the pentagon actually scores a mission, why over-levelling a hero can lose you calls, and how to beat the hacking puzzles. Then we give a spoiler-light map of all eight episodes so you always know where you are. And only then, behind a clearly marked spoiler wall, do we explain how the endings really work — the hidden counters and their exact thresholds — so you can steer to any ending yourself instead of following a script. Everything is in our own words and cross-checked against the official Steam page (app 2592160), Wikipedia, Polygon, Game Rant, IntoIndieGames and two community Steam guides.
What is Dispatch?
Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy from AdHoc Studio — a team built from the writers and directors behind Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us — and it shows. It released episodically over four weeks in late 2025 (the first two episodes on 22 October 2025, the last two on 12 November), then arrived complete on PC and PlayStation 5, with Switch and Xbox versions following. It was one of the best-reviewed games of the year (Metacritic in the high 80s, around 97% of critics recommending it) and a genuine commercial breakout, selling over four million copies, a million of them in its first ten days.
You play Robert Robertson III, a.k.a. Mecha Man (voiced by Aaron Paul) — a third-generation superhero with no actual powers, just the high-tech mech suit his grandfather built. While hunting the man who killed his father, Robert’s suit is destroyed, and to pay for repairs he’s forced to take a desk job at the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN). There he runs the Z-Team: a roster of reformed super-villains who are now, technically, the heroes you send out to handle the city’s emergencies. The cast is stacked — Laura Bailey as the invisible, asthmatic ex-villain Invisigal, Jeffrey Wright as Track Star, Matthew Mercer as the antagonist Shroud, plus a wall of recognisable streamers and creators in supporting roles.
The framing that matters for a guide: Dispatch is directed almost entirely by your choices, but it hides the maths. Most dialogue is cosmetic, a handful of decisions quietly move invisible counters, and the dispatch missions run on a scoring model the tutorial never fully spells out. Understand those two systems and the game opens up completely. Note too that it has generous accessibility options — including a “playable without timed input” mode — so if the dialogue timer stresses you out, you can switch it off and think.
The strategy layer the game barely explains
Every emergency — the game calls them Calls — is scored on five stats arranged as a pentagon: Combat (Attack), Vigor (Defense), Mobility, Charisma and Intelligence. Each call shows a required shape inside that pentagon, and each hero you assign contributes their own stats. The single most important thing to understand is how success is calculated:
- Success is roughly the percentage of the call’s required pentagon that your team’s combined pentagon covers. It’s an area calculation, not a checklist. That has a huge, counter-intuitive consequence: it’s usually more important to meet a call’s lowest requirements than its highest ones. A team that’s great at Combat but has zero Charisma will score worse on a balanced call than a team that’s merely okay at everything, because the missing corner punches a big hole in the covered area.
- Vigor is the most valuable stat. Because of where it sits on the pentagon (adjacent to both Combat and Mobility), a point of Vigor covers more area on more calls than a point of anything else. Calls also tend to demand a lot of it. When in doubt, level Vigor.
- Anything at 80%+ success will essentially always succeed. You do not need to chase 100% on every call — once you’re comfortably past 80%, the risk is negligible and you’re better off saving your strong heroes for the next emergency.
- Beware the auto-fail from too much of a stat. This is the trap nobody expects. Some calls will auto-fail if a hero’s stat is above a hidden ceiling (excess Combat is the usual culprit — sending a brawler to a delicate situation). This is exactly why blindly maxing every hero is a mistake: late-game you sometimes want a low-Combat hero on the bench. Don’t over-level for its own sake.
Two more systems quietly decide a lot of your shifts:
- Synergy pairs. Certain heroes work better together and add a flat success bonus when deployed on the same call: +5% / +10% / +15% as the pair’s synergy levels up. The base pairs are Sonar + Malevola, Flambae + Prism, Invisigal + Golem, and Punch Up + Coupé. Pairing them isn’t just free success — from Episode 3 on, the team starts sabotaging each other under pressure, and synergy partners won’t sabotage one another. Keep your pairs together and you sidestep the whole problem.
- Mid-call choices (Disruptions / Skill Checks). Many calls interrupt mid-action with a decision, usually gated behind a specific stat. Two things to know: a “hacking” option, when offered, succeeds automatically for any hero regardless of stats; and picking a hero’s character-specific option grants that hero roughly 33% bonus XP, which is the fastest, cleanest way to level the heroes you care about. If you’re trying to grow a particular hero, route their personal choices to them.
Building and levelling the Z-Team
You spend skill points to raise each hero’s five stats (up to Rank 10), and every hero has a unique Power that bends the rules. A few are worth specialising hard into, because their Power makes a lopsided build pay off:
- Sonar — one of the strongest heroes in the game. His Power (a bat/hybrid form) can auto-complete certain calls outright, so you mostly just want to feed his Intelligence and Charisma (both rare stats on the roster). A +10 Intelligence / +10 Charisma Sonar is a problem-solver.
- Golem — a pure Vigor wall; push him to +10 Vigor and do what you like with the rest. A secondary Power turns him into a genuine powerhouse later.
- Invisigal — a Mobility main (to +10), with Intelligence and Combat behind it.
- Coupé — counter-intuitively, lean into Intelligence (it’s scarce across the team), plus Mobility and Vigor.
- Punch Up — Combat, Charisma and Vigor; Flambae — a Mobility/Vigor/Combat generalist; Prism — Charisma main (can pivot to Intelligence); Malevola — the great all-rounder, level her evenly so she fits any call.
The general rule: specialise to a hero’s shape, build out your four synergy pairs, and use character-specific call choices to funnel XP. And remember the over-level warning from the previous section — if you’re chasing the harder achievements, it’s sometimes correct to leave points unspent so you keep a low-Combat option available for the calls that punish it.
The hacking minigames
Woven through the story are 28 hacking puzzles. Mechanically they’re about routing a signal pulse through a network of nodes to a central core before an anti-virus reaches it. You’ll Alter Paths with directional inputs to redirect the pulse, clear blocking anti-viruses (electricity nodes destroy them), and on later levels deal with curveballs like frequency matching and, on the final one, inverted controls. None are brutal on their own.
The real difficulty is the checkpoint system, which is genuinely bad — and worth knowing before you care about achievements. If you fail a hack (or botch an important call), there is no “reload last checkpoint”; you have to quit to the main menu and reload your save, which usually means replaying the entire shift, RNG and all. Two practical takeaways:
- If you’re going for the “H4ck3d By R0b3rt” achievement (clear all 28 without a single failure), treat each hack as a save-state moment and steady your nerves — one slip costs the whole shift. It’s the hardest achievement in the game for exactly this reason.
- Do not pause the game in the moment right after you finish a hack. There’s a known glitch where pausing too quickly can fail to return you to the shift map and force a full shift restart even though you completed the hack. Let the screen settle first.
The shape of the game: a spoiler-light episode map
The game runs across eight episodes. Here’s the whole arc at a glance — what each episode is about and the big decision it puts in front of you — with no story spoilers. Use it to stay oriented; the spoiler-heavy detail of each decision is walled off below.
| Episode | What it’s about | The decision that matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Pivot | Prologue as Mecha Man; the suit is lost; you interview at SDN. A dispatch tutorial. | How you treat the captured villain (sets your first Hero/Antihero points). |
| 2. Onboard | First real day with the Z-Team; your first full dispatch shift (12 calls). | Mostly a free shift — the best place to grab the “clean shift” achievement. |
| 3. Turnover | Management forces cuts; sabotage mechanics appear. | Cut Sonar or Coupé from the team. |
| 4. Restructure | You replace the cut hero, and your romance arc opens up. | Recruit Waterboy or Phenomaman; dinner with Blazer or movies with Invisigal. |
| 5. Team Building | A city blackout; hacking restores districts; the team gets curious about you. | Reveal your identity to the Z-Team, or keep it secret. |
| 6. Moving Parts | A heist; the conspiracy around Robert’s past tightens. | Story-driven; your earlier identity choice changes who’s available. |
| 7. Retrospective | Flashbacks and revelations; the romance paths lock here. | Cut or defend Invisigal; Track Star or Invisigal; the locker-room kiss. |
| 8. Synergy | The finale: a long night shift, a boss fight, and the confrontation with Shroud. | Spare or kill the antagonist, and several last calls that resolve the cast. |
The rhythm is steady: most episodes give you a dispatch shift to manage and one decision that feeds the hidden ending counters. The next two sections explain those counters and decisions — and they contain spoilers.
⚠ SPOILER WALL — everything below discusses the major branch choices and the three endings. If you’d rather discover them yourself, skip to “Achievements & getting to 100%.”
How the endings actually work (spoilers)
Here is the thing the game never tells you and the single most useful fact in this guide: your ending is not decided by one big choice at the end. It’s the sum of dozens of small choices across all eight episodes, tallied into three independent hidden counters. There are three ending dimensions, and they’re entangled:
- Romance — Blonde Blazer, Invisigal, or no one.
- Mentor — do you succeed or fail as a mentor to Invisigal.
- Hero — do you end the game a true hero, an antihero, or an ordinary everyman.
Each runs on a numeric counter, and you hit an ending by crossing a threshold:
- Hero counter: reach 20+ Hero points for the true hero ending, or 20+ Antihero points for the antihero ending. If you finish with fewer than 20 of both, you get the everyman ending. Points come from how you behave throughout — for instance, dropping the captured villain off your balcony back in Episode 1 adds an Antihero point. If you want one specific outcome, consistently pick the “heroic” or the “ruthless” option whenever the game offers a moral fork.
- Mentor counter: you need 45 or more on the hidden “Robert Mentor Counter” to succeed as Invisigal’s mentor. This is the one that catches people out, because…
- Romance counter (“Sweet Exit Counter”): you need it at 10 or higher to romance Invisigal — and succeeding as her mentor is a prerequisite for romancing her. You cannot get the Invisigal romance without also clearing the mentor threshold.
So, concretely, here’s how to lock each romance:
- Blonde Blazer: take her to dinner in Episode 4 (not the movies with Invisigal) and kiss her. Don’t kiss Invisigal later.
- Invisigal: keep your Sweet Exit Counter at 10+ across the game, kiss her in the locker room in Episode 7, and succeed as her mentor (45+ Mentor). All three are required.
- No one: the cleanest route is to follow Invisigal’s path but deliberately fail as a mentor, or simply break the relationship off in Episode 7 — the game counts a break-up as “no romance,” which conveniently means you can bank that ending by replaying only Episode 8 rather than a whole extra playthrough.
If you only play once, decide which of the three dimensions you care about most and pick consistently toward it. If you’re a completionist, the developers’ structure rewards roughly two and a half playthroughs: one full run for one romance + set of choices, a second for the alternates, and a partial Episode 8 replay for the “no romance” ending. Because the counters are invisible, many players run a community mod that surfaces the point values of each choice — handy if you don’t want to track them by feel.
The major branch choices, and what they actually change
Most dialogue in Dispatch is flavour. These are the decisions that genuinely fork the story, episode by episode:
- Episode 1 — the villain on the balcony & “how do you feel about your father?” Your treatment of the captured goon is your first nudge on the Hero/Antihero counter. The father question is character flavour (an “I love my dad” beat). The bar run-in with Flambae — throwing water or alcohol — and the kiss at the Hollywood sign are cosmetic; pick whatever you like.
- Episode 3 — cut Sonar or Coupé. Management makes you drop one teammate. This is a real, lasting roster loss for the rest of that playthrough, and the two cuts even unlock different items/achievements (a tie if you cut Sonar, a knife if you cut Coupé). Mechanically, think about which synergy pair you’re willing to break and which hero’s stats you’ll miss more — Sonar’s auto-clears are hard to replace, but Coupé’s scarce Intelligence is too.
- Episode 4 — recruit Waterboy or Phenomaman. Your replacement hero. Phenomaman arrives with high, static stats but doesn’t level up. Waterboy starts weak and learns fast, but has a chaotic quirk (he can injure a teammate and sometimes forces himself onto calls). For a smooth story run, Phenomaman is the safer pick; for an optimised long game, Waterboy’s growth — and his usefully low Combat — can be an asset.
- Episode 5 — reveal your identity, or keep it secret. Telling the Z-Team you’re Mecha Man is a big character beat, but it has a concrete cost: Flambae becomes unavailable for the following episode. Keeping the secret keeps your roster intact. Either is valid; just don’t reveal it if you’re mid-way through a tight optimisation run.
- Episode 7 — cut or defend Invisigal, and Track Star vs Invisigal. This is the emotional pivot of the game and where the romance/mentor paths lock. Defending Invisigal is the road to her redemption (and her romance); cutting her sends her arc somewhere much darker. This is also your last clean chance to break off a romance for the “no one” ending.
- Episode 8 — spare or kill, and the final calls. The finale asks whether you spare or kill the antagonist (the two choices unlock opposite achievements), what you hand over (the Astral Pulse or the Prototype), whether you forgive or forget the teammates who wronged you, and whether you free Invisigal or finish alone. There’s also a one-off boss, the Red Ring Captain, to beat. These choices pay off whichever Hero/Antihero leaning you’ve built all game.
Romance, in practice
To put the counter rules into a simple plan:
- Want Blonde Blazer? Say yes to dinner in Episode 4, kiss her, and don’t pursue Invisigal. Straightforward.
- Want Invisigal? You have to play the long game: be warm to her throughout (keep that Sweet Exit Counter climbing to 10+), be a good mentor (45+), defend her in Episode 7, and kiss her in the locker room. Miss the mentor threshold and the romance is simply off the table no matter what else you do.
- Want neither? Either keep your distance from Blazer and your Sweet Exit low, or pursue Invisigal but fail the mentor check — or just break it off in Episode 7. The game gives you a clean “we can just be friends” outcome.
The neat trick for completionists: because the Episode 7 break-up registers as “no romance,” you can experience two romance endings and the friendship ending across one-and-a-bit playthroughs rather than three full runs.
Achievements & getting to 100%
There are 36 achievements, and full completion takes roughly 20–30 hours across about two-and-a-half playthroughs. Most come naturally from seeing the different endings; a handful deserve a heads-up:
- “H4ck3d By R0b3rt” — clear all 28 hacking puzzles without a single failure. The hardest in the game, purely because of the punishing checkpointing covered above. Some hacks are missable if you end a fight too quickly, so don’t rush past optional ones.
- The clean-shift achievement — complete a whole shift with no missed or failed calls. Easiest to grab in Episode 2, the first full 12-call shift, before sabotage and stat ceilings complicate things.
- “Snake Eyes” and “Fool’s Luck” — the RNG pair: fail a call you had a 70%+ chance to win, and win a call you had under 15% chance on. These can take a few attempts to roll; do them on a throwaway call you don’t mind losing.
- Stat and rank milestones — e.g. taking one hero all the way to Rank 10, or maxing a single stat. Plan one “showcase” hero for these.
- Two popularity secrets — the game hands achievements for picking the least popular options, tracked against global player stats: choose the unloved Plain Glazed donut and the unloved Cigar from the store. (These can drift as the player base shifts, so check current stats if they don’t pop.)
Is it worth it? An honest verdict
Dispatch is the rare choice-driven game where the “choices matter” promise actually holds up, wrapped around a strategy layer that’s smarter than it first looks. The writing and the voice cast — Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, Matthew Mercer and a deep bench of guests — carry an animated-show energy that very few games match, and the Telltale DNA means the character work lands. The dispatch puzzle of fitting the right team into each pentagon, juggling synergy and fatigue, gives your hands something to do between the story beats instead of just clicking through dialogue. It earns its reviews.
The honest caveats: the checkpoint and save system is the weakest part of the package, and it turns the otherwise-fun hacking into a teeth-grinding exercise the moment you care about the 100%. A couple of achievements lean on pure RNG, and the hidden ending counters mean that, without a guide or a mod, your first ending can feel slightly arbitrary — you may not realise why you got the outcome you did. None of that outweighs the strengths. Play it blind first for the story, let the chips fall, and then — if you want to chase a specific ending or the platinum — come back to the counters and the build tips above. It’s one of the standout narrative games of its year, and well worth your time.