After numerous delays, Tom Clancy’s The Division is finally out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. But Massive Entertainment has repeated too many of its biggest competitor’s mistakes, leaving the studio with an incredibly polished but largely uninteresting new entry in the growing “loot shooter” subgenre.
In Tom Clancy’s The Division, players assume the role of an Agent; one of thousands of seemingly ordinary members of society secretly allied with a clandestine government organization. The government activates Agents in response to a biological attack carried out on Black Friday, which brings New York City to the brink of total ruin. Joined by fellow The Division players from around the globe, it’s your job to stop those who threaten the city’s residents and help find a cure for the bacteria wreaking havoc on NYC.
Well, not all of New York.
Turns out, after once promising the game would include more of the city, Massive Entertainment could only have a condensed version of Manhattan ready for launch this month. A tiny corner of Brooklyn is seen during the early goings, but you won’t get to go back after finishing The Division’s tutorial segment. Thankfully, Massive’s recreation of Manhattan is still a labyrinth of streets, sewers, buildings, alleys and other pathways. The one borough featured in The Division looks fantastic regardless of which platform you’re playing the game on. The PC version will come out on top in any side-by-side graphics comparison. But Ubisoft has taken steps to guarantee there isn’t that much of a difference.
The action in The Division is similarly impressive; mechanically on-par with any loot shooter out there despite a substantially more realistic setting than we’ve come to expect from the genre. And it turns out New York City makes a diverse battlefield. Shootouts can happen anywhere, from random intersections and street corners to Madison Square Garden or Grand Central Station. There’s an element of verticality in The Division missing from many modern shooters, and it adds an extra layer of strategy to just about every gunfight. High ground is particularly important when playing solo because players can frequently bottleneck aggressive enemies at climbing points or staircases.
Blind fire and suppression both play big roles in The Division, too. Keeping your enemies pinned behind cover makes it easier for your allies to reposition without taking fire or giving away their new position, and to throw grenades without worrying the intended target will escape. Meanwhile, blind fire gives players a way to defend themselves from incoming enemies without exposure to much enemy fire. In addition to adding a bit of realism, it gives players a viable defense while waiting for their HP to regenerate or to finish reloading.
Both mechanics also bring some much-needed depth to the six classes of weapons found in The Division. Light machine guns are great for keeping your enemies pinned down, while shotguns and submachine guns both dispatch nearby enemies with ruthless efficiency. Assault rifles provide players with a well-rounded response in most scenarios, while marksman rifles offer the ultimate protection against snipers and other enemies situated a bit further away. And every player carries a sidearm, which seems to be limited to pistols and sawed-off shotguns.
Along with three firearm slots, players have six equipment slots for stat-altering items and six slots for cosmetic loot. Equipment for each can be purchased at the Base of Operations, along with safe houses throughout Manhattan, but there’s so much loot in The Division you could probably finish the entire campaign without ever spending a credit. Players will occasionally have to settle for consumables, like canned food or water, which can be used for temporary buffs like increased damage. Foodstuffs can also be traded to some civilians for extra experience, along with a new piece of gear or a cosmetic item.
To its credit, Massive seems to have learned a few lessons from Bungie. The campaign in The Division is significantly longer than story content featured in Destiny at launch. It might even be comparable to the entirety of its predecessor’s Year One content. Those who’ve come to expect a certain experience from Ubisoft’s open-world releases will also be happy to know the usual smorgasbord of collectibles has been hidden throughout Manhattan. Few of them are interesting, or even remotely entertaining to retrieve, but we’ll admit to being suckers for the holographic ECHOs spread throughout the borough. Thankfully, the side missions in each neighborhood offer a better reward in the form of new crafting recipes.
It sure would have been nice if Massive learned a few more lessons from Bungie’s 18-month head start, though. The Division tells its story in a far more coherent manner than Destiny, which relegated most of its lore and plot details to a companion app, but the game fails to give players any sense of investment in its world or characters. Pretty much all of the game’s big, bad evils are introduced in the same missions where you kill them. Players typically aren’t provided with much of a backstory or reason to care about the handful of named NPCs who appear throughout. And the closest The Division ever comes to examining any of the moral questions that would arise in such a horrendous situation is by acknowledging some agents would probably go rogue instead of trying to save New York. It’s a very gray landscape, but one with very few gray areas.
Everyone your commanding officer identifies as a good guy is a really a good guy and everybody she says is a bad guy … well, you get the picture. But life is rarely that simple on a good day, much less in a failing city that’s been ravaged by an uncontrollable new illness. But Massive does everything it can to drive that idea home, right down to the uniform appearance of all the player’s enemies. Would anyone from the studio like to explain how each faction managed to find these uniforms among the walls of trash on most streets? Who convinced rioters and ex-cons to wear matching clothes and work together? Better yet, how?
For the most part, we never get answers to these questions and it hurts the game considerably. On those occasions when Massive does provide some background information, the details are tied to collectibles few players will retrieve.. That lack of storytelling might have been forgivable if Massive had focused on delivering more replayability. To be fair, The Division does give players the option of tackling each mission on one of two increased difficulty settings; one (Hard) that’s available to players from the start of the campaign and one (Daily Challenge) designed specifically for level 30 players. For some, those extra challenges will be more than enough to keep playing until the game’s first expansion debuts. But those bored by repetition won’t find much reason to return to The Division after finishing the campaign because the multiplayer is lackluster, too.
The Dark Zone remains one of the biggest disappointments in the game. As we mentioned in our first impressions, the it takes up a much larger chunk of the map than we expected. Unfortunately, there’s still nothing interesting to do in the lawless portion of the game’s map, unless trolling other members of The Division community sounds like a thrilling afternoon/evening to you. There are some NPCs roaming the Dark Zone as well, which typically require teams of players to take down, but players already seem to outnumber non-player characters by a wide margin. More importantly, the risk of being killed and robbed by another agent rarely matches the quality of the loot you receive.
Ubisoft says some of the most powerful equipment in the game can only be recovered in the Dark Zone; however, we didn’t need any DZ gear to finish The Division’s campaign. In fact, the handful of occasions when we did bother exploring the Dark Zone yielded loot that was substantially worse than the gear we already had equipped. At its best, meaning those rare times when players actually work together to find new gear, there’s nothing differentiating Dark Zone encounters from the side missions and encounters found in the rest of Manhattan. At its worst, The Division’s lawless area is little more than a place for players to camp at spawn points and ruin other players’ attempts to extract Dark Zone loot
Perhaps the most glaring issue facing The Division, given the nature of the project, is how repetitive the shootouts begin to feel after a few hours. The handful of factions encountered throughout the game’s campaign might dress relatively differently from one another, but they all apparently use the same field tactics manual when preparing to establish their own hold on the city. Pretty much every fight in The Division plays out the exact same way:
- Kill the shocktroopers who immediately charge you .
- Use grenades and skills to take down grenadiers and soldiers.
- Use long-range weapons to take down snipers (as needed).
Occasionally, a few veteran soldiers and/or a boss are thrown into the mix, forcing the player to avoid an extra set of attacks while clearing out the lesser enemies first. But there’s never any change in strategy. You kill the guys who rush in, turn your attention to mid-range enemies and then take out the stragglers. Every once in a while, players will end up surrounded by their foes. But it almost always happens because of pathfinding errors that don’t work themselves out until the next wave is spawned. There were only a few occasions when enemy soldiers tried to use the basic suppression and flanking techniques players rely on throughout the campaign.
Those are some of the game’s biggest disappointments but they’re hardly the only ones. The game’s character creator is the most uninspired take on the feature we’ve seen in years, offering just a handful of choices when sculpting a new agent. Players choose their skin tone, hair/beard style and facial structure, but that’s pretty much where the customization stops. Cosmetic items give players a bit more control over their agent’s appearance; however, most of the clothing options in The Division look relatively similar to one another.The limited number of cosmetic items don’t stack, either, and so no doubling up on face accessories like sunglasses and earrings.
When push comes to shove, it’s hard not to be disappointed with Tom Clancy’s The Division. Sure, the game looks pretty good and its core mechanics are solid. But the game doesn’t have any soul. Your first hour with the game is practically identical to Hour 30. Enemies begin to feel stale after a few hours, as do their tactics, and there’s no real reason to get attached to anyone you meet during the campaign. To add insult to injury, The Division replicates too many of Destiny’s mistakes, ultimately creating a project so similar in scope and design that it’s difficult to review the game without making comparisons. I have little doubt The Division will find a consistent audience, willing to look past its many flaws to enjoy what occasionally feels like a glorified voice chat server, but this is not the Destiny killer we were hoping for.
It’s not even a particularly great game.
Full Disclosure: The PS4 copy of Tom Clancy's The Division used in the creation of this review was provided by a representative of Ubisoft ; however, the publisher did not retain any editorial oversight/privileges.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional coverage of The Division throughout 2016 and for as long as Massive supports The Division in the years to come.
