The Division

There was one game that since its E3 debut I like so many others was so excited for. This is of course Tom Clancy's The Division. The division wowed crowds at E3 and did so every single time that it released any new trailer or the smallest bit of gameplay. So after such a massive hype and the vast amount of excitement I personally felt over it, does it live up to my expectations? Short answer, not really.

Now I don't want to say no straight off the bat because that there is so much that it does well but then there are some parts of it that I felt really let me down.

This is one of the games that received a "Massive graphical downgrade" which got a huge amount of media attention. Now, I have seen this game played on the Playstation, I played it on the Xbox and I have to say graphical downgrade or not this game looks amazing. The weather is awesome and actually affects gameplay, visibility sometime being a real issue. The city looks incredible, and is so full of really rich detail. So graphically it lived up to my expectations, but sometimes I felt as I played that the beautiful visuals was all that it had.

Okay so the bad. The game for me lacked variation with the enemies only having a few classes and there only being a few factions the enemies got very repetitive after a while. The weapons also suffered from the realism, I normally love realistic weaponry in games and I'm not usually one for laser weapons and crazy ass shit all going off everywhere, but I found myself wishing for more guns. The level system also didn't do it justice, I don't have a problem with the levelling system in general as Borderlands is one of my favourite games but the level system coupled with the lack of weapons added to a sort of ploddy monotony.

So the main game feels like you are always grinding and the bullet sponge issue that a lot of people have a problem with is a bit of a problem for me especially with the boss fights. Basically what i like to call the single player part was a disappointment for me.

The Dark zone is a part of the game that feels very removed from the main game. It feels like a full game in its own right, which is a plus for me. The negative I suppose is that I didn't enjoy it. The tension of the game I quite enjoyed and the excitement of finding loot and trying to extract it is really good and can be really fun right up until THAT moment. Other players can be arseholes. I am normally very chilled out and gracious when it comes to playing any game online but this is totally different. While trying to extract your new bobble hat you notice that other players have started to come to the extraction site and there is bound to be at least one dickhead among them with an overpowered gun that will mow you down because of your tiny hanging yellow loot bag. I know that some people say that I get frustrated because I'm not as good at the game or because I have no friends. Well they are half right, my friends got the game before me and were way to high level to go looting with a puny level player. As for good at the game, they're right. I wasn't good at PvP in this game and after finding out I didn't enjoy it I didn't bother working on it.

So there it is, my most anticipated game of about three years and with a heavy heart I would give it a disgustingly low 5/10 and no one is more disappointed than me.

Mad flavour Gamer out