I really enjoyed much of my time with Tom Clancy's The Division, but I don't think it's a particularly great game. On paper, The Division is precisely the Ubisoft open-world template, where the side tasks are somehow even more repetitive than usual and tower climbing has been replaced with running up to a person or "situation board" at every safe house to fill in your map with a ton of little, cookie-cutter objectives. But the Diablo/Destiny-like nature of its occasional online play gives it a social hook that helps overcome the game's lame attempts at storytelling, its city full of repetitive tasks, and even its complete non-ending. It breaks down like this: if you tend to play these sorts of games by yourself and don't like it when player-on-player conflict can have consequences, you probably won't warm up to The Division. But if you like to group up and do stuff with a set of friends, The Division's competent third-person shooting and its main missions are engaging enough to keep you going. And hopefully the chatter with your friends about hockey scores or where to get the best steak sandwiches or whatever will be good enough to keep you moving through the game's more monotonous moments.

The Division is an always-connected third-person shooter that lets you get into groups of up to four players as you take back a quarantined section of New York City from various looters and opportunists who are attempting to take control of the virus-laden city. It has a setting and a premise, but it's very light on actual story. Instead, the point is to get as much loot as you can. You can grab it from the dead bodies of your enemies. You'll find it in chests. You'll get it as a mission reward. You can even craft your own. But the real story in The Division is watching the numbers go higher. You'll find better armor with various stats. You'll re-roll some of those stats until you find ones that are to your liking. You'll slot mods onto your weapons and armor to make them more effective. You'll stare at stat screens that could have been laid out in a more informative manner and puzzle out which gun parts you should strap to your gun to make it great for murdering bad guys... or good guys, depending on what you're up to. The story doesn't really wrap up so much as it stops, as if it really wants you to focus on the numbers instead of the stuff you're actually doing.

That stuff? Shooting people in the face and hoping that they drop cool stuff. But since this game is semi-realistic, all that cool stuff is based on real weaponry. So the standard leveling curve that you'd expect from an action-RPG is in place, but you're just getting the same guns with higher levels and damage numbers attached. One AK-47 fires just like another, but your level 30 AK-47 is going to do more damage than your level 8 AK-47. And both of them require you to empty a fair amount of your magazine into the opposition in order to bring down enemies that are at or above your level. You have to really lean on a hardcore suspension of disbelief to care about the proceedings, but if you're able to write all that stuff off as "typical video game shit," it's fine.


Each safehouse has a poorly written character who will talk at you when you take on a side mission in his or her district.
While the side stuff may be monotonous, the game's main quests take you through some unique locations. You'll stomp through police stations, power stations, Grand Central Station, apartment buildings, and all sorts of other hastily fortified positions. They play like a good co-op cover-based shooter should. The action scales up if you're playing with other people and the AI, though prone to moments of complete idiocy, gets pretty good at flanking you if you aren't good enough at flanking them first. It feels hectic, and your various abilities and loadouts can make or break your team, especially at the higher difficulty settings. Those hairy moments, where your team is constantly saving each other and loosely coordinating attacks on waves of enemies, are the best that The Division's co-op side has to offer.

Then there's the Dark Zone. The entire middle of the city is cordoned off due to extreme contamination, so naturally you'll want to go there with some friends and see what's up. This is where the game's hybridized form of competitive multiplayer surfaces. This zone is one large death trap, with enemies that are at your level or tougher. They'll drop good loot, but the loot is "contaminated." So if you want any of it for use in the rest of the game, you have to call in a helicopter at a designated extraction spot and airlift those items out. Extracting that loot requires you to fire a flare gun, which tends to alert another wave of tough enemies, who descend upon your extraction spot to take care of you. If you die, you'll drop your contaminated items and lose a chunk of Dark Zone experience points, which accrue on a separate meter. Also--and this is the important part--ot