Shacknews Game of the Year 2025 - Dispatch

In a year of amazing games, it was a washed-up hero's mission to redeem a team of misfit villains that resonated most with the Shacknews staff.

We at Shacknews love a good story, and once upon a time, Telltale Games told those stories. It told them in games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Batman, and other ventures, but it’s been a while. The convoluted and unfortunate ending of Telltale is a story for another time, but what came out of it in 2025 is what’s special in this case. AdHoc Studio, a band of mostly former Telltale Games talent, formed to create something new. Something original. Like the group itself, it created a game in which people get second chances to try again. And in 2025, the results of that pursuit gave us the impeccable first season of Dispatch.

Much like the Telltale games that came before it, Dispatch is a choice-driven narrative adventure game. We take up the role of Robert Robertson, AKA Mecha Man. He’s the Iron Man in a world where heroes work at companies in which they are assigned to hero work while villains run organized gangs, at least in Los Angeles. At the beginning of Dispatch, Robert loses his suit. He was beaten down by his nemesis and was ready to call it quits. That is, until a local hero dispatch calls him up with an offer: oversee a group of reformed villains trying to become heroes, and the group will fix his Mecha Man suit.

The cast of Dispatch is a huge part of what makes it an incredible game. AdHoc Studio tapped the talents of Critical Role (including Matt Mercer and Laura Bailey) as well as numerous popular creative voices such as Jacksepticeye, MoistCr1TiKaL, and Alanah Pearce, with Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul rounding out the wild and diverse cast as Robert. Every one of them delivered fantastic performances on their individual parts, making it easy to root for, or against them, at any given stage of the game. Undoubtedly, many of us had a hero we wanted to succeed, and Dispatch gave us tons of moments to help or hurt them.

What’s more, the choices were rich and set us off on wildly diverse paths depending on what routes we took, a fact that was presented to us at the end of each episode when we learned how other players chose in that nostalgic Telltale fashion. It was fun for the community, being able to talk and jeer each other again on where we landed in Dispatch’s most pivotal choices.

Dispatch isn’t just Telltale in new drapery, though. AdHoc Studios upped its gameplay in a way that not only fit the aesthetics, but was engaging as well. Directing the heroes to jobs based on their talents is the main loop of the game. Timing of calls and travel to and from sites made it difficult to make sure you had the right expertise available to you when you needed it and leveling heroes, figuring out their synergies, and navigating their on-the-fly troubles was a blast, if not frantic. However, Robert is also a tech guy who knows how to hack systems and it plays heavily into his role as a dispatcher. There are plenty of moments where Robert takes matters into his own hands with a hacking game that also fits well into the gameplay elements of the overall narrative.

At just about every turn, Dispatch impressed, excited, amused, stunned, saddened, and satisfied. The interweave of its characters and the choices you make around them made for one of the most entertaining stories of the year, where we were champing at the bit every week waiting for the next episode to drop. Where we argued with each other on if we chose Coupe or Sonar, Waterboy or Phenomaman. Where we poked fun at each other over whether we romanced anyone or played it professional.

More than that, Dispatch is the story of a bunch of losers dealt a bad hand that rise to become something bigger and better, because the story never really stops at a loss unless you let it. There’s an absolute beauty in that redemption, propelled forth by a great cast and engaging gameplay. For that and more, we at Shacknews congratulate AdHoc Studio and Dispatch with our Game of the Year 2025.