Tom Clancy's The Division 2 PC Review

World is broke. And there’s only one cure: Guns. That’s the motto of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2. Publisher Ubisoft has another open world set up, where players are tasked with hopping from battle to battle. Stuff abound and tons of things to shoot, so go shoot it up! It’s a premise as simple as it is immediate. Frankly, that’s also as far as the game thinks ahead, which leads to some rough design choices and consistent technical failures. There are lots of guns though; lots of them.

Right off the bat, The Division 2 starts with a whispery Apple-esque infomercial, but for the apocalypse; setting the tone with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. As that narrative never changes, the story renders itself immediately negligible. Perhaps it’s for the best that the shooter really does claim to be “not political” and only sheepishly glances at some shoe-horned sociopolitical beats. Almost every single line of writing sounds like the first draft of a middle school student, right down to shouting: “Bullets, I need you!” There’s no way an authentic message would’ve turned out anything but catastrophic. Cringing laughter at all the dumb, faux seriousness the game is inundated in is a blessing, by that comparison.

 

NOT POLITICAL!

 

Yet, no one comes to The Division 2 for the setting. Rather, the focus is, still, getting behind cover and popping out to shoot at things. Well, there is a metric ton of that to do, in a million different ways. From guided shooting galleries in missions to hunting down bounties or capturing enemy control points for people; every bullet spent goes toward a tiny little bit of Washington D.C.’s endless liberation. And freedom and justice for all! There is a considerable amount of variety and the pacing for those nuances follows suit, unlocking differing events and new enemy types, as agents move towards new regions. Even if the early game is inconsequential, it doesn’t make it less worthwhile to enjoy progression, as the onion layers of The Division 2 unfold over and over. In a game all about repetition, having a new angle every few hours is not an easy feat.

All this nuance, however, comes at a price. Navigating menus and the user interface (UI) is a confusing, frustrating nightmare. Sections have subsections upon subsections and are strewn about at random, while the game literally never stops throwing shapes at the screen, going as far as obstructing gameplay and yet, somehow, not managing to give sound info. There is no getting used to the UI overload, but rather learning to see through it. Weapons don’t have clear damage tallies, but some weird math system for prompted values instead. The UI has the arrangement of a grand strategy game, but for the complexity of a cover shooter. This pairing is inconsistent at best and hindering at the times where the game doesn’t know how to follow its own rules, like no longer tracking dynamic bounties that move between surfaces.

Combat follows a similar line of near endless diversity, but with an inability to fully follow through on it. Guns vary in feel, range and application, to give a nice selection of play styles. As leveling increases their traits, the weapons will start including special skills that can be played with as well. There’s an impressive amount of changes, like having a chance to reload for free by landing shots or getting buffs by staying in cover. Gear additionally receives ways to mold a character towards having things like more critical damage or armor regeneration. These same modifiers allow for increasing skill power, so that deployable drones and mines become more potent or get their lengthy cooldowns shortened. There’s definitely plenty of ways to craft and further fine-tune a well-oiled murder machine in surprisingly granular directions, at least, in theory.

In practice, details won’t matter, as there are few distinct ways that are viable and, in the end, chaos will undo any subtlety. Unlocking skills doesn’t make sense beyond the two first obvious choices. Close range weapons are barely useful, since popping in and out of cover can only be done a few seconds at a time, as armor and health melts away. Even in optimal conditions, enemy mobs will spawn out of points that may or may not be adjacent to agents, leading to immediate massive damage and death. There is no preparing or adjusting to sudden appearances or getting destroyed in one shot by elite enemies or projectiles with perfect aim at all times.

 

 

Dying in The Division 2 is as cheap as it comes and will often lead to lost progress and backtracking anywhere between two and fifteen minutes. Not progressing is an integral part of this endless loop. There are a dozen ways where the dice rolls come up unfavorably and death is inevitable. Sudden spawns, one-shots, obstructed terrain, game freezes, cooldown errors, unexpected crossfire from other locations and even straight up Dark Souls trolling. An agent walks in a room and gets decked out immediately. It turns out an elite appeared just then. Tough luck; just walk back for five minutes and do it again.

No versatility matters, because there’s no competence at the core of the gameplay design to toy around with anything, let alone have technical inaptitude lead to points not tracking at all. Frequently, missions and other events will simply not complete or straight-up break, once more prompting to do it all over again. In theory, there are about twenty hours of The Division 2 before reaching “the end,” whatever that means in this game. In reality, the total can go up to double that amount, due to all the lost progression.

It’s a shame, since the enemies, to their credit, are incredibly clever at flushing agents out of cover or shooting from one position to allow for others to flank. Mobs push players to their limits, creating priority targets and alternating those as the fight moves forward. As far as artificial intelligence (AI) goes, this game is a solid example of adaptive thinking.

 

 

The best part of The Division 2, by far, comes from not engaging with any of the active aggravations. Exploration uncovers the best, most muted part of the game. Clever little puzzles funnel players through the gorgeous environment and allow them to fully take in how the downfall of Washington can change a scenery, on their way to a neat loot room at the end of that rainbow. This is a beautiful game and that notion spans far, far beyond the already creative shooting galleries. Grabbing a collectible through a series of rooftops feels like cracking a code. It’s an uncomplicated and rewarding mechanism. Sadly, discovery is also fairly inconsequential and will get further deprioritized during the end game, as the world gets populated with even more hostile mobs.

By completing all the arbitrary points of main progression, the world wipes its slates and opens up anew, but with even more events and treadmills to go through. The Division 2 is noticeably geared towards this end game content, as even an ingeniously balanced gameplay design gets added, with its own advancements. No one would’ve believed that getting another gun after dozens of hours would be engaging, but it really is and that’s applaudable.

More perpetual grinding can be achieved in the Dark Zone areas, where players can turn on each other and steal each other’s loot, though this section also doesn’t stay away from aforementioned design flaws. The fun comes from sweating bullets, though the reality is that any player that wants to shoot others will likely immediately do so. The 4 versus 4 player Conflict mode, however, is more pure in its simplicity. This mode also gets a lot of added value by synergizing skills and managing to control choke points. Conflict is good!

 

 

Interacting with players is going to become second nature, because banding together with others is going to be a mandatory issue. The Division 2 is virtually impossible to play solo. Worse yet, grouping with four players makes the game a breeze with no real punch. There’s no good balance between the hard wall of solo play and waltzing through content in a team, let alone the blatant upping of loot rates for those who get into matchmaking. There is an incredibly specific way this game is to be played and those who choose otherwise are actively punished for it.

Specifically, for PC, the game’s technical flaws bore into the build, with instability going as far as crashing or even wiping settings. And, of course, when the game stops working, that’s a bunch more progress lost. There are a decent amount of customization options though, to make the alluring environment look that much more mesmerizing, without asking too much of more modest computers.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is a treadmill for suckers who simply must have their open world shooting game and don’t care about anything else. There’s more than plenty of that to go around, even twice, though it comes at the cost of skewing priorities towards getting it all in there, plus considerable technical ineptitude. In true Ubisoft fashion, this shooter has all the pleasing elements for an endless adventure, but it’s far from cashing in on it at launch. Maybe after reworking a ton of inexplicable design choices, it will get there in a year or so. And so it goes.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed (@Daavpuke)