The Division’s closed beta hands-on: Ubisoft’s blockbuster is overhyped but playable

Missions are underwhelming, but the Dark Zone has promise

Above: You’ll encounter roving gangs in NYC’s unruly streets.

Image Credit: Ubisoft

Outside of the Dark Zone, you can also team up with players at the entry points for missions, such as a raid to get medical supplies. I performed the first mission on my own, and I was able to take the enemies out without too much trouble. But when I went on a hostage rescue mission, it was laughable. I took out four enemies, then found a key. I opened the door to the hostage room. The first guy walked out and didn’t even thank me. Then second guy thanked me profusely. There was absolutely no emotion in that hostage rescue at all. I got my points, collected some loot, and moved on. That was very disappointing.

But as I said, the presence of real human players in The Dark Zone makes the multiplayer gameplay potentially very exciting. When you go into the Dark Zone, you can team up pretty easily with other players. Because the Dark Zone has player-versus-player combat, teaming up is a tense affair. You can run into other agents of The Division, but you are never sure if they are friend or foe. You can use the controller to send gestures to them to indicate you are a friendly. You can wave, clap, or do jumping jacks. Even after I did this, I got shot by a non-hostile who suddenly went rogue on me.

One of the cool things is that when you die in the zone, you may drop your loot. Then your death spot shows up on the minimap. When you respawn, you can rush back to the spot to see if you can recover your loot. I did this a number of times. But when the squad of humans went rogue on me in an extraction zone on top of a parking garage, I had a hard time getting my loot back. I charged back to the place where the rogues killed me, but they were still there. They were still extracting their loot, one helicopter and one package at a time. So they were making themselves into a centralized target for every non-hostile agent to attack.

But the parking garage is easily defended if you have four allies, as the rogues had. So they kept killing the agents that came into the extraction zone. I tried tossing my grenades at them, but they were pretty tough to kill. So I just concentrated on getting one of them. Eventually, the good guys won and wiped out the rogues. But that moment of gameplay showed me the great potential of what this game could be when millions of people are playing it.

It’s not a great shooter so far

Above: Tom Clancy’s The Division

Image Credit: Ubisoft

Ultimately, I have the same problem with The Division that I had with Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and with Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege. It’s just not a great shooter. It plays a little like Gears of War, where you have to move from cover to cover to survive. I learned that the hard way during combat. But the quality of the close combat isn’t as good. With third-person shooters, it’s always very difficult to capture the action when the combat is really close. In this one, I couldn’t even hit enemies that were about two feet away from me, and so I fell victim to the baseball bat many times.

I had to adapt and deal with that silliness. I stayed further back and used more cover. I found I could pick off some of the enemies from a distance. And I made sure never to get stuck in a crossfire. But this is not really the kind of gameplay that I expected from a game that pledged to be so realistic in its portrayal of post-apocalypse New York. So far, it has none of the narrative drama of The Last of Us, and it has none of the sharp shooter mechanics of third-person shooter games such as Gears of War or first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops III.

I’m really hoping that the beginning of the game is outstanding and full of drama. Because Ubisoft managed to show us a middle part of the game in the closed beta that just wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I hoped it would be.