The Division, review: An exhilarating multiplayer experience let down by repetitive missions

PS4, Xbox One, PC - £49.99 - Ubisoft

There you are, a squad of four soldiers in a desolate New York, the streets running rampant with like-minded looters, all prowling the city, hoping to find crates filled with the spoils of fallen Division warriors.

Suddenly, an extraction point nearby is triggered. 90 seconds until the helicopter gets there. You run to it and find another group of soldiers waiting. Do you ignore them and evacuate your own treasures? Do you steal what they have by force - after all if you don’t gun them down, what’s to stop them shooting you? But how do you know if they have superior weapons? Perhaps you can work together to defeat the nearby AI.

Shots are heard in the distance. Another player comes running in, a much higher level than everyone else. Someone on your team fires, a person tells you via radio that you’ve ‘gone rogue’ and a bounty has been put on your head. Everyone in the area has been alerted to your presence and you’re their new target. A firefight ensues, you re-spawn about two minutes running pace away - perhaps you can make it back to help your comrades? You rush back into the hellhole, it is even more intense than before, but you’ve regrouped and return fire.

It's these confrontations when playing in the Dark Zone - the player vs player area in the game - that make Tom Clancy’s The Division special. The tension of not knowing which way another online player will turn, working with your team to hunt down those who have gone rogue, or even going rogue yourself. Who can you trust? And do they trust you?

First, another question; how did New York become lawless? The Division takes place mid-crisis. One Black Friday, a biochemical virus was unleashed in the city, spreading via dollar-note transactions. People began to get ill, the city was cordoned off and people start causing chaos - similar to what happens to Gotham in The Dark Knight Rises. However, with no singular Batman coming to save the day, it is up to a squad of ‘citizens’ - the titular Division - to enter the city and restore peace.

This is your starting point, and as you play the story missions - which can be played solo or with friends/random strangers online - you begin to uncover just what happened on the busiest shopping day of the year.

Unfortunately, as much as the game tries, at no point did I feel particularly invested in the story. The characters you meet along the way are bland, clichéd and boring. Your upgradeable base feels the same; you will want to spend as little time there as possible.

Unexpectedly high demand has resulted in the beta being extended (Ubisoft)

The missions themselves are better but can become repetitive, all following a similar formula; enter a building, shoot everyone, kill a boss who takes bullets better than a sponge absorbs water. It’s fun, but after a while you start to realise there’s a whole lot more to this game than the story, and I’m not talking about the side missions (which, as you may have guessed from this being a Ubisoft game, are all very, very repetitive).

Luckily, as uninspiring as the missions/side missions can be, the city itself is beautifully rendered, breathtakingly so, a pleasure just to walk through. When storms come ushering in, the screen fogs up, things get intense (especially when surrounded by enemies). It makes the grind a lot more enjoyable, because Oh Boy are you going to have to grind on these not-so-bright AI enemies.

To get to the spectacular Dark Zone you need to be a relatively high level, putting in at least a half-dozen hours to get anywhere near equipped for it. And then, once you’re there, the levelling system changes and you have to start again. Luckily, these levels go a lot quicker as you fight already much higher level enemies, but the problem is you don’t increase your normal level. Instead, you have to go back out of the Dark Zone and play through the same old missions to get up to scratch for the next set. As great as it is to skip out of multiplayer and back to the story, it's a shame that it takes so damn long to get to where you want to be.

Saying that, playing the Dark Zone is a superb experience unlike any other. While in the PVP area, there’s no room for mistakes, no easy option; it gets intense, and it gets there quickly. My initial description at the beginning of this review happened to me in the game and it was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in recent memory. Unfortunately, it just takes a while to get to those epic moments (and was definitely helped by playing with a number of friends). If you can get a squad together to play online, I would highly recommend as there’s nothing quite like it. If you’re more the lone wolf type, this may be less exhilarating.