Microreview [video game]: Tom Clancy's The Division 2 by Massive Entertainment (developer)

Trouble in the Capitol

After the wreck that was Anthem, I was ready for a better shlooter. After playing the open and closed beta, I knew that The Division 2 was that game. But having spent ~30 hours in the game, I’ve come to learn it improves a lot of issues (compared to Anthem, but also The Division) but it still isn’t perfect.

The Division 2 is a third-person cover shooter with loot collection. It picks some time after The Division, but in Washington, DC rather than New York City. Like NYC in the previous, DC was ravaged by the Green Poison (a manufactured smallpox variant) and is in a state of rebuilding rather than the simple survival focus of The Division. But there isn’t a whole lot of plot here either because it also retreads a lot of “reestablishment of society” beats from The Division.

The Division 2, if anything, has a lot to do and collect. Every area of the map is simply littered with missions and landmarks, and these tasks give you plentiful amounts of loot. The world of The Division 2 has knee pads, backpacks, body armor, sanitary masks, and other protective gear everywhere. And guns! It’s like a prepper hive lives in every basement, and most of them exploded up to the surface in the ensuing disaster. All this gear has a handful of levels of rarity and numbers go up in a satisfying fashion if you’re compelled by seeing numbers go up.

The Division 2 improves on the first game’s skill selection (which are things that you can do in combat on a timer, like drop a turret or pull up a shield) and enemy tactics. In the first game, a solo player like myself could do very well simply by dropping an automated turret and then flanking the enemies as they take cover from the turret. That doesn’t work so well in The Division 2, because enemies outnumber and flank you, and tougher ones will simply rush your turret and kick it to death. To compensate, you’ve got a much bigger selection of tools to adapt to enemy tactics. Where The Division had four, The Division 2 has eight, and each of those has three variants. You can only pick two configurations out of the possible 24, and it’s a hard choice. That turret that draws enemy attention is still useful, but sometimes I’d rather have the grenade launcher that drains enemy armor, or the drone that heals me.

This variety in gear and tactical options doesn’t change the basic gameplay loop though, and it wears on after a while. With some exceptions, weapons are just bullet hoses, and the enemies are just more goons with a guns shooting at you. A lot of the missions take place in museums and DC landmarks, which is cool because they’re beautiful environments with neat set pieces, but what you do in the missions rarely changes. You enter a room full of enemies, take cover, and then shoot at them until they die. That sounds like an oversimplification, but it really isn’t. The action feels good but I’ve mowed down hundreds of enemies. This isn’t a big change from the last Division, where I also cleared rooms and mowed down hundreds of enemies with automatic weapons.

The huge amount of stuff in the game but limited variety in core gameplay has worn out my interest in playing it more. I’ve honestly not completed the main mission branch, and I’m going to need to take a break and come back to it later before I start to resent this game. It’s a fun game for the first 20 something hours and numbers go up, but numbers going up isn’t cutting it for me anymore. It is more fun to play with others, and matchmaking exists for every activity, but even playing with others doesn’t change the core gameplay loop. The good(?) news is that this is a “live service” type game that will be getting more stuff over time, and Ubisoft has demonstrated their dedication to supporting their games with The Division (which markedly improved over time), and other titles like For Honor and Rainbow Six: Siege. I’m fairly confident I’ll come back to The Division 2 in a couple months, wrap up the main missions, and play more of the new stuff they add to it. The Division 2 is fun but wears out its welcome before you finish all of what it offers.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 lots of loot, +1 lots of stuff to do

Penalties: -2 repetitive core gameplay loop

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Massive Entertainment (developer). Tom Clancy's The Division 2 (Ubisoft, 2019)

Microreview [video game]: Dark Souls 3 by From Software (developer)

Hard But No Diamond

A short while ago, I'd committed to ignoring games described as inspired by Dark Souls. I'd played some Dark Souls and didn't enjoy it much, played some Dark Souls inspired games like Lords of the Fallen and Bound by Flame and I didn't like any of them. But this isn't a consistent dislike. I really really enjoyed Salt & Sanctuary, but the qualities of Dark Souls that inhabited Hollow Knight turned me right off. And almost immediately after I'd decided that Dark Souls-like games were not for me, Humble Monthly gave me a copy of Dark Souls 3. I beat Dark Souls 3. I enjoyed Dark Souls 3.

I am ill equipped to describe what makes Dark Souls 3 so different from Dark Souls, and even less equipped to compare it to Dark Souls 2, but Dark Souls 3 hooked me fairly quick. I know how these games work and they're very unforgiving, particularly of my overly-aggressive playstyle. With the help of a build guide to direct my efforts on creating a character I would enjoy playing with, a simple melee sword-and-board fighter, I sliced and chopped my way through hordes of monsters. The variety in combat encounters and enemies ensured that even my simple character build was never boring. Maybe Salt & Sanctuary made me a more patient player, but I rarely felt like the fights were unfair, even when I was dying to bosses over and over. I'd eventually learn their patterns and weaknesses, and chop them to pieces with my sword. Where as I found Dark Souls to be a largely frustrating affair, Dark Souls 3 never felt frustrating; it was rewarding.

What isn't rewarding in the game is the storyline, or lack thereof. It starts with a cutscene explaining that the lords of cinder have left their graves and need to be returned to their thrones to rekindle the dying world. From there, there's more or less nothing much to offer until you reach the end, and you get a short cutscene for your efforts. Sure, you'll find other non-hostile people with some "quests" of their own, but there's no journal. No quest log. Often, I struggled to even remember their names. Most items have a sentence or two of flavor text but that's about it for worldbuilding. You could go end-to-end through this game and never learn a single thing about the lords of cinder that you're mercilessly hunting down and killing.

This is a bit of a shame because the world they've built, without the exposition, is really interesting in that it's not standard fantasy or grimdark. If anything, it's sorrowful. This is a dying world, roamed by undead things, desperate for purpose and meaning. I find myself wanting to go back to Dark Souls again for another try to see if I can fill in the blanks because I want to learn more. Even if I can't, if I can find in Dark Souls what I found in Dark Souls 3, that'll be enough. Dark Souls 3 is a challenging game that rewards persistence and learning without feeling cheap.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 a huge variety of enemies and worlds that never gets boring

Penalties: -1 non-existent storytelling does the world no justice

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 (an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: From Software. Dark Souls 3 [Namco Bandai, 2016]

Microreview [video game]: Assassin's Creed Origins by Ubisoft Montreal (developer)

A Bright Shining Sun

I tell people I have a love/hate relationship with the Assassin's Creed series, but I'm going to be totally honest here: it's mostly a love/annoyed relationship. I find them to be brainless timesinks, and that's not really a bad thing. They're a reliable, often enjoyable 20 something hours of game. I haven't played all of them, and the ones I have played are often regarded as the bad ones, but I almost always get one when I want to kill time. Assassin's Creed Origins, however, is better than a time killer. It's a great game.

Assassin's Creed Origins takes the history-skipping game way back to ancient Egypt, in the times when Cleopatra's brother occupies her throne, and he's propped up by a Greek army. You play as Bayek, a Medjay, and you're hunting down the people who killed your son. This mission will take Bayek all across Egypt and lead to uncovering a greater conspiracy.

Origins bins a lot of hallmarks of the Assassin's Creed series. In doing so, it becomes a much more enjoyable game, and probably a more accessible game, but it loses some of what makes Assassin's Creed unique. Origins presents a huge, sprawling Egypt that you're free to explore and engage with on your terms.

Origins took a lot of, let's call it, inspiration from The Witcher 3. It's very much about having a lot of stuff to do, and letting you do it in whatever priority you want. Often, you can even run off in the middle of a quest to do something else and then come back and pick it right up. While the quests aren't quite as well written as The Witcher 3, and they rarely do that thing where it acknowledges when you've already solved a step in the quest ahead of time, they are competent. They don't feel like a waste of time. Bayek himself, along with the rest of the cast, is also well written. Compared to some of the rest of the Assassin's Creed series, this is the best it's been.

What is loses is the strict focus on stealth. Bayek can get into a lot of fights and leave most of them alive, where most Assassin's Creed protagonists would wilt like a flower. Additionally, if you do find yourself in over your head, you can simply run away and it'll almost always work. This is in stark contrast with other games in the series, where enemies are almost omniscient and ever-preset to the point that being spotted means reloading a checkpoint. Add in that you no longer have the ability, or much need, to blend in with crowds, nor much need to run along rooftops to avoid being seen, means this Assassin's Creed feels least like a game in this series. If it weren't in a historical setting, with a single "assassinate" button, and good climbing mechanics, it'd be a different game entirely.

Some people aren't going to like this shift; I'm not one of those people. I loved it. Like The Witcher 3, it hooked me early on and I spent a lot of long stretches of time playing it. Unplayed games notwithstanding, this is the best game in the series. The extra time Ubisoft put into its development clearly paid off; they made an Assassin's Creed that I just loved.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 absorbed a lot of the good open-world qualities of The Witcher 3

Penalties: -1 lost some of the unique qualities that Assassin's Creed is known for

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin's Creed Origins [Ubisoft, 2017]