GAME REVIEW: Tom Clancy’s The Division — The Quest for Better Guns

Ever since it’s grand reveal at E3 2013, everyone and their mothers have been zealously waiting for the release of Tom Clancy’s The Division. The idea of surviving in a post-biological-disaster Manhattan with friends was nothing short of exciting. Now that the game is actually here, we’ve placed it under the microscope to see if the game was well worth all the wait.

S T O R Y

Tom Clancy is best known for writing stories rich in espionage, conspiracy, and anything pertaining military sciences, all set in a realistic realm. Simply put, the Tom Clancy brand of grounded, pseudo-realistic tales is not a good fit for the type of game Ubisoft wants The Division to be. It drastically limits the boundaries of what the developers can create for future updates. The Division at most, can maybe give us a new faction of humans with slightly more advanced, pseudo-realistic weaponry. Anything more than that would be out of place from what The Division’s universe have established.

G A M E P L A Y

Gun-play in The Division is well refined. Relying heavily on cover-based combat, the game puts emphasis to character positioning and re-positioning, forcing players to flank and move from cover to cover as enemies do so as well, sometimes, even better. Weaponry in The Division are somewhat limited, with only a handful of weapon types complimented only by randomly generated stats and mod slots, much like Diablo’s loot and socketing system. In fact, much of it’s RPG elements seems to be lifted straight from Diablo 3 and had been integrated into The Division’s shooter-based nature quite smoothly. This also means that the game relies on heavy grinding for loot, hoping to get a weapon with perfectly rolled stats.

The Division likes to be classified as an RPG. As such, it comes with a variety skills and abilities. Abilities gradually unlocks based on your progress. You can switch your active abilities between all unlocked skills at any given time, even while in combat. This freedom is somewhat wasted because some skills are obviously too good to be traded off to some of the less effective skills. You’d imagine that as an RPG, different players fill different roles, but these roles don’t carry that much weight when the shooting starts.

The game can be enjoyed solo for some time, specially since there’s decent matchmaking. It’s only until you reach end game, when you’ll have to venture to The Dark Zone for better loot that things change. In the Dark Zone, PvP is enabled, making group play all the more necessary.

V I S U A L S  &  P E R F O R M A N C E

 The Division is a pretty game. It is believable in the way it presents itself. The world is populated by objects crafted such that no two areas will be exactly the same. The result between the game’s lighting and their dynamic weather system is very impressive, perhaps too impressive. They took visuals so seriously that sometimes it gets in the way (i.e. when snowstorms makes it impossible to see anything past 15 meters while AIs is don’t seem to share the same visual impairment. ) Nevertheless, there’s no shortage of detail in The Division. From destructible environments to the type of fabric on your toon’s jacket. You’re bound to spend some time aimlessly walking and panning your camera over a raging snowstorm and nothing but street lights.

V E R D I C T

 Tom Clancy’s The Division is a great game, but nowhere near the game it wanted to be.  If you pick this up there’s no doubt you’ll have a great time, just not what you’d expect. As for future content, it’s easy to suspect that the scope will be a bit limited given it’s realistic nature. Unlike say, Destiny, where they can quite literally pull new things out of the darkest corners of space.