“Combat also benefits from a massive selection of firearms, and while many are variants of one another I’m still finding entirely new additions to my arsenal even after looting almost 2,000 items. As a result of these factors, combat remained demanding and fun, if a little predictable, throughout my 60 hours with The Division 2. These lowly grunts may melt quickly, but they pack a punch and can spell trouble if they get behind you.
A sneaky improvement over the first game is that harder content doesn’t strictly mean more high-health enemies, even challenge-difficulty strongholds provide you with plenty of “red bar” fodder to cut your teeth on. Most adversaries can spawn as more a difficult version of their basic role, and get a correspondingly colored health bar to indicate who can take a few more hits. Their rusher is a suicide bomber, their engineer controls a Battle Bot, and their heavy tries to crush your skull with a giant hammer. The expected assortment of enemy archetypes, like rushers, snipers, and engineers are all here, but some factions like the Mad Max-esque “Outcasts” take some entertaining creative liberties with these roles. The good news is that enemy variety elsewhere is significantly better than the first game. Bespoke boss mechanics are a staple of the shared-world shooter and action RPG genres, so I was expecting to see some more elaborate encounters, especially in The Division 2’s strongholds, but came up empty. The only one who (barely) breaks this rule is Diesel, from the District Union Arena, who briefly takes control of a turret on a stationary armored car but then just turns out to be another armor-clad Hyena machine gunner. This deprives the PvE encounters of sorely needed stand-out moments and mechanical intricacy. It’s a pity that these unique elements aren’t incorporated into The Division 2’s lackluster boss fights because they certainly could have used the variety.Īll main-mission and stronghold bosses, on all difficulty levels, just seem to be normal enemy archetypes with more health. Some missions, like the Federal Bunker or Lincoln Memorial, even introduce welcome new mission-specific mechanics like shooting a valve to douse flames, or tracing a power cord to a destructible circuit in order to open a door. The Jefferson Trade Center mission, for example, effectively establishes the stakes: a Division agent has been taken hostage, and then it executes on that premise. The missions themselves are well crafted, and many succeed in delivering a bitesize storyline. However, new activities, like battling roaming patrols of elite enemies, are introduced as you progress and the freedom to tackle your laundry list of tasks in any order you wish keeps it from feeling like an obligatory grind. “There is a clearly similar progression structure to each of the 11 PvE zones as you’re leveling up: you’ll find a safe house or settlement, scour the landscape for Strategic Homeland Defense (S.H.D.) caches, run missions, and capture the handful of control points. It all comes together to provide a space that makes it okay to stop and smell the roses, I never regretted indulging my inner explorer. The series’ familiar and predictable urban grid gives way to lush, open vistas and iconic monuments overtaken by vines. The capital is painstakingly populated with a fanatical amount of detail and boasts much more in the way of environmental variance than the first game’s depiction of New York City. There are chests and collectibles around every corner, and this generous distribution of loot goes a long way in the context of The Division 2’s phenomenally well-realized recreation of Washington D.C. Gunplay is impactful – enemies react to being shot sooner and die faster, and the world is teeming with enticing reasons to explore it. Things in The Division 2 seem to pick up right where the original post-pandemic story left off in terms of both plotline and cover-based shooting, but it quickly becomes clear that many aspects of the gameplay have improved in meaningful ways.
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