Last year’s Destiny was a hit. Though often labelled repetitive — it had you doing the same menial tasks over and over again to gain more levels — it still continues to draw players in, with new exciting loot to be had and an addictive character progression system.
The Division follows suit this year. Like Destiny, it is essentially a single-player shooter that can be played alone or with friends, but always online. Where Destiny was a futuristic romp through beautiful worlds, The Division is a tactical shooter, set in an open-world post-apocalyptic New York.
What’s it about?
New York movies and video games have seen alien invasions, large rampaging monsters (Cloverfield and Godzilla), and the end of the world; it has become one large playground for Will Smith and zombies. Now, you’ve got the flu and that’s the apocalypse of The Division. The city is hit by a mysterious flu on Black Friday, America’s biggest shopping day.
The months that followed were utter chaos and now New York is a quarantined battleground. In the absence of any armed forces or law, a special task force of highly trained operatives are activated from their mundane cover lives. Known as The Division, you play as one of these soldiers tasked with bringing order to chaos and getting to the source of the virus.
How does it play?
The Division is an always-online Third Person Shooter, which means the action takes place from over the shoulder of a character which you create and set (from a few preset faces that can be tweaked a bit).
The game got off to a rocky start as you have to register your character at the Brooklyn safe house, on one laptop in the game world. This had players queuing up as if at a BMC office. But those were initial hiccups; once the missions were on, we got a taste of what The Division was like.
The game takes you across New York, following a storyline along with the rest of the world online. Apart from the main story, there are several things to do around the city. You can venture forth and get to playing either a team of your friends or with a team that the game match makes for you.
As a standalone single-player experience, The Division is boring and can get mundane pretty fast. However, with your friends, actual people you know who you can voice-communicate with, the game is fun.
At every Games Expo so far, The Division’s game world and graphics have been blowing minds. New York looks so real, it’s hard to believe it’s a game. With the litter-strewn streets, abandoned cars that are wet and dirty in the slushy snow: every corner has a story.
And there are beautiful graphics; from looters running about to stragglers left behind scavenging for food, and abandoned parks with fairy lights and lonely merry-go-rounds.
It plays best with a high-end Nvidia card as your eyes will be treated to some amazing effects, thanks to a host of special settings.
The game usually drops you into intense gunfights. A headshot to an enemy is instant death, but in The Division, headshots take a lot of bullets, which do cause heavy damage. But it’s not that one-hit aim-and-kill satisfaction. The weapons feel real, given the game’s military shooter DNA; however, the realism ends when enemies take a few magazines of bullets to go down, not to mention the bosses. Maybe Destiny’s loot system has spoilt people, but at the end of a boss battle, you would expect more loot than just a bag.
As you progress through the missions, you gain experience points and level up like a soldier would. earning more gear, and loot to sell and buy more. You also get specialisations and perks. There is also a Player vs Player mode called The Dark Zone, which is a lot of fun, but inexplicably, experience you earn there does not count in the main story.
It’s still quite early for The Division, and while the initial verdict is good, it all depends on how well Ubisoft expands the online shooter world. Like Destiny, perhaps weekend special missions and events will make it to the game soon.
Should you get it?
If you like realistic military shooters in a very well-fleshed-out, intriguing world, then The Division is worth the price. Especially on PC. It isn’t perfect, but it’s fun, playable and is only going to get better. Definitely highly recommended.
The author is a freelance writer and full-time geek
Tom Clancy’s: The Division
Developer: Ubisoft Massive
Publisher: Ubisoft
PC: 1799 PS4/XBOX One - Rs 3,499
