The Division 2’s First Few Hours Are Addicting, Fun and Frustrating

I’ve spent a good chunk of time clearing out the streets of Washington D.C, and it has mostly been a very pleasant experience.

While a lot of mechanics are the same in The Division 2, it is impressive how much has been improved since last time around. First of all, the shooting and gunplay feel a lot tighter and fun to engage with. Aiming is snappier and combat just has a more fluid feel to it. Things explode, enemies stumble and fall and smoke starts filling the street. It’s a beautiful mess that is incredibly satisfying to play.

The AI in The Division 2 goes a long way in making the combat feel this good. Enemies are excessively aggressive and will do whatever they can to flush you out of cover. Stay too long at a spot and grenades will start flying, machine gunners start flanking and those baton armed bastards come running up to ruin your day. The Division 2, much more than the original game, requires you to be on your toes, making use of the environment and your skills are an absolute must for survival. Especially if you are playing alone.

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The Division 2 is fully playable and fun to play by yourself, but it is with friends that the combat really shines. When you’re running with a full squad, the tactics, skills, and perks become really interesting and you can start to strategize and really make good use of them.

Speaking of skills and perks, The Division 2 comes with a slew of interesting ways to go about murdering your opposition. Remote turrets, bomber-drones, mines, and cluster grenades to name a few. Each perk can also be customized in a few different ways: the turret can be a flamethrower or a sniper version, for instance. My personal favorite at this point though is the cluster grenade that releases a swarm of micro drones which harass and damage enemies. It is incredibly satisfying to hurl that thing into a large group of enemies and see the mayhem it creates. In general, the progression has been revamped and improved since the first game and it all feels like it makes more sense.

Streamlining seems to have been a focus for Ubisoft this time around and there is a lot of quality of life improvements that make the game flow a lot better. For instance, attachments are a skill upgrade this time around as opposed to being loot like in the first game. Overall, the inventory management and the loot is a lot easier to deal with now — except when it comes to DPS. All weapons have a bunch of numbers and stats on them, but to get a DPS value you are forced to visit the shooting range. While it is fun to see a shooting range actually be useful, it would be nice to easily determine if a weapon is better or worse out in the field.

As I mentioned in my beta coverage, there have been great strides made in terms of the structure of the game. While the first game had side activities and events throughout New York City, they felt very bland and were not very engaging. Now, though, they are much better integrated into the world around you. You help out settlements by gathering food, clearing out bandits and solving various problems for them. As a reward, they will give you resources, blueprints, and recruitable staff. These recruits will make their way back to your main base, granting you some special abilities like opening up crafting stations or access to other aspects of the game.

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My main frustrations with the game so far have been technical in nature. While most of the game seems stable and runs great on my 1070, there are a couple of irritating bugs that I have encountered. There is one particularly unfortunate bug that affects wireless headsets, making the framerate drop and sound not play properly. Other issues have ranged from some stuttering to complete crashes, sometimes of the whole system. Turning off DX12 and some other key things help, but overall it seems The Division 2 is very sensitive to being interrupted in any manner. Problems tend to occur whenever there are popup messages from other apps. For instance, my game crashed at one point when a friend logged on an sent a message to me from Uplay. So, turn off as many background apps as you can and remember that alt+tabbing the game is a game of chance in whether or not it will come back up again.

Despite these frustrations though, the gameplay has been so addictive and fun that I find myself starting the game up again and again after each crash.

One area I am less impressed with so far is the story. At this moment I haven’t really seen much of consequence. It has mostly been about smaller, personal stories and nothing that works to further the overarching story in these games. Hopefully this is something that will pick up as I continue to murder my way through the streets of D.C.