Tom Clancy's The Division has been coming for quite some time now. Many didn't even expect it to release at all with the amount of delays but here we are with the open beta, the game itself releasing very soon indeed. Like many games in the market now, The Division aims to try and piggyback off the success of Destiny, Bungie's first release under Activision. While Destiny itself is thought to be lackluster and simply a cash-grab, it still made a LOT of money, so developers see it as a model to base their games off. The Division takes this to the extreme, with a game that pretty much matches the same hybrid genre as Destiny, only now it's in a more modern time period and it's a third-person cover-based shooter.

Many are hoping that The Division aims to be a better Destiny, with more content overall and less screwing over of their fanbase. While there are definitely things in the game which give me hope that this is the case, there are still some serious issues and concerns that the alpha/beta has raised for me which lead me to believe that the MMO/Shooter/Thing genre that Destiny began still has a long way to go before it works.

First off, The Division seems to have a much more competent narrative than Destiny did. Good start. Despite only having access to the first mission, it already seems like Ubisoft was able to hire a writer who actually understood how to write a script compared to the monkey that Bungie hired to re-write the whole thing after tearing up Joseph Staten's original plotline.

The game mechanics are also very solid. It seems like they have perfected the cover-based shooter movement and gunplay, with easy transitioning from cover-to-cover and satisfying fights that make every battle fun.

But the darkzone is the real selling point of The Division. The PvP combat zone, where players can choose to work together with each other to fight through all the tougher enemies and acquire the best loot....or turn on each other and take everything for themselves. It's both terrifying and exhilirating with each encounter with another player.

However, there STILL seems to be a lack of content here. PvE encounters are few and far between, are effectively copy and pasted in different locations, with little to no variation in the actual rewards offered. Perhaps this is just because they are low-level but if you want to keep people's attention, they need to open up the map and be overcome with options and choices of what to do, not squinting as they try to find out if there's ANYTHING to do whatsoever.

There are also some poor design choices. The JTF (friendly characters) are poorly done with jeeps that look like they were designed by an idiot who just painted their initials on in a really bad font and the UI is a painfully bad downgrade from what was originally shown at the E3 demo. The world can also feel very empty at times. While there are tons of civilians dotted around, the atmosphere doesnt exactly scream death and destruction, and the so called 'gangs' are so unorganised that you only ever seem to see three of the grunts every few miles or so and that's it.

I pray that the actual game will not disappoint, but here's some advice for all of you, wait for the reviews to come out before purchasing the game. It's still difficult to say whether it will be a great game, or yet another commercially successful piece of trash like Destiny was.