Reviews
[Review-in-Progress] Masterful Level Design Elevates ‘The Division 2’ Over Loot-Shooting Peers
Read our in progress The Division 2 review to see how the post-apocalyptic shooter sequel is shaping up. Is a war-torn Washington the perfect loot n’ shoot playground?
As I sidled along a wall of artfully arranged sandbags in a museum exhibit devoted to the history of the Vietnam War, I peeked through lush, faux flora to try and spot my real enemies amid the silhouettes of mannequin soldiers. The trench I moved through was designed to give museum visitors a feel for life in the trenches of the southeast Asian jungle. But, the Gatling gun that my opponents had aimed at me was very real. Well, video game real, at least.
The Division 2, the new sequel to Ubisoft’s 2016 loot shooter, constantly walks this line. Some of its most memorable setpieces—like a bombastic shooting spree through the National Air and Space Museum—mine a real-world location for all its worth, arranging cover and enemies expertly to facilitate a field trip significantly more exhilarating than my eighth-grade jaunt across the nation’s capital. But some, like the hazy Nixon-era shooting gallery mentioned above, are manufactured whole cloth.
The team at developer Massive Entertainment is aware that museum exhibits, like video game levels, are artificial spaces, arranged to provide an experience for their guests; for the visitors who pace their halls; who stop to read the inscriptions on the ample informational placards; who ooh and ah at the dinosaurs, or fighter planes, or other really big things that the curators somehow, improbably, managed to fit beneath their rotundas. The Division 2 marries the real to the imaginary to create the best levels I’ve seen in a shooter since Titanfall 2. In a genre that’s often defined by repetition, The Division 2 is as wonderfully varied as the museums that call D.C. home.
Seven months after the events of the first game, the paramilitary Division organization has expanded their efforts from New York to Washington D.C. You’ll start the game by creating a silent avatar, and after a brief tutorial mission, will move into the White House —setting up shop like Cory from Cory in the House, but if he was a paramilitary agent instead of a psychic’s wisecracking kid brother. From there, you’ll work with other Division-aries and armed civilians to take back the city from a pair of gangs — the Hyenas and the True Sons—both of whom are as uninteresting and cartoonishly evil as possible.
These opposing factions are boring in every way, except the way that matters most: they’re worthy opponents. The Hyenas and True Sons aren’t bullet sponges like many loot shooter baddies. With the proper weaponry, most enemies will go down after a few shots. But, what they lack in defense, they make up for in agility, constantly flanking you and taking multiple bullets to the chest if it means they can club you on the noggin. In The Division 2, you will hardly ever follow the standard cover shooter formula: hide in one spot, pop out of cover to fire a few rounds, duck down again, repeat for half-an-hour. While many games with Gears of War-style combat force you to cower until you get hemorrhoids, The Division 2 will have you running from cover to cover, twitching from left to right, searching for the glint of an enemy’s gun, sweating as you hear an opponent’s footsteps or muffled laughter. This game, frequently, is terrifying.
Those enemies, paired with The Division 2’s incredible mission design, is a match made in shooter heaven. The mission locations are interesting enough on their own—I would happily play a more narrative-driven adventure set in this fictional D.C.—but, when enemies begin pouring into the starry dimness of a planetarium or charging along the red dirt of a Mars exhibit, The Division 2 really shines.
This isn’t just a series of missions, though. The Division 2 is an open world game, with about a half-dozen sizable areas to explore. So far, at least, clever design and some dynamic systems make these areas continuously compelling to root through. Ubisoft’s shooter takes some design cues from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That game incentivized exploration by constantly rewarding the player with loot, collectibles, new shrine puzzles to solve and just plain cool stuff to find in the wilderness. The Division 2 takes a page out of the Hyrule Historia, stashing new guns, armor and audio diaries around every corner. If you take the time to explore, you will consistently be rewarded — and unlike in Breath of the Wild, your weapons won’t break after a few uses.
And, in one of The Division 2’s smartest design decisions, Massive included a dynamic weather system and a day-and-night cycle. Exploration is made all the more exciting by the knowledge that a sand storm could roll in at any minute. During one memorable encounter, I had been banging my head against the last fight of a lengthy mission for about a half-hour, as the sun sank in the sky. In my final attempt, the sun had fully set and cracks of thunder pealed out overhead as rain fell on the battlefield. While the mission’s design didn’t fundamentally change, my last hurrah was made all the more memorable because the battlefield felt just different enough. Little touches like this are a brilliant way to help a game designed to be played “forever” stay interesting over time.
Overall, The Division 2 is a fantastic experience; a shared world shooter that isn’t asking players to hang in there and wait for it to reach its full potential. It’s already great. However, while BioWare’s storytelling—esoteric and proper noun-filled as it may be—will keep me coming back to Anthem, The Division 2 will need to continue to provide exciting gameplay experiences. The story here is as bare bones as humanly possible, dotted with barely-there characters with the sketchiest sketches of personalities. I don’t care about the lore of The Division 2; each and every audio log I’ve found has been poorly written and equally poorly acted.
Meanwhile, the fascinating political implications inherent in Washington D.C. as a setting are ignored. While Ubisoft has chosen the center of American politics as its setting, and chosen to tell a story about opposing factions warring for control, the company continues the tradition that Far Cry 5 began, gesturing at the important subject matter, but shrinking from the opportunity to say anything. Instead, the White House is a “symbol of hope.” Nothing more, nothing less.
While the game says nothing, it does plenty. This is a mechanically rich, impeccably designed, technically proficient open world loot shooter that is getting everything right (on the gameplay end of things, at least) from the very start. It may fail to tap into D.C.’s significance as a national capital, but it expertly uses the town’s landmarks for some of the best levels I’ve seen in a long time.
Oh, and so far, about 25 to 30 hours in, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the PvPvE Dark Zones, and haven’t played any of Conflict, the PvP mode. I’ll continue to play, and will update this review after I’ve had some more time with this excellent game.
The Division 2 review code for PS4 provided by the publisher
The Division 2 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Franchise callbacks and connective tissue between films are aplenty in Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn, including a sense of humor. Yet the laughs feel oddly placed in the most dour entry yet, with its sobering allegory for domestic abuse. Ambitious swings and inspired sequences unleash thrilling carnage that satisfy, but it all unravels by its clumsy final showdown.
Alice (Souheila Yacoub) is already a survivor before the arrival of Deadites. She’s suffered domestic abuse and violence at the hands of her husband, Will Price (George Pullar), and finally sees reprieve when the lakeside Deadite that bookended Evil Dead Rise causes his death. It’s a calculated move by the undead; they’re in search of a certain Kandarian dagger that happens to be a Price family heirloom. So, Alice’s grieving with her in-laws becomes a bloodbath as she’s forced to confront literal and metaphorical demons, courtesy of the Necronomicon.
Vaniček, who co-wrote the script with Florent Bernard, presents a rather rotten family tree before any demonic activity. Will is, after all, his parents’ son, and mom and dad are a nasty piece of work. Erroll Shand manages to top his skin-crawling villain from Mārama as Price patriarch Edgar, a volatile vision of toxicity and control. His wife, Susan (Tandi Wright), reveals herself to be even more vile, doling out cruel barbs that indicate she’s quite comfortable with her husband and eldest son’s penchant for violence.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; flickers of ignorance and bigotry occasionally cut through Grandma’s (Maude Davey) dementia-addled mind. The exception to this family’s rot is with timid youngest son Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), though he’s too browbeaten to protect anyone from the Prices’ wrath. His cowardice is revealed to be a different form of toxicity, though, a byproduct of the kind of fruit this family tree bears. Which is to say that Evil Dead Burn may be the first in the franchise to operate on such a palpable degree of hate. It’s hard to feel fear when you actively despise the majority of these characters and root for their demise.
The good news is that Vaniček delivers on that front. Adhering to the formula, the family members perish one by one in inventive ways. Including the poor family pup, though his Deadite form doesn’t contribute much to the chaos. It’s the ingenious set pieces and demonic sequences that stand out in Evil Dead Burn, calling Vaniček’s nerve-fraying Infested to mind. An early sequence involving a moving car, one that sees multiple bodies fighting for life or death and utilizing whatever weapon they can, is worth the ticket price alone. A later sequence that sees Alice crawling away as an all-out brawl breaks out around her in a long, continuous take also adds thrilling personality.
Evil Dead Burn sags dramatically between these sequences, though, forcing us to sit through more vitriol from vicious in-laws with only contact lenses and wounds to distinguish them from human or demon. The somber tone is matched by a flat gray palette evocative of ash, made more literal by the falling of snow. The cold, flat aesthetic also diminishes some of the horror’s visceral impact. It all builds to a rather dismal climax that introduces a shoddy CG monstrosity that makes Alice’s demons made of burnt flesh.
In a film series that has, thus far, maintained fierce commitment to practical effects, the clunky final boss of demons here winds up a huge disappointment. At least the filmmaker commits fully to the Burn part of the title, forgoing the blood-drenched finales of the previous two films to deliver something a bit fresher.
It’s so heavy-handed in its domestic violence theme that subtext is just text, which in turn clashes with the upbeat splatstick fan service bits. A mid-credit scene aims to bring the laughs, but the post-credit scene is so egregious in its fan service that it reads desperate and feels shoehorned in just to remind fans how much we love this particular character.
Vaniček most certainly understands the assignment when it comes to delivering gruesome freakouts and brutal carnage. It’s everything else around it that largely frustrates. Yacoub is a winsome final girl who’s already been battered before the events of the film, then we’re forced to watch the rest of the family pile on in even worse ways.
It’s the type of bleak that’s at constant odds with the Evil Dead formula and callbacks, making for a tonally uneven vision of domestic abuse. It makes you miss when the ancient evil in this series didn’t need a trauma metaphor to terrorize. That’s what the demons are for.
Evil Dead Burn releases in theaters on July 10.
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