Tom Clancy's The Division, Deadly Review

Ubisoft is known for using Tom Clancy’s license in many games from Rainbow Six to Splinter Cell. This time the license is used for an ambitions third person shooter MMO call The Division. Does this game live out to its hype and its Tom Clancy name? Let’s find out.

Story The Division puts us in New York after the aftermath of a small pox virus that was spread using bank notes which transferred around during black Friday sales. You play as a sleeper agent which was activated as part of a second way of agents known as The Division. Your job is to uphold the peace and situation in New York with the help of volunteer forces known as the JTF.

The feel of a apocalyptic survival of the fittest can be seen around the city.

After a series of unfortunate events, your commander is injured in a Helicopter crash and you are put in charge of returning a base of operation to full function.

During your missions, you are introduced to the groups of evil doers residing in New York. There are the Rioters, Rikers, Cleaners and The Last Man Battalion. You will also learn what happen to the first wave of Division.

Story Mission gives rewards at the end of the mission depending on difficulty.

The story has quite a solid plot to begin with, but it starts falling apart the longer you play the game. The characters in this game does not feel memorable. From the NPC which gives you missions to the enemies which you kill faster than you can find out what their backstory is. Most of the story is also told by the collectibles around the city. There are cell phone recordings and CCTV recordings to further explain on the happenings on the city. A 3D recreation of an event can also be play back by using a technology called an ECHO. This is somehow interesting but slowly loses charm after a few times.

Most of the story is driven through ECHO

Well the collectibles does explain about the story, it somehow does not feel as a whole. The story telling feels disjointed and does not feel smooth. Main antagonists in this game are no different than any other enemy NPC. Half way through the game, the story loses its value as you fire tons of bullets onto more enemy NPCs.

Lore I want to take a moment to open up a sub category under the Story Review. It is about the Lore of the game.

I have no doubt The Division has a lot of Story Depth and lore which can be explore but somehow Massive Ubisoft just fails to deliver in this part. Beside the main characters, there are many more characters that were named in game. No background story was given to them and all there are bullet sponges for your gun as your shoot them down and collect your loot.

Graphics/Audio The graphics in this game for the console half are not what they seem as in E3 when the game was announce. The graphics received the Watchdog treatment and was butchered down. Even the window reflections are disabled. Frame rate are lock at 30fps on the console which sometimes make the input lag very noticeable. There are also sometime texture loading problems with far away texture loading before some close proximity ones.

Nice fire you got there

Things are sunnier on the PC side with 60fps and also better graphics. In the PC part you will be able to notice foot prints on snow to bullet holes in covers which were shot at. With this in mind, I feel the team deserve kudos in putting in these details into the game and hope the console ports may achieve this type of graphic as patches roles out in the future.

Certain graffiti makes alleyways nice to explore

Audio in this game is also excellent. From gun fire to environment, these sound makes you feel immersed in the city of New York. Only problem is that some NPC audio cue during events are somewhat repetitive. Audio lines are repeated by NPC makes the game feels underdeveloped in their audio library.

Gameplay Firstly, let’s get one thing straight, whatever that is shown during E3 premier trailer, some are not in the final game. There are no epic weapon opening, no such thing as using a door as a shield. No remote assist from people on portable devices.

Now that is cleared, let’s get into the gameplay itself and start with the character creation. For such a high profile game, it is a shame that the character creation is very limited. It won’t take long before you spot your own doppelganger in the streets. To make your character look unique, Massive has allowed us to use clothing appearance items which change how we look without affecting our attributes. This sounds like a good thing but most of your cloths only consists of mostly recolor winter clothing.

The 3 branches of skill trees

Character customization in this game so far takes the cake. This what currently makes the core of the game interesting. When you completed all the base upgrade, you will be able to access all skills and talents. These skills are separated to 3 groups, medical, tech and security. Every skill somehow has a purpose in this game though truth be told, some skills feels a little more

important than another. You are also limited to equip 2 skills and 1 signature skills at one time.

This makes choices sometime difficult but at the same time makes team playing all so more important so that skill variation exist to defeat the boss.

Skills are unlocked using points earn in mission and sub-mission

There are also talents which are special to modify your character. Each character can have up to 4 talents at max level which is level 30. The talents further compliments a certain play style your character has and somehow makes your unique in a team base environment.

There are also main stats for your characters. They consist of Firepower, Stamina and Electronics, which represent DPS, Health and Skillpower. This makes setting up your character depending on what you like to use even better. Thought there is a slight flaw where certain gun talents require a certain stat requirement makes stat distribution a little hassle.

Weapons stats and character attributes

Each gear also has a special talent or a modifier, like the percentage of healing your First Aim Heals or the percentage of damage to elite members and many more. This diablo-esque RnG (Random Number Generator) on your equipment make farming for a certain number even more important to make a perfect character.

From stat modifiers, to weapon mods to equipment talents, these bring the number of unique weapons to billions. This might all sound fine and dandy but there is an issue with this, beside high end gears, which are hard to get, weapons types felt repetitive. There is always an AK-47 from low level and high level, from common to epic, there are not many actual real life weapon types on this game.

Last thing about the gear, gear check and level check in this game is very obvious. Taking out a normal NPC a few higher level then you takes ages if you don’t die before that. Taking out higher level bosses are near impossible sometimes.

The party system in this game is great. Each areas has its own matchmaking system, from mission to free roam. The system has it hiccups sometime but when it works, it works wells. There is also a nice voice chat build ingame. This makes proximity chat possible especially in the dark zone where you are able to hear other people chatting around you.

Now on to the actual gameplay mechanics. The mechanics are solid as itself for a third person. Certain problems persist here as it does across this type of genre. Camera angle while in the cover sometimes block your view for shooting even though it is clear that you can shoot especially when you are getting cover on high ground. The cover system is clear and simple with the movement cover to cover made easy by just pressing a button and your character will move to the next cover.

When things get hectic during battle that is where flaws can be seen in the mechanics. In a fire fight where things are face pace, the input lag start showing as a problem on the console part. The diving animation to entering cover animation has a certain delay to it. I find myself sometimes accidentally double tapping the cover button because I thought I was not in cover during the dive-roll to find myself entering cover and exiting the cover once the dive-roll animation ends.

The fire fights in this game are okay at its best. There are only a few varieties of enemies from your usual melee attackers, grenade throwers, heavy machine gunner, snipers, and etc. Only problem is besides the cleaners and a few, which has an obvious weakness in their gas tanks or ammo cache, every other enemy is the same. The most effective was is always to just shoot the head. This makes higher level fire fights all about shooting the bullet sponges till they go down which may feel repetitive after a few missions.

When you hit max level which is 30, you will get to craft high-end gear and collecting resources becomes your farming routine, from dismantling gear for crafting materials and collecting phoenix coins to buy blueprints. This makes the game a little grind but also make obtaining the perfect equipment a little harder. Besides crafting, most high end gear can drop from bosses on challenging difficulty or in The Dark Zone. Speaking about the dark zone, let’s get into that.

When you are high level and start exploring, you may notice some places or missions uses the same area layout which makes some areas feel like a Déjà vu of an earlier mission. This makes the game feel somewhat underdeveloped as you go exploring.

The Dark Zone The Dark Zone is the PvP half of the game. To be really blunt, there are no PvP objectives in this game. It is more like a Player Kill (PK) Zone in other MMORPG. Shooting a player continuously turns you into a rogue agent which put a bounty on your head for other agents to kill. Loot in this area handles differently. Any gears you collect are place into a quarantine bag which has limited space but this does not mean that you already have the loot. You have to extract the loot at certain location to really obtain them. Holding any loot will show a bright yellow quarantine bag behind your character underneath your backpack. This tells other people that you have something but does not inform them the exact gear which you looted. Before you extract the gear, other players may attack you to obtain certain part of the loot. The loot also may be dropped if you die to NPC.

The Dark Zone areas are marked in red

The Dark Zone has a separate experience bar which actually has no purpose besides locking you to purchase high level blueprints. There are also Dark Zone Credits but by the time you are able to purchase anything with because of the level lock, most gears obtain using Dark Zone Credit are useless. Dying in The Dark Zone has a penalty. You will lose Dark Zone Credits and Dark Zone Experience on top of dropping your loot in this area.

The Dark Zone is filled with a lot of NPC enemies beside other players. You can expect to bump into other players in hot farming zones in this area. These NPCs drops Phoenix Credits which are used to purchase blue prints and also high end gear. There are also Division Tech which are materials used to create high end gears. This makes The Dark Zone very important for players who are trying to obtain the best end game gear.

When things go Rogue, it can go crazy

Turning rogue is something special in The Dark Zone. This allows you to kill people and obtain their loot. Turning rogue puts a timer on your head for other agents to hunt you down. If you manage to survive the man hunt you will be rewarded. Dying while being rogue gives a slightly harsher death penalty and also increased respawn times.

Massive Ubisoft had a great idea but somehow fell flat. To the harsh punishment for turning rogue before it was patch to the easier to obtain farming method outside in the PvE area. The Dark Zone still has many things to be fixed. We will keep a close watch on the changes which will happen but until then, people will try their best to obtain the best farm method regardless if it is in or out of The Dark Zone.

Conclusion Tom Clancy’s The Division is a very ambitions game to begin with. Being the only other MMO shooter for consoles, there was a lot riding on Massive Ubisoft to make this game stand out from the competition. There is many things done correctly in this game that Massive Ubisoft should be proud of but at the same time, many mistakes are also made that they should not seeing as there are many lesson to be learn from other games in this genre. Currently the game is in its infant stage and still trying to stand up on its own.

I am going to give Tom Clancy’s: The Division, A 2 out of 5

PROS -Fantastic Character Customization -Unique loot attributes -Party and matchmaking is excellent -Solid third person shooter mechanics CONS -Lack of any real PvP -Story line a little dull and boss battle feels uneventful -No real enemy variety.

Score Reasoning

1 Point – Good Character Customization, from the Primary Attributes, to Skills and Mods 1 Point - Base shooting mechanic

Personal Note As a game, The Division is missing a lot of important things which makes it feel incomplete. There are no clans or guilds system which makes it hard to form a groups. Boss battles are also nothing more than a shooting fess with no unique way to approach fights. A lot of guns and skills need balancing to make it viable. A proper PvP mode should be added in this game to give players a way to fight without being in The Dark Zone and dying as a rogue. I hope future patches and expansion will help this game move forward. So far many repeatable mistakes from games like Destiny and Diablo are being made by Massive Ubisoft and I hope that they do not take years to fix them like the other.

Tom Clancy's Division is available on PS4, XboxOne and PC.

This reviewed is based on the PS4 version.

#DeadlyRush2014 #Review #2016