PC Gamer Review

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

I'm cornered by three strangers. They can see the loot I'm carrying on my back. I expect them to shoot any second—instead, all three start doing jumping jacks in unison. Welcome to The Division, where fitness comes first. It was a warm welcome, so I joined in and they helped me extract my loot from the PvP Dark Zone. We spent the next hour parading through central Manhattan, helping out strangers in need and hunting down rogue soldiers in a series of vigilante revenge quests.

 

But with or without impromptu friends, the vast majority of my time in The Division was spent sprinting between abstract world map icons, completing shallow side missions for incremental loot snacks (empty calories), and firing entire ammo reserves into soldiers whose superhuman health bars would be hearty enough to feed a family. Even an entire family of revenge-driven vigilante cardio enthusiasts. I miss them.

The Division is an open world RPG co-op cover (breath) shooter set in the ruins of Manhattan after a rough bout of Black Friday bioterrorism sent the city spiraling into a mini-apocalypse. Manhattan is quarantined, so the Division, a covert federal force, is sent into the city to restore some semblance of federal civility (by shooting everyone highlighted in red on sight).

 

I spent over 30 hours sprinting between icons in a beautifully rendered open world, which is typical of Ubisoft games. But The Division doesn’t lift the Assassin’s Creed template directly, as progression through the open world leans on traditional RPG mechanics. I leveled up my soldier, unlocked new abilities, and scoured the world for better guns and gear. I had fun with the campaign, but at the expense of 22 hours of filler, and I won’t go back.

 

Take cover
The Division is a collection of story missions, side missions, and random combat encounters strewn throughout the world. You can opt to tackle them alone, with three friends, or strangers via matchmaking. Safe houses function as small social hubs and the only places you'll run into other players (besides the Dark Zone, which we’ll get to); the rest of the open world is limited to you and your team.

 

Combat can be tense and challenging, especially with teammates. Press a key to take cover on corners or highlighted chest-high objects. From cover, you can blind fire, take aim, toss grenades, or use one of your class abilities, like throwing out an automated turret that suppresses nearby enemies or a med station that heals everyone in a visible radius. I rarely had time to dig in, as enemies flanked or sent explosives my direction with reckless abandon. Under that kind of pressure, I changed cover a lot, and with ease. Highlight the cover you want to move to with the camera and hold a key to go there. That simple movement meant I didn’t have to maneuver around a tangle of obstacles, allowing space for more improvisational thinking.

 

During intense firefights conversations with teammates fell into a natural rhythm based on abilities and weapons equipped. I ran with a semiautomatic shotgun, a cover reinforcing buff, and a turret. In my favorite scenario, two tanky shielded enemies paired with a medic walked up a tight corridor toward our cover. I threw out my turret to distract the shielded enemies, my teammates told me they’d suppress, and I took off to the other end of the corridor to get behind their line of defense, take out the medic, and open up the shielded enemies to fire. If only more of the combat had the same strategic construction.

 

The Division punishes bad decisions well enough (stay out of cover too long, get shot, or stay in one place too long, get flanked), so it’s disappointing that the elite enemies are just prolonged versions of regular encounters and that they’re used so often. Elites don’t employ especially erratic behaviors, or complex patterns: they just swallow magazine after magazine while talking smack. One of the fights went so long the music ended.

 

"I looked like every other bundled up, sniffly-nosed player out there."

 

When my teammates and I were around the same level, and played missions at or just below the recommended starting point, the combat was usually a good challenge. We depended on one another to fill out blind spots: I was a shotgunner, so we knew a sniper would be a necessary. If I had the turret and cover buff equipped for flanking, a teammate would spec out a medic class on the fly.

 

However, incentive to play with one another faded as our levels grew apart. All it took was one teammate a few levels higher than our own to turn a balanced combat experience into their own personal shooting gallery. Conversely, when matchmaking for some of the later missions, I was often thrown into a team of antsy players who were one-hit-and-dead underleveled. Leave that group, and I’m kicked back to the nearest safe house, which is a two-minute sprint back to the mission starting point.

 

Moot loot
There’s no way to just power through the campaign—where the best level design and encounters are—since they don’t reward enough XP to prep you for the next. Collectibles and killing enemies give out even less XP, which leaves the side missions as the primary gate between you and the best parts of The Division.

 

Some side missions feed reward points that feed into upgrading your base of operations, a repurposed post office full of repetitive NPCs and visual reward that coincides with newly unlocked perks, combat abilities, and passive abilities. Most boil down to defending a point from enemy waves or infiltrating a warehouse to kill an elite enemy. They take five to ten minutes to complete, running between locations included, which meant I had to dedicate hours to them in order to upgrade my perks and abilities. Even with teammates, no amount of shooting could spare us from the monotony. I’d say we were lucky to find the autorun key, but the implication that we’d need it at all wasn’t exactly a relief.

 

Weapon imbalances aren’t as frustrating since better ones drop so often, but whether a gun is common trash or an impressive purple drop, they all feel the same to operate, even if they’re crunching different numbers beneath the kimono. The same goes for vanity items and armor. Tom Clancy’s worlds are typically grounded in realism, but without some kind of eccentricity or customizable expression built into the drab wardrobe, I felt my progress was impossible to dictate. I looked like every other bundled up, sniffly-nosed player out there, whether level one or 28.

 

My attire might have been lacking, but Division’s Manhattan is gorgeous. With settings maxed out, otherwise minute details stand out. Glass, tile, and fabrics shatter and perforate closely to their real life counterparts. Hazy golden hour light spills into the slick city streets, while thick snowstorms turn streetlamps into conical havens and wandering NPCs into creepy silhouettes. A slew of post-processing and weather effects layer on a grimy, sterile palette to a once lively metropolis. Environments are stocked with natural props, one with giant Christmas ornaments, and most can be shot, which make otherwise routine firefights cloudy and frenetic with debris.

 

But the overarching story is poorly communicated and easily ignorable. It’s a political narrative nested in a game about simple, material rewards, where you’re saving a city by killing half the people in it. In The Division's most discordant moment, a friend and I walked through a scene in the campaign where dozens of coffins and bodies, some covered in American flags, littered the sewers underground. It’s somber scene with scary connotations. When I climbed down for a closer look, it wasn’t to see what I could learn about what happened here, but to see if a loot chest was nestled between the coffins. By the story’s conclusion, hardly anything is resolved, and instead sets The Division up for as many small narratives as it needs for future expansions. But there’s nothing lost by missing the pulpy sociopolitical beats—it’s nice enough as a wash of moody light and sound.

 

The darkness
At the literal core of The Division is the Dark Zone, by far its most interesting digit, a social exercise in stranger danger. It’s a huge section of the map dotted with elite enemy mobs, hidden chests, and a ton of other players. The catch is that collected loot is contaminated and can only be extracted via helicopter. Every time this happens, all the players in the Dark Zone are alerted to the drop’s exact location. They can help stave off the waves of incoming enemies, or kill you and take your stuff. Doing so marks them as rogue, and ‘pure’ players get a reward for taking them down.

 

"Sometimes, a group would remember my name and hunt me down repeatedly."

 

Proximity mic chat is enabled, so you can plead for your life, ask strangers to do jumping jacks with you, or coax them into attacking with insults. Sometimes, nothing would happen for an hour and I’d extract loot as a lone wolf without issue. Sometimes, we’d befriend a dozen other players and roam the map like some preternatural loot-extraction force. Sometimes, a group would remember my name and hunt me down repeatedly. That’s what I get for name-calling. It’s unpredictable, tense, and my favorite way to upgrade weapons and gear. But even in the Dark Zone, the drip slowed soon enough, and I was confronted with what exactly to do with my hoard of high level stuff. Not much.

 

The end game is vapid. Daily missions unlock at level 30, but they’re just campaign levels with difficulty modifiers that reward crafting material, which I’ve yet to find useful. There’s more powerful loot to find, but it all requires serious amounts of repetition to obtain. And afterwards, there’s nothing except the same levels and enemies to test it out on. Free updates are on the way with Incursions, scenarios designed to test players in the end game, but until they’re out the sense of progression is distilled into fleeting number comparisons between weapons that feel exactly the same to shoot.

 

The RPG-ness of The Division is no more sacred than that of Cookie Clicker’s. Numbers spill out, you collect resources, loot, and make the numbers spill out faster—the RPG components are there for the sake of kill efficiency, increased by little more than a restricted nibbling at The Division’s gristle, a rubbery, tasteless collection of repetitive side missions and heavy health bars. Beneath all the excess is a challenging and strategic eight hour co-op cover shooter that deserves an audience, but it’s occluded by a thick, noxious loot haze.

 

(source) http://www.pcgamer.com//tom-clancys-the-division-review/

[Sennex 1,903]

Damn, that read like a review of Destiny

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

Out of all the reviews, and this is from what I've watched for the first week has the most parts I agree with. I know that my say should be taken with a grain of salt as I've never played it.

[Baabcat 1,646]

Damn, that read like a review of Destiny

I actually think Destiny has way more depth than The Division. I put well over 1000 hours into Destiny, can't see me getting anywhere near that from this one. I'm enjoying the fights but the review is very true. Even the main missions you have to artificially add challenge by being a bit under levelled.

[TigerBurge 2,375]

I actually think Destiny has way more depth than The Division. I put well over 1000 hours into Destiny, can't see me getting anywhere near that from this one. I'm enjoying the fights but the review is very true. Even the main missions you have to artificially add challenge by being a bit under levelled.

See I diagree. Destiny was a cookie cutter. Very straight forward with everything. The Division has so much more depth with crafting and mods it's stupid. I spent a hour tonight min/maxing my gear. That doesn't even take into account recalibration. Then you have the daily hard missions and the challenge mission,which is so much more difficult than any nightfall. Then the DZ with a full party is great fun. Hell the challenge mode is harder that any raid on destiny.

Then you do side missions that totally complete a lot of the story. The echos and phone recording are what grimore cards in destiny should of been.

[Diddums 4,346]

We need to compare release Destiny to release Division. Destiny now and Division now aren't worth comparing, as Destiny has 18 months experience and content. 

 

They're two very different games, the only things they have in common are:

 

PvPvE

Lootwhoring

Guns

Bad guys

 

 

That's about it. Destiny doesn't have crafting, Division does. Destiny is first person, Division isn't. Division is set in one area, Destiny is set all over the universe. For me they're both fantastic games for different reasons. Destiny will always hold a place for me because I've had some of my most epic gaming nights on it, similar to BO2. The Division isn't even a fortnight old so it's hard to say but apparently we're getting incursions soon which will flesh out the end game a bit. 

 

I'm gonna go out and say it: I am already getting bored of the division. I can't quite put my finger on it but it's just lacking at the moment. The setting is phenomenal, it really is. If there's one crown this game can wear, it's the ability to set the atmosphere. There are some proper goosebumps moments in this game, which really make my hairs stand on end. No game has ever done that. The weather, lighting and graphics are astonishingly good. The main mission line is excellent too although the bullet sponge bad guys are starting to wear a bit thin. Bullet sponges have their place in games but being exactly the same creature as me and being able to soak mag after mag of 7.62mm rounds just doesn't feel right. I put this aspect aside because I want the game to awesome but I can't deny that I'm turning a blind eye here. 

 

The setting, as beautiful, engaging and in-depth as it is, is still the same everywhere you go. Every corner you turn is a right angle as well. There's no variety although this is just the way the game is. Comparing this to Destiny, which has various planets of different colours and loads of different bad guys, this doesn't have long legs. How many bad guys in ballistic vests can you kill before it gets boring? The last boss on the last mission was mind bendingly good. I don't want to ruin the surprise but having spent all the prior missions killing the same sort of thing over and over, it was very refreshing to do the last mission.

 

I'm currently level 28 and although I enjoy the game, I play for an hour and get bored. There's no call to the end game, apart from challenge missions and dailies there's literally nothing to do. The high end stuff which you can craft at 30 has apparently got a grind stuck to it which makes Destiny look like a walk in the park. I don't mind grinding but there's a point where you have to wonder if it's worth it and from reading around the net, this seems to be a question asked by most at the moment. The Dark Zone, whilst fun now, is hard at level 30. From what I've read the bad guys are all level 32 which makes lone wolfing a venture not worth starting as the difficulty gradient falls off a cliff. 

 

I dunno. I enjoy it and it's fun and all that but I don't know how long this is going to last for me. To be honest if Bungie release a monster Xpac with burn primaries, a good raid and fix their stupid light system I'll hop back on there and that'll probably be the end of the Division for me. 

 

I want to love this game, I really do. I'm probably the biggest fanboy here and I was arguably the most excited for it but I have to question where the game is headed. Where can they take the setting? Either there's another outbreak or there's a cure. One means all our work was for nothing and the other means that we're no longer needed. The setting doesn't allow for much creativity boss wise. If the virus created mutants or something we could have huge hulking beasts which could be raid bosses and stuff but sinking a billion rounds into someone with a bulletproof vest and a helmet on just doesn't sit right. We're wearing the same stuff ffs.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

The next couple of content updates will completely decide if this game sinks or floats. If it will learn from Destiny's content mistakes, or follow the path. I feel The Division is way closer to Diablo 3 than destiny.

[phil bottle 9,743]

If it's possible, have a rent of the game over a weekend or something, you'll have a better opinion/take on the game once you've had a go.

 

As an example, I didn't think I would like Dying Light, based on reviews. But I was given a cheap code for it and it ended up being one of the most enjoyable games I have ever played. Took me completely by surprise.

[techno 3,509]

Good post diddums.

I have to agree, I've played 17 hours so far and I spend more time on black ops 3 still, I don't have the desire to play division because I can't play solo there's no point because if I rank up I spoil it, it ruins it for Clive as different level people can't play together.

I also really see no comparison to Destiny what shit me about that is the weapons, no weapon variety and I see that in the division.

I know however that even if I play through the story with others it will have been a worthwhile purchase but better than destiny was nah not to me like dids said I had some epic times on that game the division won't fill that void unfortunately.

As for the reviews they all do seem to bring the same points to the table which means to me there very valid points.

[Capn_Underpants 401]

Sorry, I'm all over the place, I'm on my phone.

Contrary to popular belief, the only gripe I have with the game is the risk vs reward in the DZ. There is absolutely NO reason to go rogue in the DZ. You lose way too much XP, DZ Keys, and currency. It's completely lopsided to bounty hunting. Sure you can kill one person, possibly two and get away with it, but more than that, good luck! DZ is to the point were it's too easy just because of that.

Two daily missions and a challenge mode, (which is harder then any nightfall I've ever done, hell, even a raid) that is reset every day... Already beats out Destiny for me. With the amount of blueprints you can buy I don't see daily missions (and challenge mode) turning into Destiny anytime soon, with not doing them ever.

I'd like to get all high end gear and see how the DZ (high levels) and challenge mode are then.

I had a look at the trophies for the game, easy platinum. A lot of the trophies are ones that you can get just by playing. Nothing you really need to try for.

I've enjoyed the game. I understand seeing people bored with it already. But I was bored with Destiny too. The only reason I kept playing was because of the parties. I'm sure it would be the same for The Division, but i'm always in a party when I play and haven't had a dull moment.

I'm sure at some point I'll get the season pass.

[crippled_viper 258]

I can never get into parties. Either I'm too of a low level and I'm struggling to catch up because anyone who is on is already in a party or doing high level stuff. So far I'm still not impressed with this game. I had a much better time with BO3 than this. Cause you could solo on BO3 if there was no one on.

[cyberninja2601 1,106]

The level disparity in parties is an issue.

 

On thing I have noticed is that if you go to a safe house that is within you level range (which is dependent on the location) and party up, you will be partied up with people that are within the same level range as you.

 

The level is displayed in the top right when you look at the map.

 

I don't know if that is guaranteed but it seem pretty reliable. 

 

I do agree that the game gets pretty routine however. Even the encounters and side missions are pretty much the same. 

 

The game is best played and most fun when you do get 4 people that are the appropriate level doing a mission that is also the appropriate level.  If you are 1-2 levels higher than the mission however, it gets pretty easy with 4 well organized people.