Tom Clancy’s The Division Review

Multiplayer:

There’s a beautiful vision here of the game Ubisoft want you to play, that serves as a stark contrast to the game players will find themselves actually playing. This is truest in The Division’s multiplayer offerings. It’s equally beautiful in its way, and bucks trends you’d expect from strangers on the internet.

The Darkzone is a perfect representation of that skewed vision. It’s a walled off, contaminated part of the city that serves as the titles PvP offering. You’re able to go in with a team, kill elite enemies, grab impressive loot and, hopefully, extract this high level gear. You’re also likely to run into other players, however, and it’s these guys that can be the most dangerous element in The Division. Killing another player – or, ‘going Rogue’ – allows you to steal their hard earned drops, but it paints a high value target on your back. It’s a really cool system that feeds the idea of a destroyed city and the desperation of the survivors more so than anything that happens outside of the Darkzone’s walls. Strangely, no one I ran into was anything but helpful and friendly. The anonymity of the internet usually brings out the worst in people – and this must have been what Ubisoft were banking on with the Darkzone – but in a strange twist this area is filled with lovely people. The same can’t be said for campaign missions.

As a multiplayer-focused experience, The Division really benefits from having a solid group to tackle it with. The main story is infinitely more fun with a couple of buddies beside you splitting important roles, and in my experience matchmaking with strangers has led me to join some very self-serving assholes who only care about their own progression. It’s not a fun way to play, and going it alone is often not a realistic option.

This limitation is actually one of The Division’s biggest downfalls, and should your group fracture and separate in terms of levels or progress, the Division doesn’t have smart answers to how to team you up anymore. My teammate moved ahead a couple of levels on a night I wasn’t able to play, and by the time we buddied up the next morning the game adjusted any enemies we were facing to be challenging for him, impossible for me.

Getting downed in a single hit throughout a mission and being unable to really do any damage to enemies ruins the multiplayer experience. Being able to organize a team of four to consistently meet and play (without anyone logging in and messing around on their own from time to time) is nearly impossible for most of us, and I wish this lifestyle would have been factored in when it came to balancing the game. Worst of all, it means it’s impossible to recommend the game to a friend and then play through it with them without ruining their experience.

It’s hard to say just how successful The Division will be in the long run. We need to see how Ubisoft will support it going forwards and how the community will shape the result, as players tend to do to these types of experiences. Destiny is a completely different now than it was at launch, and I expect the same thing to happen here, too. From looking at the material Ubisoft have promised with the season pass of The Division, I really think I’ll be sticking around for the long haul, though.

Presentation:

The Division is gorgeous. As soon as you boot it up and start trudging around NYC you’ll realize what a fantastic job the designers did on this one. The city is a Christmas snapshot: a thick layer of snow covers everything, blizzards will occasionally roll in and serve to blind both you and your enemies, and steam belches from every manhole. It’s a wonderfully realized post-apocalypse, too, with the city truly feeling like it was abandoned in the middle of an ordinary day.

More impressively, the city feels huge. Not just in the endless network of streets and buildings, but in the sheer verticality of it all. Skyscrapers loom over you with a visceral presence and you often feel as tiny as you should making your way through the streets below. Everything looks and sounds great in the Division, Manhattan is one of the best realized open-world’s I’ve explored, and I was really blown away by the vision it took to craft everything here.

Conclusion:

Tom Clancy’s The Division is the best game Ubisoft have made in years. More importantly, it’s taken lessons from the likes of Assassin’s Creed, FarCry and Watchdogs and put them to good use. Using the company’s successes and failures in this way has really helped shape The Division into the stunning game it is at launch, and restores a lot of faith in Ubisoft that they’d lost in recent years.

The addictive gameplay, phenomenal world-building and the exciting promise of its future , both near and far, make it an easy title to recommend. Just be sure to bring some friends.