Tom Clancy's The Division Review

The Division is a third person cover shooter game, because unlike your regular "walking Rambo shooter", if you are not under cover, you will be dead in a second. What makes this game unique is that Ubisoft tried to mix some "RPG" elements, like skill trees, character attributes, weapon bonuses and control conditions into the game. We like to see it as a mix of Gears of War, Diablo and Borderlands blended together.

Gear bonuses

As any shooter game, this one has an immense arsenal at your disposal, each weapon having their own characteristics, so we definitely recommend trying them all out. But most importantly is the bonuses they carry. As we mentioned this game is heavily weighted on loot, which means that when you get to drop/craft that one weapon you were looking for, chances of it having the matching bonuses for your build are very, very low. They do allow you to re-roll one of them, but just one. It would be really nice to be able to

Incendiary grenade

have two equal weapons and transfer a bonus from one to the other, since loot is individual and there is no way to trade items, you still would have to farm your equipment. An important additional tool of your arsenal are grenades. They are a reliable source to disable your opponent. Flashbang will blind, incendiary grenade will burn and so on, all of them stunning your opponent for a couple seconds.

White line shows cover pathfinding.

The second most important mechanic is finding cover. Enemies do an enormous amount of damage, so you will always be looking for a way to protect yourself until the right moment to come out and shoot. To make things more exciting you can even aim for a specific cover and the game will pathfind a route to it. Interesting additional mechanic is if an enemy is peaking at you through cover and you hit a bullet right in front of him (in the cover itself, like the wall or barricade), the smoke and fragments will blind him for a couple seconds, giving you just enough time to reposition yourself or close in for the kill.

Inventory and Character Attributes

Finally we have character attributes, skills, talents and perks. Character attributes are simple, you have just three: Firearms (your damage), Stamina (your health) and Electronics (your skill power). All your gear will enhance at least one of this, and you can combine them as you see fit. There are 9 skills and 3 "super powers", you can have 2 skills + 1 "super power" equipped at the same time. Each skill has 3 modifications that will change it in some way, and we recommend exploring each one at least once. Perks are simple passive buffs and talents are somewhat "active" buffs. More precisely a talent has certain conditions (like getting to cover or shooting your enemy on the head), if you meet the condition you will receive the talents buff for a short time.

Dying in the Dark Zone

Last, but not least, we have to briefly talk about the Dark Zone, the end-game area of the map where the game becomes truly multiplayer with extra hardened enemies and the best gear in the game. The Dark Zone has exclusive mechanics that we could spend a whole post writing about, so in short: The Dark Zone has it's own ranking system, currency and contaminated loot that needs to be extracted in specific locations before you can use it. That is where the player killers will hunt you and try to steal your hard earned loot. Respawning, looting and specially killing other players is something that definitely could have used some more development iteration, as there is barely enough time to come back and get your loot and revenge. Which is the best part of this whole system.


We also feel that this mix of on-line/off-line didn't quite work the best. The world doesn't really feel as multiplayer as a single-player game with friends, despite being clearly focused on multiplayer. But if you are in for the single-player only you will be missing a good portion of the end-game. Overall The Division has a well paced experience with a reasonable balanced shooting/cover system. A positive point to the great environment artists that gave life to a very realistic trashed looking New York City.

Final Score: 8 out of 10.