An Honest Review of The Division.

The Division is a game based in New York City, after a disease (interestingly named “the Green Poison” or “Dollar Flu”) infects the entire city. The way it spreads is through dollar bills — which is actually quite an efficient way to spread a disease. They don’t really go in depth as to what happens to a person when they get infected except for the fact that they die horrifically.

The entire city goes to shit (excuse my French) and panic ensues. There’s no real explanation to the enemies other than they’re people/psychos who want to rid their city of the infected. So, sleeper agents (known as The Division) are deployed all over the city to help restore order and peace.

 Alright, now that we got that out of the way. Despite this game being a few months old, I decided that it would be a great idea to write a review for it.

I was incredibly excited for this game back when it was announced in 2012. I took one look at it and said “yep, this is the game to defeat all games.” Then E3 2014 came around, showing that they did indeed downgrade the graphics, but not so much for me to care for. It still looked amazing to me, and I was quite excited to play it. And then the dreaded E3 2015 showcase.

It showed how drastically the graphics have been changed and they also announced that the map would be only a small (yet kind of big) part of a city, when just a year ago they were saying it was going to be all of New York. Still, I wasn’t too put down about that and still thought it looked great, and still loved it when the closed beta came out. For what the closed beta was, it showed how promising this game was to be.

But boy there are cons to this game, as well as pros. Sadly, not enough pros to subside the cons. The most major pro I found, however, was how presentable the graphics were, despite all of the downgrades. I was impressed.

The most major con was when I reached around level 15 and quickly realized I was fighting the same, awfully predictable enemies. Sure, some had flame throwers, others had skills where they could toss out a little turret. I’m assuming this was their version of diversity. Another major con I could not get past was how dull leveling was. It was honestly the most mind-numbingly tedious thing to do in the game.

 Despite the leveling being boring and the enemies also being boring, getting high level gear felt surprisingly good, at first. But in order to actually progress in the game you have to continue to run these “dungeons” to level your character up, and you just keep obtaining the same boring gear you saw in the last run. I forgot to mention this, but [SPOILERS] the end of the game is you endlessly firing bullets at a helicopter for roughly 10 minutes -wow-

 There were small things about the game that I did like, however. There were little side missions you could do where you follow an echo of a lost Division Agent which ultimately leads you to said agent’s lost wristband. There weren’t any rewards for doing this though, it literally only gave you experience points. I also liked that you could sometimes give supplies to civilians and in exchange they gave you a new pom-pom beanie or a new nice looking coat.

Then there’s the Dark Zone. The supposed savior of The Division, and as much as I want to agree (and I actually did agree with before all of the scripters came), it wasn’t any better than the game.

In fact, once all of the scripters figured out the files and made themselves invisible, you had to deal with the annoyingly overpowered NPCs that roamed the Dark Zone that could instantly one shot you no matter how hard you tried. You almost made it, Dark Zone, almost!

 I desperately wanted to love this game, however all of the bad things (as I said in the beginning) subsided the bad, and I was therefore uninterested. Overall, I’d rate this game an honest 5/10, if the Dark Zone had been a success, but it’s sadly only a 4/10.

Thank you for reading my review, and I hope you enjoyed (even if you disagreed)