Tom Clancy’s the Division 2 is the most stunningly beautiful mess I’ve ever seen, where everything’s made up and the loot doesn’t matter. It’s quickly become my go-to podcast game—meaning I usually put something on in the background whilst chipping away at a plethora of tasks , missions and activities scattered throughout each region in a sprawling post-pandemic Washington D.C.
The story is decent. A little dark, but we’ll get to that later. It’s like anything you would expect from the Clancy-verse long after he stopped writing and began advising lesser authors and slapping his name on the finished product.
The game does a poor job of explaining all its intricacies (skill power, how to get it, what all the sleek UI numbers and color-coded symbols mean in the player menu, etc.). However, these are things easily picked up and only confuse for a short time.
Throughout the game (especially level 0-20), TCD2 hits the player with a tsunami of loot. Guns (primary, secondary and sidearm), backpacks, gloves, kneepads and holsters all drop constantly. It’s a given that when you find a slightly better piece of gear you like that minutes later you will find one slightly better. The gear maximizer in all of us bursts forth with a vengeance to spend a significant and sometimes irritating amount of time perusing gear items and an equal amount of mods to use in their various slots, comparing stats until finally making a decision only to find something better in the next encounter. On one hand, this gets tiresome and feels like the game is doing its best to get in its own way, on the other, it forces a player to use every type of weapon available at some point. At the writing of this article, I’m 30-plus hours in and I’ve yet to use the same loadout for more than half an hour.
On the subject of guns: this game has a lot of them. Assault rifles, bolt action and marksman rifles, SMGs, shotguns, pistols; if you’ve seen it in a movie, it’s probably in TCD2. A variety of skins—acquired through looting (rarely) or via micro-transactions (naturally)—is available to give them either a wacky appearance in the tone of Fortnite or a grittier look for the realists. I personally take an unnecessary amount of delight in painting the classic Soviet arsenal (M44, AK-47 and Dragunov) a brilliant shade of comrade crimson. On the subject of the classics, you’ll find some old goldies in the game that deserve an honorable mention because they’re…just…cool. The M14 is a personal favorite in the historical line-up next to the Thompson SMG, double-barreled shotgun (both long and sawn-off), M60, the original M16, Remington 700, Colt 1911, FN FAL and the RPK along with the afore mentioned Soviet-era guns. Guns in the game are fun and vary widely, allowing players to choose their style: close-, medium-, long- or the wiser mixed-range loadouts. Unfortunately, guns vary in terms of realism as well and exist only in this tiny RPG universe Ubisoft has created. If you’re the kind of gamer who would get hung up on an FAL being easier to fire on full-auto than an M4, you should probably stick to Rising Storm 2: Vietnam.
(Here’s where, much like the game, we’ll be taking a dark turn.)
Also unfortunately, in the era in which we live there is a degree of social commentary to be derived from even the rhythmic, mind numbing time-sink that is TCD2. Right off the bat the menus in the game drop the term “assault style weapon” on you. The heart will sink a tad or swell a size as you become either a triggered conservative or a vindicated liberal. For those of you who find yourselves an indifferent neither, you and your righty and lefty friends might all find common ground in the fact that it is kind of disturbing to be slaughtering African American gangbangers called Hyenas in the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.
Wait, what? Exactly.
Besides the predominantly black Hyenas who favor hopping around out in the middle of the street with their guns held sideways, there is a mixed-race group of Second Amendment fanboys (and –girls, kudos to Ubisoft for bad guy [and –girl] inclusivity) called the True Sons (and daughters). They love tactical gear, explosives, ArmaLite Rifles and probably voted for Donnie J. Rounding out the factions of baddies we have the Borderlands/Mad Max types called the Outcasts. These crazies generally start off an attack with a couple of suicide bombers. Then some Molotovs. Then flamethrowers. Then some toxic gas. If those options prove ineffective, they like to send out a brute with a hammer. (Any Halo fans?)
Rockstar successfully parodied our society with viciously hilarious honesty, Ubisoft just made an IP that tells a really dark story about the U.S. Government striking its own abandoned citizens from the grave with a hoard of sleeper agents called The Division. Yes, the Hyenas, True Sons and Outcasts are bad people—the snippets of dialogue players find in the form of Mobile Electronic Devices and the real-time actions they will witness in a playthrough prove that—but in the TCD2 universe, the government failed those people and so in a lawless world they became bad. The government’s response to this breakdown is using these sleeper agents that are trying to bring the world back to heel to slaughter the bad apples: Hyenas (poor blacks), True Sons (the gun nuts) and the Outcasts (those with mental health issues).
Why is something we don’t tend to ask in a videogame. Plot happens, but it’s an action-based experience that you have and you move on. For a great while I didn’t ask why, but as the story progresses, you come to a moment when Agent Alani Kelso looks your avatar in the eye and mutters, “Kill them all.” Everything after that snapped into focus the blurry words that I had seen approaching but had avoided because I’m vegging out playing a videogame and those words are making me think; I didn’t want to look into that dark doorway that the camera was panning in on because I knew that something was going to scream out of the darkness accompanied with a dramatic sting. FINAL SOLUTION. Someone at Ubisoft was either trying to get it done that day and get home, or had a fantastically fascistic dream of making the society after better than the one we have now: just get rid of these people! The game is about Americans killing Americans. The side you play on has utterly written off the other side as evil and views them as less than they are themselves. That is what’s wrong with our nation today. That would be intelligent commentary if your side’s response in the game wasn’t to, “Kill them all.”
Told you it was going to take a turn. Bottom line: Tom Clancy’s the Division 2 is a fun game. Firefights become high speed chess, especially during boss fights, looting is (sometimes overly) satisfying, if not real then the firearms at least feel good and the repetitive activities in each region of D.C. are varied enough so as not to become just that. On the multiplayer front, both PVE and PVP are a blast though the co-op is where the game truly shines and wherein the endgame lies. Worth $59.99? I think few games are but I would definitely recommend giving it a go sometime soon.
The Division 2 Year 6 Season 1 PTS patch notes are now available, as the test begins this April 26! Download size, schedule revealed too.
Read on for The Division 2 Title Update 20 PTS Phase 2 patch notes to see what changes are incoming to gamers this coming February.
Massive has responded with their findings, as The Division 2 Title Update 20 PTS phase 1 feedback and developer notes have been revealed.
After UBI's CEO spout about getting used to not owning games, i wont be buying naymore Ubisoft games
I...did not expect a review emphasizing that aspect of the game, and I dig it. Interesting perspective to see before I dive into this one next week. How do you think the first Division handled social commentary compared to this one?
Also, welcome back to N4G! It's cool to see how long you've been away from submitting & commenting and then dropping this Division 2 review over the weekend. Hope to see more content from you.