The Division is a difficult title to review and discuss. The game is rather expansive and offers players many reasons to keep on coming back for more. In many ways, you could say this is the title Destiny should’ve been. However, just like Destiny, it falls into the same traps but manages to overcome those hurdles to offer an experience that transcends the sum of its parts and becomes something truly magical. Its combination of great gunplay and fair progression keep you coming back for more even though the story is somewhat confusing and lacks that sense of scale and impact we expect from video games nowadays.
The Division offers two distinct modes that blend together in interesting ways. One is the rather confusing story mode and the other is the free-for-all area known as the infamous Dark Zone. The story is told through a lot of missions but they never really come together. The main objective of the game is to take back New York City from various factions who have seized control of certain neighborhoods. Throughout my experience I was hoping for the story to become more than just taking back regions. Unfortunately, that never really happened. While there are plenty of mysteries to uncover—like where this deadly outbreak came from—the game never pits you against a truly engaging and memorable enemy. I won’t go into details but it seems that the truly memorable enemy will make an appearance in the expansions.
As mentioned earlier, The Dark Zone is a region where you go to collect the best loot. You fight hordes of computer-controller enemies and the occasional rogue player who would rather steal your loot. Venturing alone into the multiplayer area is suicide so you should always bring at least one other person along who can watch you back. The Dark Zone is easily The Division’s best feature as it allows you to create your own strategy when it comes to dealing with normal enemies and rogue agents.
The Division’s gameplay provides for some of the most exhilarating moments in any video game. Enemies flank you from all sides, bullets chip away at your cover, and the gunplay is so incredibly satisfying. The game loves to put you under stress. Not so much stress where you want to stop playing, but just enough to get you gripping your controller as tight as you can. One specific example of this I can remember is when I stumbled upon some gangbangers harassing a civilian. My first instinct was to unload my clip into the criminals…once I did I realized my mistake. These foes were five levels higher than me. They all turned around on me and I instantly turned around and sprinted towards a car to hide behind. I leaped over the hood of a car and took cover. Bullets were whizzing past me and they were walking slowly towards me. I had to quickly devise a plan. My hands were sweating and gripping the controller, I didn’t want to lose any of the items I had taken from The Dark Zone.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a man charging me with a baseball bat and I dive away from my cover to avoid the oncoming baseball bat turning my head into nothing but a splatter of blood on the side of a taxi. My body is exposed for any sharpshooter to see and I am strafing backwards to avoid the man wildly swinging his baseball bat like a child at a little league game. I shoot a small sticky grenade onto his chest and blow him away. I hip fire my gun like a mad man hoping to scare the enemies into cover so I can move forward without being shot to death like Scarface. As I move forward, Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now starts playing on Pandora and I instantly feel a rush of adrenaline flow through my body and start annihilating the gangbangers by lobbing grenades and unloading bullets with my decked out weapon. There was so much chaos and I had the biggest smile on my face. It was truly brilliant. The Division’s gameplay provides for all sorts of amazing player-created moments like this and it’s absolutely perfect. This is where the game truly shines.
The progression in The Division is just as satisfying as the combat, if not more. Throughout your time with The Division, you will become more and more powerful. You level up your skill trees, get new and better gear, and much more. The progression doesn’t stop at just leveling up your character…it expands into all of Manhattan! The whole island is divided into sections based on levels. The further you get from Hudson Pier, the harder the enemies are. You can go to any point of the map whenever you want after the prologue, but you’re more likely to get your head kicked in if you stray too far from where the recommended regions are.
The biggest element you can upgrade is your Base of Operations. This is the “safe place” for anyone left in Manhattan but is also used as the headquarters for The Division. You’ll slowly build it up to study the virus and create a cure, keep order on the island, and keep water, electricity and other necessities up and running. There are three different wings to upgrade: medical, security and technology. Each of them has individual upgrades that change not only the look of the makeshift base, but will provide perks for you such as better chances of finding certain loot. The more you upgrade, the easier it will be to become more powerful. It’s incredibly fun to slowly upgrade your base from an abandoned post office to a proper military headquarters.
Within the Base of Operations there are civilians seeking shelter, food and medical help. It feels alive and like they didn’t just scatter random characters around to make you think the world is alive. It truly is alive. Unnamed characters will say offhanded comments about why they’re there or mention details about their lives. It feels like these people have lives outside of what you’re seeing on screen. It also enhances the overall story. It shows what this catastrophe has done to people. Parents are stressed out and don’t know how to handle their children. Children don’t know what to do because they can’t go outside and play and their friends are gone. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and adds a new layer to the game. This storytelling goes outside of the Base of Operations as well and shows a whole new side of people. This outbreak has turned many into savages and put people out of their homes. People are trying to break into cars, digging through trash cans and harassing others. It’s such a terrifying world that turns what may have been good people into ones that will do anything to survive. It seems to capture the human condition quite accurately.
As alluded to earlier, if you want to see an even darker side to people, head to the appropriately named space called The Dark Zone. Mix the great mechanics of the core game, computer-controlled enemies, and some of the rarest loot with real players, and you get the most chaotic multiplayer experience in recent memory. The Dark Zone is a sectioned off piece of the city right in the middle of Manhattan. This whole part of the city has been contaminated with the virus so you’re required to to wear a mask and put any loot you find into a protective bag which you will extract via helicopter when it’s filled with your new toys.
The Dark Zone is the most tense location in any video game ever, especially if you’re all by yourself. People can jump out of the shadows and attack you or you might walk into a group of pyromaniacs who will literally light you up. The danger is high and so are the stakes. The only reason you’ll really want to enter The Dark Zone is to gain some of that sweet sweet loot. All of the good loot is in there, and people will do whatever it takes to get their hands on it and if you lose it, good luck getting it back.
The Dark Zone is very large and there are many layers to it. It’s hard to track the people who took your stuff but that’s not a bad thing at all. There are many ways to lose pursuers like taking to the rooftops, taking shortcuts through buildings, diving down into the dark subway tunnels or just sticking to the streets and alleyways. The most tense moments have to come from the extraction zones. When you finally get some good gear, you’ll head to the nearest extraction point and shoot a flare up into the sky to signal a helicopter. This alerts anyone in the area that there is some good loot nearby and that they’ll have a way to extract it pretty quickly. This means you’ll need to hide or set up defenses while you wait a little over a minute for the helicopter to arrive. You will be so on edge that you won’t even want to come out of your little hiding spot to put your gear on the helicopter. My hands honestly get a bit sweaty when I am in the extraction zone. It gets even scarier when there are people already out there. Everyone is just pointing their guns at each other and you’re just waiting for one person to pull the trigger and cause so much chaos you forget you were even there to extract anything.
I can’t stress this enough but going in without a couple of buddies is just the worst idea imaginable. Most of the people in The Dark Zone are teamed up with their friends. If you go in alone, you will find yourself in a lot of frustrating situations so it’s better to just squad up. It’s not entirely impossible to take down people who are grouped up, I managed to take down two rogue agents at the same time but I may have just gotten incredibly lucky. If you really want to go alone, I would stay away from populated areas and stay off the streets.
Now that you know about all the amazing aspects of The Division, it’s time to talk about some of the problems. Apart from the story, the technical issues are what really worry me. The frame rate stutters on occasion or slows to a crawl. It usually happens when you’re engaged in intense firefights. This can end up leading to your death. There are also some annoyances like the infamous delta error where you can’t connect to the servers. Lastly, sometimes items can’t be sold from your inventory and you get stuck behind doors and have to fast travel to the nearest safe house to regain the ability to move. I realize that these issues might be common with open world games but surely the developers could’ve fixed at least the frame rate. The drops can be quite jarring to witness.
My biggest concern has to be the fact that the input lag increases dramatically when you’re playing with a friend online. The single-player experience, particularly the movement and shooting is really responsive, however, the minute someone joins the controls feel clunky and become cumbersome. You get used to it after awhile but it’s just shocking to notice the obvious and immediate difference in controller responsiveness. I think this ties into the frame rate problems as the frame rate can cause an increase or decrease in input lag depending on how stable or high it is. I really hope this issue is addressed as it is by far the biggest problem facing The Division in my opinion.
Summary
Overall, despite its issues which can be fixed with patches and an expansion, The Division is a truly astonishing game that offers endless possibilities for the future. It lays the foundation for a thrilling franchise that can foster numerous stories. I never say this but the hype surrounding this game was definitely justified. Ubisoft has one of the best games of this generation in their hands and I can’t wait to see where the future takes this addictive and thrilling title.
Asher and Cade is a shared byline ICXM used for 2 articles co-authored between 2015–2016 covering game reviews. See the individual contributor profiles for the writers behind these collaborations.