Tom Clancy's The Division

Over the recent years Ubisoft have been producing a lot of games that all tie into a sandbox theme - Assassin’s Creed, Watchdogs and Far Cry all fall under this. For those of you that don’t know what that is: Imagine a sandbox, the type that you used to play in as a child. You could do anything in that sandbox, be anywhere as long as your imagination permitted it. A video game sandbox is much like that just without the imagination for the most part as everything is provided to you, think of it as the kitchen sink approach to game design.
Games like Far Cry are good examples of sandbox games done well: you have a plethora of story objectives to complete but if you want to dick around in the world a bit more you can do the optional side-quests. I don’t mind a sandbox game, they can be a slog to get through sometimes but if the world is fleshed out enough to keep me drawn in then that can easily be a good couple of weeks of my life gone.

Today’s sandbox subject is Tom Clancy’s The Division. Tom Clancy has managed to push out a whopping 41 games including The Division which is pretty admirable considering he’s been dead for 5 years. In the past I’ve enjoyed Tom Clancy games: the Splinter Cell franchise for being a good stealth game and Rainbow Six Siege have for being a good example of a tactical 5 on 5 shooter.

As with all of Tom Clancy’s other games, The Division is a military based shooter. You take on the guise of Generic Mcgee - let’s call him Gene for short - who has been called up to help The Division, a group of sleeper agents that drop everything the minute their watch starts glowing red to throw themselves into the fray.

The reason for this fray is a virus that was released on Black Friday transported by bank notes, a pretty solid plan at first but how is this combated in the end? You can’t take all the bank notes out of circulation without putting more in and there’s bound to be a mix up somewhere and some of the virus covered notes get left in, but I digress. The virus causes New York City to devolve into chaos and eventually Manhattan is quarantined. Gene’s job is to run around New York shooting everyone that has decided mob rule is a good idea when it probably is in all honesty, civilisation has shut down and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to give a shit so why not loot and steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and a couple dead people won’t really make a difference, right?

The story is probably a comment on the way America conducts itself during a Black Friday sale with all the trampling and horror but just taken to the next logical conclusion. Naturally, there are groups of people that want to take advantage of the chaos: general thugs, Riker’s Island escapees and, for some reason, New York sanitation workers. These guys are a group of psychopaths that somehow have access to flamethrowers the minute the city goes to shit, almost like they were expecting it, and they’re surprisingly organised which is very different to any sanitation body I’ve ever seen.

As Gene runs around the city he comes across visuals of past events, be it for completing quests or just stumbling across them in the streets. In doing so he realises that a bunch of agents had gone rogue at some point and were assisting a PMC (private military company) that are classed as “equally rogue” - whatever that means, I never knew that there were levels of being rogue. This banded bunch of rogues enact their evil plans of ransacking, destruction, murder and kidnap and always seem to be one step ahead of you: Gene’s trying to get into the city to help, the rogues shoot down the helicopter, Gene leads a small army to a person of interest with information on the virus, the rogues already have him, what a bunch of bastards they are.

Ultimately Gene makes his way to where it all started and gets a bullshit excuse for why the virus was manufactured - someone took it upon themselves to “cleanse” humanity and preserve the earth but it backfired a bit so the jokes on them I guess. All of that goes down and then a shoe horned-in cliffhanger ending rolls and the game is over, now in most other games I wouldn’t mind that but a sandbox game ending on a cliffhanger and expecting you to keep track when you’re going to spend most of your time running around doing side missions in the sequel is a bit ambitious.

As I said, in sandbox games there are main missions that progress the story and side missions that are there pretty much just to gain you XP, help you level up and get better weapons and loot. The Division could be the new master of side quest bullshit because the map is littered with them to the point that you can’t be bothered finding the story mission under all the icons. I ended up just running around and accidentally finding firefights just so I didn’t have to spend any more time on the map screen.

The second Division game is set for release in March next year and in all honesty I can’t see myself picking it up. The gameplay's fine. Running around a city gripped in disarray and shooting all the bad guys is a mechanic that had been perfected long ago so it has some allure for doing it well but not enough on its own. Because of that they had to make it a sandbox and the sandbox nature of the game probably lets it down a bit when you have to spend most of your time focusing on building up your HQ and you can only build up one of the three parts of your HQ at any one time due to the missions being for a specific need - knowledge, equipment etc. So the game turns into a weird checklist of shoot the bad mens in the correct mission to then run home to get your new shiny toy. It’s organic but dull is what I’m getting at, not every game needs to have huge twists and turns but The Division could have definitely done with one.

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Happy gaming!