(dramatic music)
(gunfire)
- [James] More than any freshly launched
shared world shooter to date,
The Division 2 presents a polished,
well thought out initial progression path
with at least some gas left in the tank after the fact.
Its great gunplay, worthwhile loot, and beautiful worlds
brimming with reasons to explore it kept me engrossed
for the the vast majority of my 70 hours of play time.
After it's early momentum,
it was a bit of a shock to discover
that the difficult end game content
that I'd been looking forward to on World Tier 4
gave me more of the same loot
that I could find elsewhere and failed to present
any meaningful new mechanical challenges.
The Darkzone too was far less interesting
than I'd hoped it would be, but the good news
is that these late game shortcomings
don't take away from the great journey
that I underwent to reach them.
The Division 2 gets so much more right
than it does wrong.
(dramatic music)
Things in The Division 2 seem to pick up
right where the original post-pandemic story left off,
both in terms of plot line and cover based shooting,
but it quickly becomes clear
that many aspects of the gameplay
have improved in meaningful ways.
Gunplay is impactful,
enemies react to being shot and die faster,
and the world is teeming
with enticing reasons to explore it.
There are are chests and collectibles around every corner,
and this generous distribution of loot goes a long way
in the context of The Division 2's
phenomenally well realized recreation of Washington D.C.
The series familiar urban grid
gives way to lush, open vistas
and iconic monuments overtaken by vines.
I never regretted indulging my inner explorer.
There is a clearly similar progression structure
to each of the 11 PVE zones as you're leveling up.
You'll find a safe house or settlement,
scour the landscape for caches, run missions,
and capture a handful of control points.
However, new activities are introduced as you progress,
and the freedom to tackle these tasks in any order you wish
keeps it from feeling like an obligatory grind.
The missions themselves are well crafted.
Some even introduce welcome new environmental mechanics,
like shooting a valve to douse flames,
or tracing a power cord to a destructible circuit
in order to open a door.
It's a pity that these unique elements
aren't incorporated into the Division 2's
lackluster boss fights,
because they certainly could have used the variety.
Bespoke boss mechanics are a staple
of the shared world shooter and action RPG genres,
so I was expecting to see some more elaborate encounters,
especially in The Division 2's new strongholds
but came up with nothing more
than apparently normal enemy archetypes with more health.
This deprives the PVE of sorely needed
stand-out moments and mechanical intricacy,
and while bosses are a bit of a let down,
enemy variety elsewhere
is significantly better than the first game.
The expected assortment of enemies are all here,
but some factions like the Mad Max-esque outcasts
take entertaining creative liberties with their roles.
Their rusher is a suicide bomber,
their engineer controls a battle bot,
and their heavy tries to crush your skill
with a giant hammer.
The sneaky improvement over the first game
is that even the higher difficulty levels
still throw plenty of lowly red bar grunts at you
to sate your blood lust.
They melt quickly under fire but pack a punch
and can spell trouble if they get behind you.
The time to kill hardly ever felt spongy
thanks in part to visual tricks
like bulky, destructible kevlar
that covers the tankier bad guys.
As a result of these factors,
combat remained demanding and fun,
if a little predictable throughout.
The Division 2 does a wonderful job
of making its massive selection of firearms
feel unique from one and other
by way of recoil patterns, rate of fire, and sound.
Weapons and equipment can drop
with beneficial modifiers called talents
that take the loot from serviceable
to genuinely interesting.
The unhinged talent for instance,
adds a whopping 25% increased weapon damage
but causes your gun to kick like a mule.
I had loads of fun
eking out every last drop of damage from my build
with the help of the DPS meter, stat screen,
and recalibration station,
even if I did discover that shotguns
were a bit too nerfed along the way.
While gunplay is much improved,
ability usage still feels clunky and ineffective,
which doesn't inspire much exploration
into these skill power builds.
Specializations on the other hand,
do offer exciting bonuses,
like different grenades, passive effects,
and the phenomenally fun to use signature weapons.
The ever present motifs
of progression, exploration, and challenge
do a wonderful job of gradually becoming
more prominent as you progress
through the approximately 22 hour main campaign.
The main plot is serviceable,
but the majority of stand-out story moments
come in the form of short, direct, but effective
sub-plots during missions.
- [In-Game Narrator] Agent vital signs, zero.
- [Narrator] There are a lot of excellent activities
and progression that await you after the critical path,
at least for a while anyway.
You'll unlock powerful signature weapons,
be introduced to dynamic world systems
like the priority target network,
and even go up against a new end-game faction
and invaded versions of previously completed missions,
but this initial end-game
is really more of an epilogue due to its brevity.
It only lasts about six hours.
Once you've completed all the invaded missions
and progressed to world tier four,
you lose the ability to replay them,
and instead gain access to challenging variants
of missions you've already played
with no significant mechanical differences
from the main campaign and rewards that stagnate quickly,
apart from the very rare exotic drops.
Before you know it, you'll reach the gear score cap of 450
and be inundated with hundred of randomly-generated,
high-end items that aren't clearly better
than what you've already got.
This is where things get a little confusing,
because of the unintuitive and inconsistent ways
in which the Division 2 allows you to circumvent
this soft limit and continue making progress.
I was shocked when most of the places
that I would expect the 450 plus loot to come from,
like daily and weekly projects,
as well as challenge difficulty
strongholds, missions, and high-value bounties,
instead, for the most part,
only gave me more the same 450 items
that I could obtain from much easier sources.
The good news here,
is the gear score isn't nearly as important
as itemization when it comes to effective power.
Progression after the gear score cap
takes the form of identifying the most advantageous effects
and distilling your horde of hundreds of high-end items
down to the absolute best.
There are also some other avenues for end-game progression
that don't involve gear score at all.
Hard difficulty capture points
award crucial weapon attachments,
and a multitude of enjoyable cryptic Easter egg hunts
bestow masks, backpack trinkets, and exotic weapons,
which, might I add, are remarkably fun to use.
The Dark Zone is sadly the biggest letdown
of The Division 2.
The combat is fun enough,
thanks to a relatively fast time to kill
and stat normalization, but the risk reward dynamic
of the rogue system is a non-starter.
At end game,
both world drops that go straight into your inventory
and contaminated items that can be stolen by other players
and must be extracted via helicopter,
are just more ubiquitous 450 gear.
Without the consequence of potentially losing
or stealing items that you care about,
the Dark Zone becomes a much less attractive
and dynamic PVP space,
and bizarrely, completing the toughest challenges
that The Division 2's Dark Zone has to offer,
like surviving a tier one man hunt,
or trading with a thieves den vendor,
award shockingly weak 250 gear score items.
We couldn't fit all the topics into the review video,
so to see my impressions of conflict PVP,
check out my written review in the description.
The Division 2 is more
than just a strong foundation for future updates.
It's a refined and intuitive shared-world shooter
with many dozens of hours of great content and progression
that you can enjoy today.
Its wonderful recreation of Washington D.C.
is a pleasure to explore,
thanks to a generous amount
of chests, collectibles, and dynamic open-world activities.
Impactful gunplay makes it easy
to care about the well thought out loot,
and there are plenty of different builds to experiment with,
even if some are better than others.
Given Ubisoft's promised roadmap,
it's hard to foresee the disappointing
end-game challenges and Dark Zone issues
being anything more than a temporary problem,
but they certainly torpedo the prospect
of sinking hundred of hours in before the first update.
Even so, for a shared-world shooter
so early in its life cycle,
those problems aren't too discouraging.
In terms of content,
The Division 2 is one of the strongest launches
the genre has seen yet.
If you enjoyed the review,
shoot me a follow on Twitter at ThugganDuggan,
and for all things The Division 2,
keep it right here on IGN.