Both for better and for worse, The Division: Underground would probably be the best way to show a curious, uninitiated player the hazy mix of fun and tedium that typifies Ubisoft’s massive third-person shooter. After all, The Division has always been at its best when the bullets are flying and your team is the only thing standing between you and the swirling chaos of explosions and gunfire, and Underground delivers that in concentrated shots without the long, pointless slogs through empty city streets. In typical Division fashion, though, this expansion still finds a few other ways to waste players’ time, like by saddling them with an ultimately unnecessary grind that threatens to tire them out before they ever get to the good stuff - which incidentally, isn’t all that good anyway.

The structure for The Division: Underground is simple and functional once you polish off its one-mission introduction: head to the new social space underneath your base of operations, amorphously named “The Terminal,” and either set up a jaunt into the New York City subway system for yourself, or matchmake to find a squad to roll with. From there, you’re dumped right into a mission that’s cobbled together from randomly chosen rooms, enemies, and objectives. There’s no stumbling about wide-open spaces in search of purpose here; just follow the yellow dot until your motion tracker lights up, and let the good times roll. Combat has always been my favorite thing about The Division, and Underground essentially allows you to mainline it with very little filler or interruption.

Loading

Undergrind

“ Underground mixes people of low and high gear level, creating a poor experience for both.

13 IMAGES

The thing is, Underground doesn’t really do much to spice that combat up. You’ll find some neat jamming beacons that prevent ability usage until you destroy them, and an occasional alarm to take out to prevent reinforcements from pouring in, but that’s it as far as new wrinkles go. No new enemy types, no unique objectives to complete, just the same room-clearing you’ve likely already done for hours upon hours. Between fights, new environmental hazards like downed electrical wires or leaky gas mains pop-up for you to contend with, but you’ll have seen them all after a few runs, so they wind up being momentary interruptions rather than interesting challenges to face. Combat remains the clear focus, and Underground’s inability to make it feel new or fresh is its central problem.It’s far from its only one though. Like the Dark Zone, Underground has its own ranking progression, so whether your gear score is a paltry 100 or a hefty 250, you have to start in the same place. This creates two issues. One is that as a low level character, I get matched with lots of teammates who are overleveled for the content, which means I might as well sit in the back and sip mojitos, because my overpowered cohorts will likely have ripped through a wave of enemies before I’ve so much as laid eyes on them, essentially trivializing the content for me. The other is that if you happen to be one of those well-geared agents, you’re stuck grinding out missions that offer you little in the ways of challenge or reward until you reach a high enough rank to attempt longer, higher level operations. If matchmaking were based off of gear level, this problem could have been mitigated, but as is, Underground mixes people of low and high gear level, creating a poor experience for both.

For many hours, I held out hope that once I unlocked the higher difficulty multi-phase missions, things would become more interesting, but that hope proved false in the end. These turned out to be nothing but a series of single-phase missions tacked on to one another, with spongier enemies that churned out higher damage numbers. It’s just a progressively scaling gear check as opposed to more elaborate mission types that might require some planning or strategizing.