Tom Clancy's The Division makes me nervous. Hear me out! It was announced at E3 in 2013 by Ubisoft Massive, was hailed as a brand new type of game in the Tom Clancy pseudo-genre, and promised to marry an online multiplayer experience with a unique, beautifully rendered New York City setting. It sounded wonderful. Then came the delays and the months and years piling up without a release date. It was no surprise that after Bungie's experience (or lack there of) in Destiny, shooter fans began to cast a heavy pool of doubt over The Division and grew concerned as to whether or not it could actually deliver on the hype it had built up from a loyal fan base. Were Ubisoft able to overcome the fumbles of their previous flagship titles? Were they able to overcome the mistakes that Bungie made with Destiny? The answer: Yes...Mostly.
In many ways, The Division executes what it sets out to do well enough to make you gloss over its shortcomings; repetitive side missions and encounters and the constant grind to upgrade to newer weapons based on stats rather than your preference of damage doing abilities. However once you get enough hours into the game, it becomes harder to gloss over these shortcomings and it makes you realize that its slave-like mentality to these shortcomings is what holds it back from being great, instead of pretty damn good.
The story: Set just weeks after a weaponized pathogen called the Green Poison ravages New York City, the player is part of an elite task force known as The Division who are left to pick up the pieces and restore power to the Joint Task Force of local law enforcement and bring hope back to the people of New York.
Sounds great! How is this achieved, you ask? Shooting people, plain and simple.
Since you spend most of the game shooting people, running to the next place (shooting people along the way, I might add) and then shooting more people at your destination, I'm happy to report that the gun mechanics are incredibly well done in The Division. There is a lot to like here when it comes to the shooting mechanics combined with varied terrain and strategy as well as the different ways to customize not only guns, but your personal loadout of skills and talents as well. It makes each player bring something unique to the table rather than having a “best class” or “best build” talent based system that other MMO's suffer from. It automatically cuts down on the other MMO common issue: The Flavor of the Month Club wherein players will roll or re-roll new characters based on what is currently buffed or nerfed in any given patch. For all intents and purposes, The Division plays very well as an RPG in this sense.
Ubisoft spent massive amounts of marketing time on telling player that you have to play this as a multiplayer title to succeed. This isn't totally true. The game is very playable solo. The scaling difficulty system makes sure that as long as you are within the recommended level range, you were ensured a fun, albeit frustrating at times, challenge with the content you were facing. Missions solo can be the most challenging and rewarding moments in The Division as you take down waves of enemies and finally a massive boss with a huge amount of health.
That said, however, you don't need to play alone if you don't want to. There are multiplayer hooks in almost every facet of the game. Thankfully Ubisoft have made it incredibly easy to match with other players — both friends and strangers alike — using some incredible in-game tools. You can join your friends online that are on the map at any time by clicking on them and the matchmaking systems work incredibly well for each story mission (these are accessible at any safehouse and in your main base of operations).
Character progressions feels very minimal at times. Skills and perks give bonuses, sure, but they're often very small percentage improvements to your already existing abilities. The ones that give practical benefits like the ability to carry more grenades, enter more contaminated spaces, or carry more medkits are nice, but they aren't exciting or game-changing. It all feels very routine at times and the way that it plays at level 5, it will also play at level 25.
The Division, like other titles before it in this genre is infinitely more fun with friends. It allows for the skill system to function as intended. The three trees of upgrades can be fully taken advantage of as they're supposed to, using their take on the traditional MMO trinity system. When each class is represented in a group, it gives a glimmer of what The Division could be if it weren't so constrained by its MMO ambitions at times.
While PvE content is the main focus of most of the game, The Division does take on PvP with a walled off chunk of the city called The Dark Zone. Named such because it was abandoned due to the exessive viral contamination and chaos. The Dark Zone is clearly intended to be late-game content, though you can enter at lower levels. Levels 25-30 are usually recommended for Dark Zone content. There is a high risk/high reward system within The Dark Zone as it holds some special and more powerful loot in the game. This loot can't be simply carried out, however. It has to be extracted via a helicopter. This process takes time, roughly 2-3 minutes, and sends an alert throughout the zone so that other rogue players and NPC's will come after you and your party to try and steal your hard-earned loot. The Dark Zone also has its own progression system that is separate from the main leveling system and will award you Dark Zone gear you can use and containers you can open. Its pretty fascinating to see this system in person and the first time you wander in after taking down a multitude of PvE enemies can be a pretty sobering experience of just how little you have accomplished so far, in the bigger picture of the game.
Ultimately, The Division is a solid title. Wandering around the ruined Manhattan cityscape with friends in the open world is the experience I wanted it to be when the game was announced almost three years ago. However it often feels full of busy work rather than meaningful work. There is a lack of different things to do, at the end of the day. Either you're running around collecting lost phone recordings or pieces of laptop intel, or you're securing yet another mercenary drop, or performing yet another JTF support mission. As you rank up they all feel the same — just harder in scale and scope. I never felt like my character was really getting stronger when I upgraded the weapons and the mods within them along with my talents but I must have been, because I saw the numbers go up on paper.
The complaints I have with the game are easily fixable and are mostly staved off by great combat fundamentals and a level design that feels (at least) on par with other great third person shooters. Some of the later level design when you start to encounter harder enemies (labeled by the now tired purple and yellow name badges representing “slightly harder” and “way harder” respectively) is very tight and compact and leads to a lot of frustration when trying to dodge a blast of flame or dive roll from a grenade. Most of the late-game missions teased and built up to a final showdown of epic proportions which, to their credit, delivered in spades. The final story mission battle is one of the best I've seen out of any third or first person shooter in terms of difficulty balanced with fun in a long time and it was refreshing to see this after grinding through 27+ levels of more-of-the-same content...and then it was over. Just like that.
The game looks wonderful across all platforms and all PC settings. Ubisoft have done a wonderful job recreating New York City and I had flashbacks to my time in NYC personally. It was a wonderful experience and sharing stories with friends about the actual city versus the city depicted in The Division was a great way to pass the time running from one place to the other. The music is wonderful, kicking in at just the right times in tense battles to really give you the immersed feeling.
Ubisoft have promised some pretty hefty things to come in the next year with both paid and free DLC which will hopefully add more of the content like the final mission to the game. That is what players will pay for, that is what they will stick around for.