VideoGame Tom Clancy's Rolling
The Division is supposed to be the entry of the Tom Clancy name into the MMOFPS market, but this isn't a review focused on the gameplay. It's focused on the story, and what a terrible story it is.
If you've read Clancy's work, you know that while his characters do what's necessary they still remain firmly on the side of law, order, and the American way even in the Rainbow Six series. The Division is not what a fan of Clancy would recognize as his typical heroic figures. Maybe at best the Division is styled of the character John Clark, but the Division itself is nothing like a heroic organization Clancy would create. If anything the Division is something that Clancy would have used as, at best, well-intentioned extremists. The Division is not something Tom Clancy would have used in any truly heroic light, it's something Clancy would have used to illustrate the dangers of an organization being so buried inside the government and allowed to do what is necessary, even in the worst situations.
I could care less about claims of repetitive gameplay and bad online mechanics honestly. It's the fact that Ubisoft couldn't get Clancy's style right.
VideoGame Not worth your time
The Division is a third person shooter action-MMO. The premise of the game is that someone has released an engineered supervirus in New York City. You are a member of The Division, a top-secret organization of sleeper agents who are activated to help bring order to the city.
You go into New York City and establish order by killing rioters, looters, sanitation workers with flamethrowers, criminals, and private military company folks who are all trying to take over the city.
Alas, despite this pretend-variety, in reality, most enemies fight pretty similarly – there’s some difference with the sanitation workers (the cleaners) because of their flamethrowers, but otherwise the factions are largely interchangeable, save for the fact that the PMC faction has three types of special characters, as opposed to one for the other factions.
The enemies are mostly pretty samey. There’s a handful of special enemy types, but they are basically ordinary enemies with some added ability. The only real exceptions are some “unique” enemies, who are anything but unique but which have more health and sometimes play a bit more differently, with a couple of big, heavy characters and one who carries around a shield to block your attacks with. By the end of it, enemies are very rote.
The Division is a new kind of MMO – a primarily single-player experience wherein you will never encounter another player in most of the game area due to almost the entire world being an instanced area for the player alone. You can play with other people at will, but you can also play it as a single-player experience, and frankly, it works just fine as one and doesn’t feel like it gets much added to it from multiplayer.
The real problem is the sameiness. The game is ultimately just a cycle of you going out and killing enemies to get better loot. The dungeons are just a series of battles with enemies which are, frankly, mostly interchangeable with battles you get into wandering around the city streets, save that sometimes there are reinforcements which join the battles. The quests, too, basically follow the same mold, and ultimately the game consists of “defend a location while enemies attack you in waves” and “attack enemies who are defending a location”. Basically the whole game follows this, and there is very little variety – what little variety there is mostly a function of the particular environment, and even there, there are a number of copy-pasted environments, including a sewer fight that I think I had five separate times.
The story is pretty bland – in theory, it is a neat idea, but in practice, you just don’t have any link to any of the characters (being a mute protagonist) and they’re all fairly generic. None of them are terribly voice-acted or get terrible lines, they’re just bland and lack any real depth. As such, there’s no reason to care about their plight. The civilians are all interchangeable, and there’s just so little to grab onto anywhere in the game.