The Division review: Mistakes were made, both old and new

ECHOs are one of the game's collectibles... and just a bit voyeuristic.

With more ways than ever for players to document and share their experiences, ridiculous bugs and absurd oversights are no longer the stuff of playground rumor. You have one chance to make a good impression, or else faceless assassins and loot caves can become the defining features of your game in the public consciousness well before early problems can be patched.

In the case of The Division, we’ll always remember the queues: a dozen or so players, stacked in orderly horizontal piles, separated only by their own collision detection as they reach for the single laptop that will unlock the rest of the game. It’s among the first of the few times The Division naturally populates its world with large groups of other players, and it’s comedy gold. From that moment forward, however, The Division reveals itself to be curiously desolate for a game that requires a constant (and, so far, rather shaky) server connection.

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That desolation makes some sense. Someone, somewhere has dosed cash in New York City (or at least the director’s cut version of Manhattan that we get) with a cocktail of smallpox, bird flu, and every other Fox News disease-of-the-year. This “dollar flu,” or “green poison,” has left the boroughs' streets either evacuated or full of corpses. Those who remain were either too slow or unwilling to escape quarantine.

This is where your protagonist comes in. As part of a secret and heavily-armed police force, aka The Division, you’ve stayed behind to, ostensibly, collect data on the virus and keep the peace (which you do by murdering tons of people, of course).

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