Game Review: Tom Clancy’s The Division
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I’m about to eat some words.
While I may not have said it here, there were a few choice words I used to describe The Division on release. Most of them rhymed with ‘bit’ and ‘a pile of sass’. It just looked like another attempt at the MMO-style looter shooter, and looked about as bullet-spongy as something like Borderlands but without the wacky aesthetic or the funny dialogue between characters that left a mark on you.
Well, while Tom Clancy’s The Division may not have many memorable characters, it certainly does a wonderful job of everything else.
The story is rather simple. Taking place after Black Friday, the US’s biggest day for sales and price cuts, New York has become a quarantine zone, after terrorists planted a virus on dollar bills, which rapidly infected millions of people within days. People have died, and it’s up to The Division, a government-run agency, to combat this threat by finding a vaccine.
So you start off entering the city, getting used the mechanics, and taking back the Post Office, which acts as the main hub of the game. From here you get side missions, visit vendors, and check message boards.
Gunplay is actually rather solid, however I must stress the fact that I’m playing this after the 1.5 update, which did change a lot of the game’s core features. The game certainly doesn’t feel as spongy as people said. It’s satisfying to get headshots and the guns do feel rather different to one another. Although I will say that the menu system is a bit of a clustertruck of information.
Now, the game really shines a few hours in, with the Dark Zone.
This is where things get intense. The entirety of this zone is PVP. So it’s up to you, and other players, whether you become rogue, taking advantage of the quarantine to grab better gear, and kill other players to get it, or work together against the tougher enemies in The Zone.
I spent a good two hours just finding loot and extracting. Obviously because it’s found in quarantine, loot items will need to be decontaminated. So you fire a flare, and wait for a chopper. But when you extract, everyone knows where you are, and can either help you defend the point, or hijack your items.
Overall, it’s a pretty decent game, especially if you want a time sink kind of game. There are tons of side missions and encounters.
Solid 4/5.