The populace of New York City has been taken out by a terrible man engineered disease tagged with the name “The Dollar Bill Virus.” The city is in a state of crisis, its nearby neighbors are in a condition of martial law, and it’s up for a unique team of reserve operatives simply known as “The Division” to try and bring back a bit of sanity and order to the disease ridden, war torn city. This is where you come in, maybe you were a doctor or lawyer, a bartender or an EMS worker before this all went down, but now you’ve been activated and it’s up to you to roll into New York and become the new law.
What developers, Massive, have built is very Tom Clancy meets Wild West meets Urban chic. You enter a disaster movie type scenario in which the terrorists have essentially already won, but it’s still up to you to get to the bottom of their plot and stop the plan from spreading. You’re given special tools with which to do this, military support, a medical science team, a nifty wrist mounted computer and tons and tons of guns and ammo. Not to mention the oh so necessary license to kill and perhaps a bit of a license to thrill.
As an ARPG, The Division hits all the correct notes. It’s a loot and shoot, with a hefty importance on gear that will almost always beat out your class skills. It’s got the same carrot and stick setup of any other game in the genre, your Diablos and Grim Dawns and Path of Exiles. You go out, kill the baddies, get some neat gear, equip that neat gear and use it to kill more baddies to get even more neat gear. There’s nothing new or different that The Division adds to the formula, but it does at least get points for style.
See the skeleton of the game is the same as any other ARPG. There’s dungeons, there’s bosses, you’ll get the occasional side quest. However the execution of these mechanics is what takes The Division up a rank. It’s the “modern’ ARPG. You won’t be fighting fire breathing whelps or balrogs, you’re going to be going after crazed pyromaniacs with flamethrowers strapped on their backs called “Cleaners.” Your normal stone and mortar dungeons are replaced by the subways, sewers and landmarks of New York City. Particularly memorable to me were all the medical dungeons. While Security dungeons often had an “Assault on Precinct 13” vibe or the Technical dungeons had you playing underground electrician, the medical dungeons had a tendency to take some of New York’s most recognizable locales and turn them inside out. There was the introductory Madison Square Garden mission, in which the famed arena was transformed into an eerie triage ward. There was the “Not Macy’s” mission in which I was required to traverse several levels of a shopping complex transformed into a hellish inferno. It’s this level of imagination that sets The Division apart from any other ARPG, and any other game set in New York.
As for the city, it is easily the best replica of my hometown I have seen in any video game. Sure it’s pretty condensed, but the most recognizable streets, Broadway, Chelsea Piers, Penn Station, have been fleshed out and detailed to the point it made it easy for me to navigate the game’s maps simply according to memory. I stood in awe at the attention paid to each street, and even if it wasn’t a 100% accurate recreation, the art team did their work so that it felt genuine and true to life. The scale of the buildings makes it feel like a real locale, and not the painfully condense approximation you often see in games like GTA. The title takes place across the entirety of Midtown Manhattan and a teensie portion of The Bronx. That’s not insignificant in terms of scale, giving you nearly a quarter of Manhattan Island to explore.
Even compared to other games that recreate real cities, other Ubisoft games that enjoy a real world sandbox, The Division excels. It frankly felt better than anything I’ve seen in The Crew, Watch Dogs or any of the Assassin’s Creed games. That’s not just the building detail. You could enter a fair amount of apartments and building complexes in The Division, and it was rare for one location to feel like the last. Even in universe chain stores, such as Starbucks parallel “Kerman Coffee”, I ran into plenty of them in the game, but the assets were used in such a way it felt like each location was different from the last.
The gameplay takes some getting used to. The importance of cover can not be stressed enough. You’re dead in seconds without appropriate cover, and even builds with a high amount of defense are only going to get a slightly higher survivability until they can duck their heads behind something. The good news is you stick to cover pretty hard. Cover to cover transitions aren’t as smooth as say, Metal Gear Solid V, but once you learn the controls you’ll find you can stick and move pretty easily. Guns are hefty and pack quite a wallop. You’ll have some shaky ass hands at the start of the game too, and won’t be able to nail those coveted headshots. The good news is you can counter this with some careful bursts of the trigger button, not to mention mods you’ll find or craft later in the game to boost stability.
Enemy AI can be variable, and their behavior will change depending on what gangs they belong to. The gangster wannabe “Rioters” will often sling their guns sideways and try to run up on you, abandoning cover, while the more militarized Rikers are all about coordinated tactics. Once you get used to the different abilities and attributes of the gangs, it gets to be fairly easy to counter them, especially with a coordinated team. Some of the bosses are pretty awesome. An “advanced” version of the common enemy classes, they’ll employ tactics that mixes up the action a little and causes you to think on your feet. From long range snipers who can land an easy headshot on you, to fire spewing monstrous men that require your team kite them and take shots at their chemical canisters to weaken them. The dungeons and the bosses are yet another place Massive’s sense of cool shines through.
Now I’m not completely without my grievances. I wish I could gush about “New York Simulator” and that’s it, but there are quite a few pet peeves I have with the game. Since it’s a Tom Clancy title, crafting and modding weapons count for a lot, and you could build yourself some pretty neat toys. On my main “Dr. Sniper” I delighted in crafting him the best marksman rifles possible, mixing and matching high and low grade parts and skills to get the exact buffs and abilities I wanted on my weapon. However the game’s crafting system felt hollow overall. There are only so many blueprints to get your hands on, then some of the best blueprints are locked behind a hefty endgame grind. Ubisoft has always had trouble implementing meaningful crafting systems, and really in The Division it was the gear modifications, not the crafting, that added an extra layer of depth.
On the topic of depth, there is no kind of class build depth in The Division. Alts are almost pointless in the game, because any player can be anything they want. There are essentially three “classes” in the game, medic, tank and DPS, and there’s only so many playstyles between those builds. Tanks will often be hidden behind their riot shield while medics will be tossing their healing grenades, and DPS gets to choose between engineering builds that allow them to construct turrets, or being straight out explosives maniacs. You won’t gain points towards your classes directly, rather, you have to tackle missions relevant to one of the three build types to secure “supplies”, you then use these supplies to upgrade your base, and upgrading your base then grants you abilities. The pro to this is you can kind of select what kind of supplies you want to tackle first, I almost always went for the medical missions first to supply my medic build, but more than likely you’ll end up doing all mission types for both completion purposes and practicality. This means whether casually or intentionally, you’ll ultimately have access to all available skills.
Even whether you have a squishy glass cannon or a powerful tank mage is entirely up to you. Gear tends to boost one or more of three stats. DPS, Defense and “Technical Skill”, the last of which impacts the effectiveness of your abilities. While I intended for Dr. Sniper to be real powerful in his technical ability, I found for the sake of survivability and taking on content solo I would just keep Defense as my stat priority. However it ultimately doesn’t matter, I can keep a secondary set of gear to boost my DPS or Technical Skill at any moment.
So if you’re into class build depth, there isn’t a ton to be found. As you grow and develop in your abilities you can at least begin to customize your class a bit more. I was sporting a nice overheal and a group heal at one point, but all in all this proved to be of no major importance. There is good news however. This fluidity in classes means that essentially all parties and pickup groups can function fairly well. You’re never going to be cockblocked because you don’t have a tank or a healer, you can just switch skills on the fly and find you can challenge any dungeon.
Now if you’re a fashion fan then The Division allows you to tickle that urge in bales. Almost a bit too much. Helping civilians will net you cosmetic gear. Uncovering a hard to reach chest might net you cosmetic gear. Struggling through the Dark Zone will net you tons and tons of cosmetic gear. Your UPlay points will get you cosmetic gear. Your base upgrades can get you cosmetic gear. Killing mobs will get you cosmetic gear. I’m something of a video game fashionista, whether it was Bloodborne, Dark Souls, World of Warcraft, Star Wars the Old Republic, Fallout, Elder Scrolls or The Secret World it was always more important to me I look good doing the deed than min/maxing my stats. So to The Division I say, these cosmetic drops are way, way too much. Especially when one is keeping their fingers crossed they’ll get a new assault rifle or shotgun only to find another damn trendy jacket.
The Dark Zone was The Division’s most promising aspect pre-launch. Post launch, and after a series of headscratching patches and nerfs, The Dark Zone has perhaps become the most ignoble part of the game. I speculated on the awesome Wild West potential of the Dark Zone, anyone turning to friend or foe at any second, helping you to kill powerful mobs only to turn on you and take your gear. The tension of not knowing who to trust. All of that is gone from The Division. It’s become extremely punitive to be a rogue agent (read: player killer) in the Dark Zone. Becoming one can undo hours of grinding for cash and rank. You can also rank down, and the sound of Final Fantasy 11’s deleveling ding haunts me when it happens. It becomes safer to gank in groups in The Dark Zone, or to grief when you’ve hit max level and gotten the gear you need. Sure, there’s still a little danger, but it ruins the surprise, you can see your attackers from a mile away, while traveling with a relative level of safety knowing no player wants to risk their rank or funds.
It’s not only going rogue that makes you lose, however. You’ll lose points simply for dying in the Dark Zone. It took me all of two deaths to lose an entire rank, and a certain purple magnum I was saving up for became even more unreachable than before I had started my Dark Zone run. It made me realize how utterly not worth it the Dark Zone was, especially when I could craft and uncover weapons at a faster rate, in a safer environment, tackling PvE. It almost feels forced, like Massive wants you to tackle the Dailies and the PvE content rather than encouraging to players to pick their poison between PvE and PvP. Dailies aren’t fun, they weren’t fun in World of Warcraft, they weren’t fun in Destiny. They are a chore.
They’re also an excuse to launch without an endgame, or to insist the dailies are the endgame. Once you hit level 30 and beat the story there’s nothing left to do in The Division. This might be okay if the story was stellar, or if multiplayer weren’t stressed so much, but right now it’s another gear grind for grinds sake. Now I don’t mind a little bit of a grind, I even think it necessary for a “complete” RPG experience, but when a game is entirely grind it just gets to be an experience lacking in fun. Theoretically you’re raising your item level so you can access the first of planned raid content called “Incursions.” However that is a ways off still. The lack of endgame content and the lack of a reason to come back to the title tends to kill MMOs, FPS and ARPGs time and time again, and The Division just looks to be another on that ever growing pyre of multiplayer games that become forgettable after you clear the main content.
The Division oozes with style, and has a jaw dropping recreation of New York City. It’s all style, some substance, but it feels like not quite enough substance. A lot of the rest of the game feels like pretty average ARPG fare, but it’s sure to tickle Tom Clancy and third person shooter fans in a unique way. The Dark Zone’s problems, and the grindiness of the game, feel as though they can be fixed with a few patches. However I can’t reward a game for something that theoretically exists. Even so I can’t deny I dumped hours into the game, and the sidequests allowed me to benchmark myself with little goals. There’s also a flavor and attitude to the city in both the NPCs you’ll encounter (mostly your military handlers who come from all walks of life, actors, psychosomatic individuals, kindly matrons) to the “stories” you can reconstruct via the use of found folders, cellphones and recreated crime scenes. It’s a strong addition to the ARPG genre, even if it’s not entirely groundbreaking, and might be worth giving a shot.
