After almost three years of various trailers and demos, I wasn't sure I understood exactly what type of experience The Division

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“ The Division's upgrades are unlocked based on where you go and what you do.

The moment-to-moment gameplay (exploration, combat, etc) of The Division is predominately third-person action. As such, it performs more than admirably. Its combat mechanics control well and the enemy AI is adaptable enough that you don’t always feel like you’re constantly replaying the same firefight as your opponents suppress, flank, and advance on you and your team. It employs your standard arsenal of military-grade weaponry, from SMGs and assault rifles to machine guns and a variety of grenades, and both weapon attachments and armor upgrades can be obtained by looting enemies, bartering with vendors or crafted using materials recovered from scrapped items.

In addition to all this traditional military hardware is some very cool semi-futuristic tech that gives each agent of The Division a specialized set of abilities. You might choose to send out a pulse that temporarily marks enemies and buffs damage, or maybe carry a riot shield to deflect bullets, or equip a seeker grenade to home in on your enemies. All of this augmented-reality tech is unlocked via RPG-style skill trees, but not in the way you might expect. While traditional RPGs will reward players with skill points to be spent on new powers and abilities, The Division's upgrades are unlocked based on where you go and what you do.

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Early on in the game, you'll reach and establish your Base of Operations, which is where you'll manage your campaign to restore order to a collapsed Manhattan. Each skill tree is tied to a wing of your base that can be improved by collecting resources while undertaking missions or exploring the city. Focusing on the medical wing will unlock healing abilities and gear, while rebuilding your BoO's infrastructure will allow you access to better technology, such as deployable turrets and the aforementioned homing grenades.

It also means that you can elect to focus on upgrading your skill sets regardless of your character's level, and while you can certainly choose one path and stick with it, you’re also free to re-spec your character at any time. This way you don't need to worry about playing through the first ten hours as a medic only to decide that you should have focused on tech upgrades instead. So long as you’ve managed to rebuild enough of your base of operations, you can switch between any abilities you’ve unlocked at any time. This makes it decidedly easier to adjust your tactics when transitioning from solo gameplay to co-op, or when going up against more dangerous enemies later in the game.

The most deadly foes we squared off against during our demo, however, weren’t AI-controlled vandals or looters – they were other player-controlled Division agents, all hunting for the most valuable loot inside The Division’s PVP-enabled arena, the Dark Zone.

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Above: How the Dark Zone manages to combine PvE and a PvP arena.

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When I first experienced the Dark Zone at last year's E3, it gave the impression that it was strictly a PvP area. Thankfully, I was mistaken, and instead of immediately being forced to attack anyone you run into, everyone in the Dark Zone – except for the errant NPC patrol – starts off as friendly. That said, players are also far more likely to come across rare or valuable loot in the DZ, and (unlike in the rest of the game world) it isn’t instanced - meaning that there’s only one, and whoever successfully manages to extract the item claims the reward. This makes attacking your fellow agents - “going rogue” as it’s called - a much more appealing prospect, and the fact that you can't exchange items with other players can lead to some tense standoffs even between the closest friends.Regardless of how many teammates you murder, once you exit the Dark Zone, all is forgiven and you’re free to resume the herculean task of rebuilding New York. My team played through a few main story missions during our demo, and each one ran between half an hour and an hour, and there seemed to be no shortage of side missions, safehouses and supply runs dotting the portion of the sizeable map we had explored. And I’ve got to mention that, aside from the occasional mistake leading to my death, once I booted up the game for the first time, I never saw another loading screen. Anywhere.

Above: We retrieve a valuable supply drop from a gang of Rioters.

With its intriguing setting and effective blending of multiple genres, The Division proved to be every bit as engaging as I had hoped. While I may have only spent a few hours with it, I realized days later that all I wanted to do was revisit its bleak version of New York (thankfully, the beta launches in a few weeks ). Here's hoping that the full game can deliver on its massive potential when it releases on March 8th.

Jon Ryan is an editor at IGN. If you want to bother him while he waits for The Division to come out, you can find him on Twitter