Tom Clancy’s The Division Underground DLC reviews emerge

Tom Clancy’s The Division has its first piece of DLC. Well… it does if you’re playing on PC or Xbox One anyway. PlayStation 4 players will have to wait a month due to a timed exclusivity deal with Microsoft.

The DLC went live on Tuesday, and as is the nature of these things, reviews have been slow to trickle in, due to the size of the expansion. It is impressively big, as you’d hope for from a DLC that costs the best part of £15. The reviews so far have painted a mixed picture for the game, promising essentially more of the same grinding action – just underground, as the title suggests.

“After an hour or so of blasting through increasingly difficult operations in Underground, the template became clear,” writes Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku. “Head into a mission, kill some dudes, go to another area, kill some more dudes, defend a point against some waves of dudes and kill a boss. Level up my Underground rank (separate from my overall level) to unlock more modifiers.” Minor variations appeared as time went on, but nothing huge.

This shouldn’t be a big surprise to players of The Division, given that’s kind of the nature of the game, but more disappointing is the blandness of the underground world. Hamilton says: “I headed out to take on the new above-ground mission that kicks off Underground and was immediately struck by how beautiful this game can be.” 

“Since then, almost every mission I’ve done has taken place among the same bleak subway terminals and power stations. The Division is a handsome game even when constrained to underground interiors, but it loses something without the icy winds and concrete chasms of the city itself. The grind becomes grindier, and the missions feel more repetitive.”

“I think underlying problems with the game undermine the potential of Underground, but it’s still a welcome addition,” says Paul Tassi at Forbes. “If you own The Division and at any point, have had fun with the endgame so far, I would absolutely pick up Underground,” he concludes, although he also notes that if you’ve lost interest in the game, then this isn’t the DLC to get you hooked all over again.

Tom Clancy’s The Division is out now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. Should you buy it? The reviews trickled in after publications have properly got their teeth into the game after initial server problems and other bugs caused problems. The most hilarious of these was the “queueing bug”, which left players lining up to access a mission-critical laptop, like Brits patiently waiting in line at Tesco:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BSSkz6iDPvM

This (and other issues) have now been patched, and the reviews are coming in, with a generally positive tone. At the time of writing, the game has a solid 84/100 rating on Metacritic. 

Digital Spy describes The Division‘s world as “the best open world Ubisoft has ever created”, while Giant Bomb puts aside a few reservations about repetitiveness to say the game is “worth seeing, provided you have some like-minded friends around”. 

Gamespot, meanwhile, finds the game maddening in plenty of respects, but too engrossing to put down, writing, “No matter how frustrated I grew with the game’s semi-indestructible enemies or its repetitive leveling structure, I absolutely could not stop playing. The world was too engrossing, the loot was too enticing, and the campaign was too gripping for me to simply walk away.”

Others, however, don’t see the game as having much longievity. Destructoid argued that “I don’t see Division lasting as long as other, similar games either months down the line, as it simply doesn’t allow for anything on a raid-like level to truly hook in the dedicated crowd.” GameGrin backed this up, saying it “may not live as long as intended.”

Over 6.4 million people tried out the beta for Tom Clancy’s The Division on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Ubisoft has announced, playing the game for an average time of around five hours. Strong numbers for Ubisoft, which will be hoping that beta testers turn into paying players, with the added incentive of in-game reward for players impressed enough to purchase the full game.

But what exactly is Tom Clancy’s The Division? Here’s what you need to know.

Tom Clancy’s The Division: At a glance

• Third-person massive multiplayer cover-shooter, set in an immaculately detailed New York

• RPG elements mean that you level up your agent and weapons in a manner similar to Destiny

• Features a high-risk PvP combat zone where players can acquire more powerful loot if they can survive and evacuate efficiently

Players familiar with Destiny will get on with Tom Clancy’s The Division from the get-go. Players explore a post-crisis version of New York in small groups, undertaking missions and leveling up RPG-style to unlock more powerful weapons and abilities. However, as

Eurogamer points out, the comparison doesn’t entirely do The Division justice: “The open world that Ubisoft Massive has crafted, a 1:1 model of Manhattan, is more compelling and more expansive than the many planets of Destiny combined. The atmosphere is exceptional, a harsh and endless winter blowing cold mist onto New York’s broad swathe of concrete. It’s full of those little details that give Tom Clancy games their own special flavour, with recognisable spaces subverted in the chaos.”

As a predominantly multiplayer experience, the game will be best played with a small party of friends, although groups are capped to four players. While that will mostly be a cooperative experience, perhaps the most exciting area of The Division comes in the Dark Zone – a player versus player area where anything goes, and fragile alliances can (and will) be broken at will for the joy of getting some rare kit.

The Dark Zone is filled with high-level enemies, but also a whole bunch of other human players, who are after the same things as you: high-level loot. If you attack another player, you get tagged as a rogue agent, making yourself a “fair game” target for everybody else in the zone. If you manage to kill another agent, then you can, in theory, take their loot back to the safety of the main game… only there’s a catch. In keeping with the story, any loot gathered in the Dark Zone comes contaminated, and the only way to make it safe is to have it airlifted out of the zone by helicopter. This involves a 90-second wait, while everyone else in the zone is alerted to the incoming airlift. In other words, they know you’ve got something good, and they’re probably going to come and take it by force. Or, as IGN said in their hands-on: “You’re ringing the dinner bell for opportunistic agents that are looking to kill you, steal your loot, attach it to the tow cable themselves, and then sprint away before other neutral agents show up to deliver swift bullet-y justice.”

Like the majority of games of this generation, though, that multiplayer exhilaration sadly won’t extend to split screen. “In your classic split screen experience, there is a defined challenge to overcome, whether it be racing a lap around a circuit or completing a mission,” the creative director of The Division told Finder.com. “But the challenge in The Division is always ongoing; there is always something to do in the open world. There’s a new mission, or new people to group up with, so you never stop playing. So having your co-op friends able to just drop-in, but when they need to go off and do their thing you can continue playing, is good as you are not bound to them. I think that suits The Division. It’s such a constantly ongoing experience, that when tying you to someone else, split screen just makes it messy.”

Tom Clancy’s The Division: Plot

So why is this perfectly modeled New York city quite so unwelcoming? Well, like the majority of the games with the Tom Clancy branding, it all comes down to terrorism. In this instance, the USA has been infected by a smallpox outbreak spread through a virus planted on banknotes on Black Friday.

As a result, The Division is called in – or the Strategic Homeland Division, to give them their more grandiose title – to piece society back together by all means necessary, which, in the case of the game, is mainly by gun-related means. This isn’t a diplomacy sim.

Enemies come in the form of various factions, including former prisoners and rogue military units looking at a more scorched earth policy than The Division agents favour.

In an interesting twist, Ubisoft has released a half-hour mini-movie documenting the events leading up to the game, which can be watched free of charge with an Amazon Prime subscription.

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