Game Review - Tom Clancy's The Division

Game Review: Tom Clancy's The Division by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft
Score: +4/-10 (FAIL for solo)

During Black Friday, a devastating pandemic sweeps through New York City, and one by one, basic services fail. In only a few days, without food or water, society collapses into chaos. The Division, an autonomous unit of tactical agents, is activated. Leading seemingly ordinary lives among us, these Agents are trained to operate independently in order to save society.
When Society Falls, We Rise.

The Division was released in 2016 and overall has aged very well. It is a fun enough looter-shooter, and the slightly high-tech contemporary setting sets it apart from others of the genre, being neither fantasy or sci-fi. And the game uses this contemporary setting very well, evoking player experiences which are perhaps not possible or harder to establish in other settings.

It might seem solo-friendly, but once you start encountering bosses, the game breaks down completely and you need to cheese them somehow to win. If you are not prepared for this and repeated frustrated, The Division is definitely a FAIL for solo players.

• +0 Graphics are decent with good performance. As a 2016 game you should have no problem running it at Ultra settings.
• -1 Terrible character customization although possibly intentional. You are making a "real person", not a hot action movie star. Nevertheless, I think many players would actually like to make a hot action movie star to be their character.
• +1 The action is quite good and with the added mechanic of requiring cover.
• This means you really can't just play bold and exciting like you can in other games. If you are not in cover you are basically dead very quickly no matter what the enemy level.
• -1/FAIL Bosses are terrible. They have piles of health, enough to ignore cover and just walk up to you and shoot you for huge amounts of damage, enough that you really can't exchange fire with them.
• This continues well past maximum character level when the world finally has limits on scaling up to your level, with the concept of World difficulty Tiers.
• Once you reach World Tier 1, enemy scaling is capped but your gear scaling is not so you can have a more reasonable time against gold "elite" enemies when your gear is at the upper end or exceeds the recommended gear score for the World Tier.
• For everyone's first playthrough however you will encounter a lot of bosses and especially if you are solo you will basically have to cheese them all. For solo play this generally involves finding some situation where the boss decides not to keep walking to you. Then you slowly snipe them while they are reloading. Or being able to keep your distance circling around cover (and sometimes causing the boss to lose track of your location) without being exposed to massive damage in the meantime.
• For co-op this is less of a problem since the boss can only deal with one target at a time, so your friend can flank them while you take cover.
• -1 Sometimes on a mission one or even two bosses will spawn and start walking around with impunity, hitting for 20% or more health per bullet, and forcing you to change cover, exposing yourself to more shots in the meantime.
• -1 Abilities don't feel exciting
• Although the abilities you can get are impactful, they are not exciting to play. Typically they involve some kind of cheese, like throwing out an automated turret to flank your enemy only to have them one-shot by a boss and do nothing at all.
• -1 Combat is all about cheesy tactics
• This is not a game where you go head-to-head with the enemy. You cheese them while they use superior numbers to try to outflank you.
• Whether you find this fun is really subjective, especially when you have to cheese a boss fight to win.
• -1 Cover is important but sometimes you are not allowed to use it.
• Sometimes a mission will have a nearby position that has excellent cover and height, but it is literally just a couple of meters outside the radius of a mission. There is no indication of mission boundaries but as soon as you get to that common-sense cover location, the mission immediately fails. You will need to fast travel away run back out to try it again.
• Many terrain features look like they should let you take cover, but you cannot. Some look like you should be able to jump up / over / down but you cannot.
• -1 Doable solo but not solo-friendly.
• It's years after release and The Division 2 is also out, so a game not being solo-friendly becomes a real liability. It's just fact that as most online games age, population drops and then trying to find players to play co-op or populate multiplayer modes can become a real chore.
• Fortunately most of the game is soloable, you just need to cheese a lot of the bosses and deal with being swarmed most of the time.
• -1 Enemy density increases in higher-level zones and gunfire can attract enemies so even if you spot just a few, it can suddenly become a huge firefight with enemies coming from all sides because they were attracted to the gunfire.
• For solo, this just creates at best tedious encounters and at worst suddenly unwinnable encounters. Enemies are very accurate with all weapons at even long distances, so it's often not viable to just run away when suddenly swarmed.
• Happily your open world is instanced to you so you don't get other players mucking around spoiling your experience unless you invite them to your party.
• +1 Open world freedom.
• Most games offering "open-world" let you do anything in any order, but generally still have a linear main quest line. The Division breaks this down even further so that even the "main quest" or main story arc isn't a linear operation.
• You start out knowing just as little as anyone else, so no one is really able to guide you through a sequence of missions. Instead, as you complete the main quest missions in virtually any order, key plot elements are revealed and you expand your understanding of what happened for the city to get to this point.
• -1 No changes to the world: Despite all your upgrades and questing, the zones essentially remain the same. Enemy presence is not reduced, friendly NPCs are stuck with pistols while the enemy has assault rifles.
• "Encounters" placed in the open world add to the sense of a living, dynamic world where you can come across hotspots that need your help. Missions are also embedded into the world 
• The world feels overly cluttered but amidst the mess you can occasionally spot some atmospheric interactions like a raven trying to catch a rat.
• -1 Zone missions are basically one-time except for a repeatable main story quest which is pointless to do because the level is generally set to less than your own and you get low-grade gear.
• So if you are feeling stuck and want to improve your gear, there are limited and tedious options:
• Sell stuff for money and buy something from an NPC vendor.
• Collect crafting materials and try your luck on the crafting lottery.
• Wander around trying to find containers or hoping for a decent loot drop. You might as well do this on lower-level maps since everything is scaled according to your level anyway and enemy density is lower there.
• Find a respawning boss on the map, cheeses it, and hope for a decent loot drop. Bosses are always equal to your level so choose the easiest one. However the effort versus random reward is generally very low.
• +1 You feel like a hero (government-sanctioned vigilante conveniently with no rules).
• The combination of a familiar contemporary setting and putting you on the side of protecting civilization helps to establish players as heroic actors easily. Whereas most other games with their unique settings have to start from scratch establishing lore and the player's role and importance.
• +1 Non-combat actions like handing out supplies to citizens in need help to reinforce this and remind the players of their role, while at the same time have relevance to the player (typically you get a piece of clothing that is added to your wardrobe choices).
• NPCs around you constantly acknowledge you, so the world feels alive and your heroic role and contributes are reinforced.