The Division has widely been claimed to be Ubisoft’s best game ever, frankly I find this statement funny when most of Ubisoft games tend to be utter rubbish and full of bugs. The Division’s success came from the free Beta it offered to people - Now the Beta was a good, healthy ‘demo’ of the game and it showed a lot of potential in the game giving you a small taste of what was to come (or hasn’t)...

I first started playing the Division when it first came out, I had been hooked by the Beta and I wanted to expreience the full game, the thing with this is that I actually enjoyed the game as a single player - This is where the problems came in for me. The Division was labelled as a Third Person Shooter MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) Game.

Let’s just divvy this up a bit:

Massively (Meaning a sizable area in which to play) - The map will take you roughly 21 minutes to get from one end to the other, provided you don’t have any annoying random spawns to fight. This, to me, isn’t massive. That is ‘meh’ size if anything.

Multiplayer - HA! You get, at most, four people per group and if you go into the Dark Zone (The game’s PvP area) you will get ganked by four people if you go on your own and if you are lucky you will have another three to be with you so the most is 8…..

Online - The only true thing about the ‘MMO’ bracket is that it is online only, though why I still can’t quite get my head around.

For me, the Division had very little special about it. The Game mechanics were very simple when it came to the weapon base, there wasn’t a levelling system where stats increased or anything and the ‘skill’ base is so basic it only has 12 main skills and 3 ultimate skills - All of these can be comboed to have two main skills and 1 ultimate. And when you unlock these, not through levels, but by grinding and getting ‘points’ it really does make you wonder what the point was.

The Story

Ok, this is something I have to give my hat off to Ubisoft - They have a good story, the idea that a ‘super flu’ wipes out half of the world is a nice theme considering most games are going ‘Zombie Heavy’ rather than ‘They Just died’ though it is clear that they ran out of ideas about 10 minutes into the conversation of ‘plots’.

With the exception of the surprise being some “First Wave” Division agent wanted to become world leader…. Yeah, that was the biggest surprise.

End Game Content

Is there any? So, with the release of Patch 1.1 (which brought MORE bugs than fixed) they realised the first of ‘many’ End Game ‘raids’ - Where four people, only four mind, have to work ‘really’ hard together and kill one boss.

Yup, one boss. It isn’t even a chain of boss fights, it is one boss that takes a total of 10 minutes of rather dull “hide, kill, dodge, heal”. The “instant” as we will call it from now on as I refuse to accept it as a raid, is just battling an APC with armour, to destroy the armour you have to capture a boom and use one person to disable the turrets.

Apart from that, it is just grinding to get end-game credits and after doing the same maps ten times over it gets to a point where you know exactly what comes from where and where to point your gun. (Seriously, clearing a ‘Hard’ boss took me and three others 1 minute flat)

The only other thing to do is get those trophies of going around and collecting items which offer nothing special other than a Ubisoft badge and a ‘well done, you have nothing better to do’

The Verdict

The Division is pretty, The Division is buggy, The Division is boring. I now find myself logging in for about 20 minutes a day, do the quests on the dailies and then log out. It has zero replay ability due to if you wanted to swap skills you can do that without it even costing you a single credit.

Seriously everyone, save yourself the money - Don’t buy it.