Road To Review: Eight Hours Into The Division

There has, quite understandably, been a lot of expectations placed upon The Division. It’s a game that’s captured attentions and imaginations ever since its first reveal back at E3 in 2013, and the real question is whether or not it lives up to that promise.

Roughly eight hours of play under my belt, I’m barely scratching the surface of the game. Certainly, I’ve been able to explore further and wider than was possible in the two beta tests that ran earlier this year, I’ve also been able to play several more story missions and start to explore the character upgrades, the loot systems and so on, but I’m still very near to the beginning of what the game has to offer, it feels like.

Even so, I can see a lot of what lies ahead. The whole slice of Manhattan Island that is open for players can already be explored – if I dare to ignore the warnings about recommended levels, and my map is absolutely littered with missions both big and small.

Having come to the island after a short introduction in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, you’re back in familiar territory from the beta tests over the last few months. Your first real objective is to head over to Madison Square Garden and set up a base of operations in the grand Post Office building. This is your own personal hub which evolves and grows as you play. Where the beta restricted you to the Medical wing, there’s no such restrictions in the full game, and you can go, activate and start doing missions for the Tech and Security departments as well.

Once you’ve rescued and recruited someone to run them for you, doing colour coded main and side missions earns you supplies to upgrade them and start to unlock more abilities and perks. The Division is a classless RPG, letting you swap abilities about as you see fit, but there’s only so many permutations when there are four active abilities for each department. Medical sees its initial ping superseded but a local burst of first aid, before letting you place a healing support station, while Tech gives you a throwable turret, homing mines, and so on.

There’s enough there that when playing with a group – and you should play as a group when you can to get the best out of the game – that you can each have complimentary abilities. The real variation comes from unlocking and applying mods to these, as well as making use of the Talents and Perks.

These tie into the overall percentage game that runs in the background. This is a “shooter looter” action RPG, with every bullet fired affected by stats and buffs of the guns, the myriad attachments and the percentage improvements they can net you. Stick a grip to the barrel of your gun and it might have 4% better accuracy or have less horizontal drift, and so on.

Everything’s incremental, but it all counts. The cover shooting in the game is simple and solid, allowing you to easily look at and move from cover to cover, adapting to the onrushing enemies – and at this point, rushing is how the rioters and flame thrower wielding Cleaners tend to attack you. It’s a shame that quite a few guns feel so unwieldy and difficult to handle, but it’s not long before you adapt, whether its with controlled bursts of fire, bolting on attachments or simply finding a different gun. Personally, I’m currently combining a Classic M1A marksman rifle for long ranged combat with a L86 LSW that I’ve found to be a surprisingly well mannered machine gun.

There are a handful of niggling little issues with the game at the moment, though. You can’t pass through other players in safe zones, meaning that doorways and NPCs can be blocked by other players standing in the way. While the game looks fantastic – please forget the delusional assumption that the game could ever match the E3 2013 video on this console hardware – certain effects flicker in and out, there’s some noticeable pop in, and bringing up ISAC’s menus very often displays them over an ugly turquoise background instead of the location that you’re in. They’re all minor kinks that can hopefully be worked out in the first couple of patches for the game.

I could happily complain about limited character hairstyles, but something more fundamental is recognising the underlying game structure and repeating patterns within it. Yes, this is a Ubisoft game, and while the safe houses and the JTF officers that hand you side missions look, sound and interact with you differently to climbing a tower, lighting a bonfire or diving into a bail of hay, it is that typical Ubisoft open world game structure.

The Dark Zone provides a respite from this, though. It’s a no man’s land, with pockets of the AI factions populating the various landmarks and roving Division agents hunting for loot and trying to extract. There’s nobody there to highlight where to go, just your own progress as a character and venturing into this particularly lawless strip of Manhattan Island.

Another problem comes from a rather by-the-numbers mission structure. Side missions are small instances, generally with a single objective or one or two quick little gunfights out in the open, but the story missions split between the three BOO departments take you deep into hostile territory and buildings. There’s some great set pieces and visuals in the first half dozen of these, from a burning department store to a full on post apocalyptic quarantine zone that really brings home the death toll.

However, these always lead to a boss fight with a named character with the same basic set up. The boss has a yellow health bar and tons of armour which needs to be whittled down, while you also need to deal with waves of lesser enemies. I’ve fought the same cartoonishly large Cleaner boss several times, and while it’s always in a different setting, it’s not particularly interesting, especially not when the cover shooting encourages you to hole up somewhere safe and shoot from cover.

I have hopes that the mission, enemy and boss variety in particular improves as I continue playing – and certainly when the two incursion missions are added in April and May – but even with this in mind, I’m still having a great time with The Division. That can only improve when I party up with friends instead of matchmade partners, and head to the other side of the island or delve into the tense Dark Zone as a team.

As servers and review code were not available prior to launch, I’m busily working toward our review. This is a snapshot of my thoughts from the early parts of the game, but we’ll be back with our review as soon as we think we’ve seen everything the game has to offer.