When The Division hit town a few years back, we were playing as soon as it launched. It unfortunately had a lot of issues during its launch period, but to its credit, Ubisoft steadily worked on improving the game, both through free patches and paid expansions.

It worked.

The Division you can play today is a much more improved and refined version of the the shaky version that launched in 2016.

It seems that Ubisoft’s taken all that they’ve learned from the first game into making the second one even better! We’ve not finished the game (we’re just level 23 at the moment) but from what we’ve seen and experienced, The Division 2 is a worthy sequel.

Amazingly the Washington Monument is still standing.

It’s taken the great cover-based gunplay from the original and amped it up. It’s changed up the skills you can get, removing powerful ones like Smart Cover, and replacing them with all new ones like the Chem Launcher and Drone.

It’s taken The Division’s tweaks to enemies and made them less bullet-resistant. They seem smarter too, flanking you more consistently now that you’ll always need to keep an eye on your six.

It’s taken the original’s focus on cooperation and tweaked both the Dark Zone mechanics and how you play with other players. There’s now even a competitive multiplayer mode on top of PVE and the Dark Zone PVP.

The Division 2 may share much of its traits from the original, but it certainly feels like its own game. Washington’s definitely has a different feel from New York, especially since it’s not full of snow.

There’s vegetation growing, animals scurrying, buildings crumbling…it honestly is in a much better place visually compared to the drab whiteout that permeated the original game.

So much color!

What’s great is that the game actually references to events in the original. There’s the obvious plot exposition, but the ones we REALLY like are the audio logs we can find, narrated by some characters players from the original will definitely recognize.

It still doesn’t give the closure to the whole New York City saga but it does at least let us glimpse what went on after the events of the original game.

While we have to admit not everything is as good as we’d like, we’re going to save our nitpicks for the review.

In the meantime, have you entered our giveaway yet? You could walk away with a copy of The Division 2 for the console of your choice!

Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.