The Division - An Experience Like Bowling

Alright folks. First off, apologies for the lateness of this review, I wanted to be sure to experience enough of this game to have my review be thorough and to have let the hype of playing this game wore off so that my review wouldn’t be diluted with fan-boying. So, without further ado, here we go.

-GAME PLAY -

Tom Clancy’s The Division is fun, it’s fun in the same way that bowling is fun, and I mean that in every way you’re currently thinking. Bowling is fun to do with friends, but never alone. Bowling is only fun when you don’t have better or more important things to do, like catching up on a good book, or looking out the window. Bowling is fun on the weekend, but you feel a little guilty when you do it on a weeknight. The Division is exactly that kind of fun.

The voice acting is fine, the characters are fine, the narrative is fine, but none of it really stands out. I’m not invested in any of the characters, and I’m not really impressed with Ubisoft's attempts at making their side quest wardens in the safe houses unique and interesting. Sad voice acting aside, the gun play is on the edge of being really super good, but it sadly misses the mark by just enough to be annoying. I find myself pumping far too many bullets into the bad guys and I get bored. I want to shoot these villains and bandits, and raiders, and scum and feel like a badass doing it, but instead I feel like my gun shoots bb’s.

All that being said, this game looks stunning. It looks pretty bloody great. Everything looks like it fits together, nothing seems out of place. The textures are detailed when they need to be, and simple when they need to be. The snow..good lord. The snow is legit in this game. I never thought I’d get excited about digital snow, but there it is. Shooting through glass is also very cool, each shot leaves fairly unique holes in the glass until the whole window breaks and falls apart, it looks great, it sounds great, it feels great. And it’s my personal opinion that you’ve not experience the full potential of the Division until you’ve shot out a tire on one of the numerous abandoned cars.

So, the game is beautiful, but if The Order: 1886 proved anything to the masses it’s that being beautiful doesn’t mean jack. Mission structure in this game is lacking, it suffers from the same stale design flaws that Destiny does. You have your main story missions, you have your generic side missions, and then you have your boring as crap grinding missions. That sums up the three types of things you’ll end up doing in this game, all of them include shooting guys and pressing square...just like Destiny.

-NARRATIVE -

So far I’m left with little more than there was a disease that killed everyone and we’re here because we’re proud New Yorkers who are going to take the city back from someone. So yeah, spoilers. To be fair, I haven’t beaten the game yet, and I am totally open to the idea of the story really picking up and blowing me away. For now though, after about 24 hours of game play, that’s all I’ve got.

-CONCLUSIONS -

The game is fun with friends, but when played alone you’re left with a fairly generic cover shooter that looks nice.

FINAL SCORE: 75/100

-EDIT-

After having played roughly 2-3 days worth of this game, I returned it to GameStop for roughly half the cost. Luckily for me Star Wars: Battlefront was exactly that amount when I was there. So in the end, no loss, and now I get to shoot up Storm Troopers on Hoth with my roommates. Considering the fact that this game got so boring for me that I turned it back in, I'm docking it down to a 60/100.

Even the Dark Zone couldn't revive this game for me.

REVISED FINAL SCORE: 60/100