THE DIVISION 2
Washington, Washing-TON...
After 25 hours of wrestling with Bio-Ware’s looter shooter Anthem, it’s funny how grateful I am for the little things in The Division 2—stuff like being able to switch my loadout on the fly, without exiting a mission or sitting through a loading screen. No one’s tried to make me and three other players sit through a boring mid-mission cutscene, either. In fact, The Division 2 barely makes me pay attention to its barely-there story at all.
The Division 2 presents a much stronger campaign experience than the first game, with fewer filler missions, and better open world side activities. Its endgame, too, is a satisfyingly different offering to the preceding hours, remixing levels, making the world feel more alive, and escalating the difficulty of side activities to keep you playing. I will say this, if The Division didn’t grab you at any point during the past two years of well-considered updates, I don’t think this will necessarily be the right game for you now.
It’s largely a superior version of the same thing — tough third-person co-op shootouts, interlocking player skills, incremental loot rewards, and a familiarly dry Tom Clancy military tone.
Where it improves is in the cadence of its rewards, pelting you with loot and experience points from various sources, and making the next upgrade feel like a natural result of your journey through the game rather than being arduously earned. If you’re looking for a strong looter shooter you can enjoy with friends in the wake of Anthem’s troubled launch, or you want a midseason break from Destiny 2, this will likely be a strong fit.
It helps that the main mission design is mostly terrific, taking you through a variety of real-world tourist spots for shootouts with the game’s three enemy factions: The Hyenas, True Sons, and Outcasts, all of which behave a bit differently in combat.
Enemies don’t feel as bullet-hungry as they did in the first game, and some of the elite enemies — whose armor is peeled off with gunfire — are genuinely fun to fight. It’s a mostly great shooter, let down by the occasional AI issue, where an enemy will get stuck on the spot, or spend so long climbing around that you can easily pick them off.
Each main campaign mission feels like a real event. Given that no one really makes linear third-person shooter games now — here they’re isolated parts of a massive open world looter game — it’s easy to forget what these kind of levels feel like when they’re designed well. EXPLODING HISTORY
There’s an amazing excursion into the American History Museum, where there’s a (probably tasteless) firefight in the midst of a Vietnam recreation exhibit, complete with royalty-free version of The End by The Doors playing in the background. And then there’s a gunfight in the Air & Space Museum’s planetarium and Mars exhibits, which for a few minutes make you feel like you’re playing a sci-fi shooter.
As someone who’s never visited the city in real life, Washington DC isn’t as immediately recognisable as the first game’s New York, barring a few obvious landmarks.
It undoubtedly feels more alive than the first game’s world, though, with plenty of friendly NPCs breaking into firefights with the various enemy factions. It can be exciting to arrive halfway through a battle to turn the cause in your side’s favor, bravely shooting enemies in the back while they’re distracted by your allies.
DC is also beautiful in places. The weather effects and day/night cycles contribute so much to the game’s atmosphere, with the world looking almost entirely different when covered in rainfall, and the odd thunderstorm making firefights particularly dramatic.
It helps that many of the activities dotted around DC’s map are genuinely good, particularly control points, which you liberate from enemy factions with
the help of AI pals. They each have the same objectives — clear the area of enemies, fight an elite, then defend the same area and fight another elite — but they’re laid out differently enough that they challenge you to think about the space and enemy positioning. At endgame, too, they’ll be taken back by enemies, continually climbing in difficulty as you keep reclaiming them for better rewards.
The journey to level 30 has a little filler in the form of side missions or repetitive activities, like stopping propaganda broadcasts, but not much. It’s a swift journey. I can’t fault The Division 2 for a lack of things to do, though. Coming out of the barren world of Anthem, it’s almost refreshing.
Progression is a lot comfier than the first game. You unlock skills at a fast clip throughout the campaign. You can also open up variants for them with the game’s plentiful SHD Tech points early on, rather than having to upgrade different wings of your base like you did in The Division 1. It feels much more flexible, like the developers want you to experiment with your ideal loadouts in advance of reaching the endgame.
It’s also refreshingly common to see enemies using novelty weapons and ammo types on you, sending deadly remote controlled cars in your direction, or gumming you up with the Chem Launcher’s riot foam while other enemies open fire on you. This gives some real variety and surprise to the game’s many shootouts.
ENTER ENDGAME
Once you hit the level 30 cap, a new faction called the Black Tusk is added to the game. You then start progressing through World Tiers, which determine the difficulty of the enemies you face and the loot you earn. You’ll then revisit most of the earlier main mission locations in their ‘invaded’ forms, remixed with this high-tech force’s new enemy types. The Black Tusk fires off explosive drones like it bought too many of them on sale, and sends in sniper-equipped robot dogs that look like they jogged out of a Metal Gear game. These invaded mission variants are a lot of fun, with enemies often spilling out of different parts of the level to your first visit.
DEMOLITION MAN
If you were hoping the Black Tusk would entail an entirely new campaign, that’s not really what the endgame offers here. The Division 2 successfully feels very different after level 30 by bringing the map to life, though, with enemy movements shown on the map as they reclaim control points, and newer, tougher multi-part bounties to tick off. The Black Tusk also brings its own new activities, like dramatic battles against Batplane-sized drones. The battle for DC really feels like an ongoing struggle, and the higher threat level of activities and rewards provided by higher difficulty main missions means it feels like there’s loads more to do.
The real sweetener at level 30 is unlocking the three specialisations, which each have their own new progression paths. They also offer their own signature weapons, which are fantastic fun to unleash, and require a specific ammo type that’s a little rare. I’ve so far focused on the Demolitionist, with nice damage bonuses for my treasured light machine guns, and a wicked class-exclusive turret upgrade that unleashes comically deadly mortar fire. Pleasingly, you can also switch between the three at any time, and completing the upgrade tree for each will definitely take a while to tick off.
It feels like The Division 2 has launched with an extremely healthy supply of things to do, then, but as with any promise of a deep post-game, a lot depends on what happens next — how players feel about the game after a few weeks of digesting what’s here at launch, how Ubisoft reacts to that, and whether the post-release content will keep providing good reasons to continue playing. I’m particularly excited to see what The Division 2’s version of an eight-player raid looks like, and I hope the planned additions to the campaign bring main missions that are as exciting as what’s in here.
The hybrid PvP/PvE area The Dark Zone returns from the first game in three varieties, all a bit different in style and layout. The Dark Zone still has the potential to create great player-generated, nerve-wracking stories, and it too is nice and generous with loot in both infected and clean variants. I really recommend sweeping each map with a group, though.
This is a very complete-feeling followup to The Division, from a team that clearly learned a lot about its audience after a series of successful, high-value updates. Dedicated players know they want this already. For everyone else, this is an exciting, moreish shooter set in a genuinely impressive world that already offers tens of hours of enjoyable shooting, exciting skills, and cool loot.