Tom Clancy's The Division: Review

Hello fellow gamers, today i will be doing reviewing Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division Beta and my experiences over the short time the beta was open.

I will  admit I got a bit caught up in the buzz for Tom Clancy's The Division since its astonishing premiere trailer at E3, so much so that I put the game on mine most anticipated games of 2016 list. After I played a few hours of the open beta for the game on Play station, my anticipation isn't gone, but it has been dulled quite a bit.

That's not to say there weren't things I loved . The beta shows off the same kind of detailed environmental design as those initial trailers, rendering a disease-ruined and fallen world where hauntingly beautiful signs of decaying civilization are everywhere you look. I also like the game's augmented-reality style interface, which overlays paths and information neatly over the "real world," including map projections that make it easy to figure out where you are and which way to go. The mix of high-end, near-future technology and crumbling urban infrastructure is certainly visually striking

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 The online party integration also seems pretty solid so far. While you can see a whole server full of players running around and buying items in central "safe zones," individual missions are split off into smaller team-based instances. It's relatively easy to join up with friends or strangers to take on those missions in small groups and coordinate your goals on a shared map. The only quibble is that voice communication seems to be the only reliable way to communicate; there are no in-game tools to quickly highlight nearby points of interest or send quick commands and information to your team (if there are, I didn't find them).

Past those surface niceties, though, the game-play on offer in The Division beta is uninspiring to say the least. The shooting action seems to draw direct inspiration from the Gears of War series, particularly in the way you can snap behind cover and move between safe points with the press of a button. That's a fine idea in theory. In execution, though, the controls are quite a bit clunkier than Epic's high-octane shooters.

Where the Gears of War games thrive on smooth animations and transitions that keep the action fluid and fast-moving, in The Division beta I found the protagonist moved much more clunkily. Stepping out of cover, climbing onto a high surface, and rolling out of the way of bullets all felt slow and awkward, with animations that focused too long on the hero just standing there without much purpose. Even something as simple as sprinting down an empty street felt awkward since even the slightest sidestep to the left or right seems to break the sprint.

The controls are only a minor quibble, though, compared to the enemy AI on display in the beta. In just a few hours of play, I ran out of fingers and toes to count the number of bat wielding enemies who simply ran straight at me at full speed, seemingly eager to be gunned down. Armed enemies were obviously more common, but they'd often pause while dodging between pieces of cover to stand in the open and shoot back at me, relatively defenseless.

One particularly stupid "boss" encounter, at the end of a side-mission line, saw the antagonist simply bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball across the edge of a nearby roof, putting herself in the open with predictable frequency you could set your watch to. Sure, these are supposed to be the earliest and easiest missions in the game, and encounters may get more difficult as you go. But it's not a strong start.

Even a couple of hours in, the shooting action is already starting to feel incredibly repetitive. Every single mission so far has boiled down to "go to this point, clear the area of waves of enemies, then move on to another point," with none of the twists or high-action set pieces that keep better shooters interesting. There has been precious little variety in the enemies, almost all of which seem to be thug-like, scowling black men in ratty hoodies who are given precious little motivation by some forgettable, overly expository story scenes and voice overs. A few "named" enemies are supposed to stand out for their intelligence and toughness, but in practice they just end up being sponges that absorb more bullets before going down.

The game's RPG-like leveling and abilities structure hasn't impressed me yet either. You can scrounge downed enemies for items, weaponry, accessories, and armor, and even use scrap materials to build up a central base. So far, though, all these features feel very transnational and perfunctory, with little of the personality that makes customization fun in shooters like Fallout or even Borderlands.

The special abilities on offer in the beta so far are kind of boring, too. There's a reusable sticky explosive that's pretty easy to shoot with pinpoint accuracy, but its detonation barely fazes even normal grunt enemies. A riot shield ability is nice for moving between cover, but it limits you to a pistol when hiding behind it and was awkward to put away in the middle of a firefight. The abilities that send out radar pings to highlight nearby enemies and heal nearby party members are at least useful, if not especially novel. The menu system hints at a bevy of additional abilities, talents, perks, and upgrades that are unlock-able as you play, but none of them are available in the beta.

Those locked bits of content and the hints of a much larger world outside the city's downtown hub give me hope that The Division can grow a bit more interesting outside of this short, limited beta test. After almost three years of anticipation, though, I'm quite a bit less excited about the game's upcoming March 8 release.