TOM CLANCY'S THE DIVISION REVIEW
It’s not too hard to find nice things to say about Tom Clancy’s The Division, especially as it unfurls in its strong opening hours: its open-world version of Manhattan is both gorgeous and authentic, its cover-based third-person combat is sound, and its RPG elements run surprisingly deep. And yet, next to every good thing The Division does, there hangs a big, ugly asterisk. That same open world is barren and unengaging, combat gets bogged down with samey waves of walking bullet sponges, and character progression is awkwardly fractured in inconvenient ways. Outside of the tension of the PvPvE Dark Zone, there’s little that makes this virtual Manhattan feel alive or dangerous.
Visually, The Division leans heavily but very effectively on the all-too-familiar iconography of post-biological-disaster Manhattan. Coming out of an early security checkpoint, daylight blinded me until my “eyes” adjusted, and then I saw it: an improvised memorial to those who had given their lives trying to take Manhattan back from the chaos that's swallowed it in the wake of an unprecedented terror attack.
I’ve spent time in the real New York City, and in fact my father was in Manhattan on 9/11. I've seen memorials like this, littered with the helmets of fallen firefighters and hastily scrawled children's drawings with "thank you" writ large across the top. It is, perhaps, a cheap way to get me emotionally invested in the conflict that drives the fragmented story forward, but it worked – at least for a time. From the quaint Christmas lights in Chelsea to the ominously unlit Times Square, The Division is full of evocative visual moments. It never follows up on them in any substantive way, but they do manage to make the city itself the most interesting character in the cast.
But as full as the world is of eerily beautiful sights to see, it is equally devoid of worthwhile things to do. Imagine an open-world game with hardly any dynamic elements, or worse, a long-dead MMO where you and a handful of party members (should you invite folks along for some co-op) are the only people left on your server. That’s a solid approximation of how engaging of a play-space The Division’s Manhattan is.
But as full as the world is of eerily beautiful sights to see, it is equally devoid of worthwhile things to do.
Enemy encounters are spread thin across the city like too little butter over too much bread, creating long stretches of eventless walking where very little happens. I’ve walked for minutes at a time without more than one or two small packs of easily dispatched thugs to entertain me. That would matter a lot less if there was more going on around me, but for a city of eight million that’s supposedly just been mortally wounded by a terror attack and subsequently overrun by multiple gangs of militarized fanatics, the streets are suffocatingly calm.
That’s mostly owing to the fact that there are virtually no random events; just illusions of them. That detachment of peacekeeping troops getting into it with a gang of looters a block over sound like they're engaging in an impromptu skirmish, but it's all a scripted show for your benefit. Once you help them end it, they'll be on indefinite leave. Though some other IGN editors say they’ve seen gangs dynamically fighting in the world, in more than 50 hours played. What’s more, these pre-set, one-and-done missions are all minor variations of one of a few simple missions types, and once you’ve done all of them in a zone, there’s no material reason to come back to that location besides some inconsequential collectibles that I quickly gave up on grabbing, even when they were only steps out of my way.
