Thanks to Ubisoft, this optional merging of singleplayer and multiplayer into one experience, makes the Tom Clancy’s The Division to poorly informed audience, probably a confused game. Therefore, to understand these reviews it is important to clarify some basic things about the game, so if the basis is already familiar feel free to skip to the next paragraph.
Thus, the Division is a game for which you need an Internet connection during gameplay. You do not need it to play with other players, but you can connect with them cooperatively in a group of up to four members. Battles between players, and PvP content, take place in a separate Dark Zone, which is not part of the main campaign. The complete campaign you can play alone, but in PvP without teammates usually you do not stand a chance. In cooperative mode, there is no competition because all is shared, each player receives his award and everyone in the group are gaining experience from every action. Difficulty of the game adapts depending on the number of players in the group and their level.
Now when that’s settled, we’re going to critique the game…

The Division is the type of the game you are playing longer than you should, but you do not know what attracts you so much. Like it is designed with a strange mathematics to keep you tainted after you squeeze from it everything you could. The main precondition for this is not looking for anything meaningful in it. Because the story is negligible boring, and the gameplay does not have hard links with reality. As long as this does not pose a problem, the Division is kind of fun brain relaxing game.
The game is placed in New York which was devastated by a deadly virus of unknown origin. The army has fallen, the streets have become dominated by gangs, and the only chance for the return of law and order is awakened undercover Division. It’s infantry army without tanks, aircraft or any other heavy artillery, but it is still the last line of defense for America. If anything – they have an unlimited supply of ammunition and they are first to explore the great conspiracy behind released virus that is transmitted with money bills.

Truth be told, it’s not the brightest story that you ever heared. Even the Freedom Fighters in 2003 (this game reminds me on it) had more convincing act, but it was still very superficial SF. In any case, it had a far better and more interesting characters because I do not remember the last time I saw this empty shells of the characters that The Division has. Here, however, I still do not think on the silent protagonist, because he was never experienced as a character at all. You’re just an agent, and what actually happens in the game is not your story. You are practically a spectator in it.

You’re not the main character of this story, nor it is the story of your character. You play only as a witness observer.

Is it at all important? I would say not really. I do not believe that any of the Division fanbase is expecting a deep story about the apocalypse. The game has an open world with a focus on cooperative multiplayer – hardly sounds like the basis for the narrative excellence what has thematically similar The Last of Us, or the phenomenal film Children of Men. The Division is just a game where you shoot first and ask questions later, just when you kill everything around, you do not get answers from anyone.

I do not take this thin story as a negative because your play in multiplayer gives the chance to live out some of your adventures that you will remember more before names of totally irrelevant characters in the campaign. For example, the boss battles in multiplayer tend to be intensive because they require elaboration of tactics, but if one player does not work as he should then it will probably be felt by the whole team. The first entry in the PvP area, the so-called Dark Zone is also a moment to remember, as well as the successful removal of valuable items from this zone. When you have these specific events, then you do not mind so much that you are not connected with NPCs in the main campaign,  or that you do not touch the question of how the deadly virus is created.
Soloing in the Division is largely possible, but progress is then somewhat slower and you definitely need to play secondary missions that have nothing to do with the main story. In the Dark Zone alone you have no chance to survive, unless you get lucky. The concept is such that other gamers can steal your items if you die, and you have to give away your location on the map because all of the  items from the Dark Zone can be taken out only by a helicopter which you have to wait a minute and a half. However, the Dark Zone is essentially separate component of the Division because it has a separate system of promotion through the ranks and does not have classic missions. It only manifests eternal thirst for progress that is driving force of this game.

Through 30 hours of the main campaign you are upgrading three wings of its base – medical, safety and technology department, and thus your character unlocks skills, modifications, accrued bonuses and private benefits, ie. Perk. Based on them, you can profile the class of your character, something like support, healer, tank, etc., But up to maximum 30th level all of the players are usually rounded with colorful skills. Only after the completion, the game requires the best combination of skills with the help of equipment. To do this, you need to modify weapons, recalibrate bonuses on the equipment and alike.

There is enough Room for the development of character so at first glance it does not matter that the Division is so repetitive. Missions are trying to be varied through colorful locations and objectives in them, but all are generally reduced to the same actions and then it is repeated in every region on the map. It keeps you with the screen because of randomness with which you can get a gun with a six percent chance that you can cause bullet to make ninety percent chance of +66 damage. But the Division does not function as  the Borderlands, Diablo and similar games.
The thing is that at some point you realize that you are looking forward to a plain stats, as no weapon and no skill in the Division does not change your style of play. In practice it should, but as I said before, during the first thirty hours no one profiled only in one class, all are experimenting until you get to what should be an endgame content, and then it turns out that there is nothing particulary special and new. Atleast for now, until expansions. Classes are not encouraged before level 30, only after The Division offered all it had to offer.

The challenge that game is offering in already seen missions is reduced to only enemies with more energy. When they take away this, we still face the same goofy opponents that will come out in the open only to fulfill their tasks. For example, if they attack any supplies that you protect, they will not attack them with protecting themselfs with some shelter but will quietly fire within, just so that the sniper can rip them down without any problems.

The problem of bad artificial intelligence is that it should encourage teamwork, but it does not work properly. The result therefore is such that the shooting is also repetitive. And we are talking here about a lot of pleasant model of shooting. Weapons operate powerful (they sound more powerful), a system of cover is also completely solid. So if you are already due to the fact that the game has a solid basis, with little variety and unpredictability, enemy AI could be somewhat smarter so the foundation of gameplay does not fall into the same repetition as well as everything else.
But once you see how The Division looks in all its glory, you can see where the studio put all of the hard work that did not involve programming advanced behavior NPC ‘s. A chaotic streets of New York look great, primarily because of the effects of particles, smoke, dynamic snow and so on. Perhaps even more importantly, it looks quite authentic; like on the New York in Crysis 2 never managed to look. Also worth to mention is convenient interface in an unobtrusive way that keeps the concentration of sight in the middle of the screen where usually most of the action takes place.

PC VERSION
From the technical side the PC version is not badly optimized, although performance is somewhat unstable regardless of the settings. Where the game has framerate drops that you can not fix by reducing the detail. Console version look slightly worse than the PC one, but runs in 30 frames per second, which for a game of this type is a significant handicap.

When talking about the PC release, we must mention that it is still a title that Nvidia officially supports and helps to optimize their cards. So owners of GeForce GTX 970 and 980 models graphic cards can further improve the already impressive appearance of the game thanks to the technologies available if you have these bastards in your housing. In the first place there are NVIDIA HBAO +, as well as NVIDIA Percentage Closer Soft Shadows with NVIDIA Hybrid frustum Traced Shadows, for more realistic, and more impressive effects of shadows on the scene. When you turn on all of these effects on Nvidia hardware, the difference between the PC and console issue becomes a bit more apparent. Of course, NVIDIA G-SYNC, SLI and Surround are also present with the possibility of raising 4K if the rest of the components permits to play normally at these settings.

As of all said criticism, both positive and negative; experience playing the Division I can summarize the best by the famous meme: “I had fun once. It was awful.” I understand that the Division is not a wonder of wonders. In fact, if it came in the form of a linear shooter we would forgotten it by the next month . But something there is very catchy. I was ecstatic when I found a good loot, and I can not deny that the cooperative action and some moments were fun while they lasted.
Will you blame the Divisions repetition of content, it completely depends on yourselves. In your defense you can safely say the life itself is repetitive – every day we eat, work, sleep – but no one will say that there is no in between occasional entertainment. Others will argue however that we never eat, we do not do things and do not sleep in the same way, but in the end it actually gets to the questions whether the glass is half full or half empty. So it is the same with the division; can be both good and bad – depending on how you look at its advantages and disadvantages…