Ubisoft is a persistent hardworker. I mean, these guys have been releasing the same game over and over during the last twelve years or so, sometimes giving it the skin of a stealth simulator in a medieval city, at other moments making it play as a hacker in a modern world, at others simply throwing you to a post-apocalyptic or ancestral version of our reality. In the end, however, these games have always followed the same rigid formula, making you explore virtual playgrounds divided into areas, each with a subset of main missions and side-quests. The formula evolved over the years, suffered minor changes, made tasks feel less repetitive, and it even threw in some superb narrative events such as in last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

In a way, it seems that both The Division 2 and Odyssey are two parts of the same game Ubisoft developed in this long decade of follow ups, flawed releases, and attempts at recovery. If Odyssey was the game that proved the developer was ready to helm the RPG Ship of the West, The Division 2 is proof that they now hold the flag among the looter shooters with repetitive loops, making Gearbox proud of what their Borderlands set in motion ten years ago.

About The Division 2

When I mean looter shooter genre, there are some elements innately tied to it which apparently no one can remove for now. It is a genre that parts with storytelling, making missions and arcs just excuses to point out where the next firefight will take place. Borderlands, the first of this kind, is still king in mixing a good set of charismatic characters into a genre that can hardly explore that aspect. The Division 2 does no magic trick and never even tries to deceive you. It is a mindless job of moving from point A to point B while shooting every enemy in range and picking up loot like crazy. It is a sincere game, an honest game coming from a developer that apparently learned from its mistakes and is taking a lot of effort to deliver products that are worth our money.

The looter shooter means also that this is a game about repetition, about doing stuff after stuff just for the sake of waiting from a random variable within the code to roll low enough so a shiny new item drops when you kill enemies or open chests. The joy of this genre is in seeing that repetitive work paying off, giving you better weapons, giving you missions in new places, and opening up the realm of customization to make your character feel and look like a badass that is ready to shoot thousands of thugs across the streets of a fallen Washington D.C.

Oh, The City…

Hell, what the fuck is Ubisoft doing here? Seriously? Are these guys humans? It is ridiculous how detailed and wonderful the city of Washington is. Every corner of it, every new room, every street and building, everything not only looks amazing, but feels as if there is such care and effort by the creators you can simply stop to look around without noticing. There is a massive variety of places to visit, from garden rooftops to deserted malls, to wasted hospitals to a museum of airships, to a crashed airplane to abandoned offices. Each place is carefully crafted to feel as part of city, making you understand how things work there, making you think what happened when people simply left that place, and perhaps just making you stand in awe to how many objects were modeled and put in there. I mean… if you think of a random object found in a big city, Ubisoft certainly had an artist modeling it and putting it in The Division 2. It is ridiculous. It is rare for a game to make you stop at so many points just to watch the details in a room or region, and The Division 2 does that on a regular basis.

It’s Efficient Too

The scenario also has another important job here besides making me waste a minute at every room looking around: lessening the sense of repetition. I mean, you will be firing rifles, sub-machine guns, pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, and assault rifles for dozens of hours against foes that are simply typical thug variations. There is the guy you can kill in a second, there is the armored guy who charges at you, there is the big slow-moving guy who can take a lot of bullets, and so on. There are a few new things here and there, such as small fucking robots armed with saws and capable of sneaking behind you and killing you in a second, but these are not enough to save the repetitive shooting alone. However, when you change the scenario, when you move from an abandoned lab with lots of windows to a great hall, or when you shift from a green park to a dark subway station, you start to see each encounter as something different, opening up a few possibilities as how you approach it.

You Play it However You Want

The Division 2 has merits of also allowing you to really embrace whatever approach you wish to when playing it. You could stand far away from an enemy group and snipe them slowly. You could rush into the middle of chaos with a shield in hand. You could slowly chug enemies by moving around and killing them at random. That is possible because the game really open ups in variation when it comes to weapon styles, making a shotgun feel completely different from a sniper rifle or a SMG. You can also spice things up with your skills, which can vary from placing a turret capable of obliterating careless foes to small flying robots going around and blinding people to make them easier targets to shoot at. There are eight different skills, each with three or four optional sets. It is a lot of to experiment with, each giving you a new way to approach the firefights.

Solo or Multiplayer

Another interesting idea of the game is offering up an entire single player experience before really putting you against or along other players. The main story and side-quests are hooks to teach you how to play while presenting you the setting, giving you settlements and hubs where you can feel progress, and ultimately having an excuse to play until you reach level cap of 30. You can play it with friends or random people if you like, and this certainly helps in tuning down repetition, but the game balance (in the main story) seems made for single-player in mind and having a friend along makes thing so incredibly easy it could hurt not only your learning experience, but also a bit of fun.

And it is A Tactical Game

One thing people claimed about the previous The Division was how many skills you had to keep your life up and simply walk towards foes shooting them in the face. Not now though. The Division 2 is a much more intelligent game, putting your shooting skills in a secondary place and giving much more focus to a strategic thinking. Firefights happen in places where foes have ways to surround you, the AI is smart enough to draw your fire while some other guy rushes from cover to cover, and you can be killed very quickly if not careful. This means you and your allies must always be on a lookout to protect choke points, advance from cover to cover to surround enemies, and ultimately carefully think when and how to utilize your skills.

With a lot of loot and things to do

The Division 2 launched as a complete game, which is pretty much a miracle for the genre considering the recent history. It is a game that offers a lot to do and rewards you at every corner with new loot, shiny weapons, mods, materials, or simply a beautifully modeled place. The side-missions are as massive as the story missions, the random activity happening across the city gives a change of pace, and you can waste time simply mixing weapons and equipment to find a build that is fit to your play style. When you finish the game, however, things start to truly expand, putting you on an adventure mode divided in tiers where you can replay missions at a harder level and where the entire map (including those missions) are invaded by the Black Tusk, a new faction with a vast array of new enemy types. Replaying story missions or working again on free-roam tasks is a whole new thing with the Black Tusk around, especially when the game also starts to apparently throw a lot more enemies against you.

Final Score

The Division 2 is an exemplar game of its genre. Since Borderland 2 the genre has never seen this kind of quality at launch, with so much content and things to do you can play it without ever really needing to think about new patches and expansions. Ubisoft really succeeded in creating a massive gaming experience in the looter shooter, mixing repetition and reward at a superb ratio and crafting one of the most amazing open-worlds of this generation. It truly lacks a plot and great characters to hook you into the setting though, which is pity because, with that, this game could be the new epic of action RPGs.