When The Division came to GamePass, it gave me a chance to try the game out. I had passed over it time and time before. Despite my interest in the game, I could never justify spending the time and money on it when I had no friends that played.
Since downloading it, I’ve put quite a bit of time into the game and reached level 18 before the shine started to fade a bit. The blend of fetch quests and third-person shooter elements make for a great time-killer, but fall short for long-term engagement.
The Good: Gameplay, Graphics, and Sound
The Division is an excellent example of what games should sound like. The slow fade-out of voices as you walk away makes you feel like you really are walking away, usually from a smart-alecky JTF officer. Bullets whizzed past my head. The distant whine of a chain gun spinning up warned me to duck.
In more than one instance, I dove behind cover just before bullets began to fly because I heard the Rioters moaning about the lack of any good loot from their most recent target. The sound never stuttered, and the gunshots felt heavy and powerful—until I added a silencer, and then I felt the power in the subdued whomp of the gun.
As far as looks go, The Division is a solid 8/10. It isn’t photo-realistic, but I had few complaints. The weather effects are particularly noteworthy; when a heavy snowfall rolled in, figures in the distance became blurred, nothing more than dark shapes that moved through the gloom.
The only graphical issue that arose came from the annoying “feature” of the screen turning red when my HP dropped too low. The grenade AOE indicator is also red. When the two are combined, like the midst of a hard firefight, then dodging grenades is nearly impossible.
The overall gameplay is fun, if a bit bland. The Divison is all about the gunplay and completing missions, and outside of the quest-giving JTF officers (each with odd personality quirks), there isn’t much to do. Phones litter the playing area with recordings that fill in blanks in the story. You can find “Echoes” of events that took place prior to your arrival in Manhattan.
The game’s controls are adequate, but I struggled to move from cover during firefights. Certain angles made the controls unintuitive and detracted from the overall experience. Still, the commendations and awards appeal to the completionist in me, and the crafting system makes me want to track down every single blueprint.
The Bad: Story, AI, and Save Points
The Division has a basic story that gives you a reason to be in Manhattan, but it isn’t deep or engaging enough to find the answers. Someone released an engineered virus to kill consumers. Anarchy descended. That’s basically all you need to know. It’s not necessarily a bad plot, but it isn’t good either. If mediocre is a bullseye, then The Division is the best-aimed dart I’ve ever seen.
Now, the main problem I have with this game is the AI. For a tactical shooter, the enemies can be downright stupid—and for no apparent reason. Cover is an essential part of survival in this game, and enemies will do whatever they can to chase you from your safe spot. Grenades, better positioning, etc. It’s expected.
What I didn’t expect is for enemies to charge my cover, duck behind it on the same side, and seem surprised to find my character there. The Rikers, a gang of escaped convicts, were particularly prone to this. They tended to use shotguns and would do the menacing-villain-walk of “shoot, move forward two steps, shoot again.” The strategy for handling them is simple: kill them before they get too close.
Irritating, but usually easy. However, stupid AI is harder to deal with than smart AI, if only because it makes half the enemies suicidal. Enemies will stand behind the player and shoot them in the back non-stop if they somehow meander around the scattered pieces of cover. And then they will drop a grenade at their feet and blow themselves, and the player, to pieces.
This sort of AI behavior forced me to put the controller down and walk away on several occasions. The problem is only compounded with increased difficulty levels, when enemies become the Sham Wow! of bullet sponges.
And that brings me to save points. When killed, I had the option to start back at nearby checkpoints. Except when I could start back at the start of a mission. The difference between those choices is when the game allowed it. Some missions included a respawn point at the start, while others forced the player to respawn 0.5 kilometers away. This is not a big deal, except that the decision whether to include a checkpoint at the start of a mission or not seems completely arbitrary.
I struggled to stay connected to Ubisoft’s servers, and since The Division is an online-only game, I found myself stressed out doing any mission that took more than ten minutes. If the server decided to drop me, then no amount of skill would prevent me from repeating all of the progress up to that point.
Conclusion: Try it out, with a grain of salt.
Despite these problems, I had fun. Obtaining stronger guns made the game flow more easily, but equipment is critical to progress. A weak gun or underpowered body armor is a death sentence. Since The Division is available for $10 at most stores or downloadable with a GamePass subscription, I recommend giving it a shot if you’re looking for something to play.
Final score: 6 out of 10.
Patrick is a long-time gamer and diehard fan of the classics: Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Halo, etc. He collects SNES games and once dove into a dumpster for a copy of Earthbound.
