I've got alot of gripes so here's me yelling into the void about Dispatch
THIS IS NOT GAME OF THE YEAR WORTHY
I played the game, I played it through, I got all the endings, I did the good and the bad.
And this game was so disappointing. No matter what you do with the QTEs and gameplay, none of it mattered. I failed every single call, every QTE, and the most I got was a line about it. That's not good game design; that's textbook horrible game design. If the gameplay doesn't matter, you didn't make a video game; you made a visual novel at best. It's not a video game, and certainly not a good one.
Story beats, they really fucking threw it here. Chase shouldn't have survived, having him come in at the end wasn't a "twist", it was a cop out. A lazy cop out, took away every bit of high stakes we had. Defeating shroud was even more disappointing, because what the fuck do you MEAN he couldnt think of being handed both? I thought he was smart? I thought he went through the game theory thousands of times? Where are the backstories? Oh, under a paywall? Is there anything in the base game that gives me ANYTHING to care about the side characters? Nope!
The voice acting. What sucks is that there are TONS of amazing performances in here…and then there's Charlie. Who let him in a booth?? Who let him say these lines and just went, "Yeah, that's a work we want to put into the world," because he SUCKED. He wasn't able to convince me of a single emotion his entire performance, and all it ended up being was "hehe Moistcritikal as a bat."
If your story relies on references and dirty humor, that's not good writing, which is exactly Dispatch's problem. Every 5 fucking seconds its "fuck/shit/cum" Yeah, whatever, haha, Gen Z, give me actual clever writing. Shroud was supposed to be a hyper-intelligent villain, yet his script is chalk full of 7th-grade vocabulary at the end. I dont want references because that's the work of OTHERS. We've gotten to a very sad point where people dont want to write original things, they just think if they reference the popular stuff enough people will be happy with it. If you have to rely on the popularity of OTHERS for your game to be successful you didnt make a good game!
It has good moments, but thats NOT enough. Its GAME of the year, not Good Moment of the year
