The Division 2 Review: 10 Ups & 4 Downs

Ups...

10. The Satisfying, Varied 25-Hour Campaign

The game's core campaign is lengthy and absurdly entertaining for the most part, and Massive deserves credit for minimising both the XP grind and general sense of repetition.

For though the game's campaign missions are level-gated to an extent - you need to be within two levels of the requirement - it generally never takes more than an hour of playing through side content to get to the next main mission.

This is ultimately a neat, unobtrusive way to encourage players to tackle peripheral content without turning it into an hours-long slog, and the result is a 25-ish-hour main campaign that's diverse and dynamic even though the story is, as mentioned, pretty much worthless.

It helps that much of the storytelling is told through the gorgeously-rendered world, with the campaign hurling players into a number of recognisable Washington monuments.

A late-game mission set inside a bunker, for instance, is surely among the most visually elaborate and downright artful missions from any looter shooter game ever made, and enhances the atmosphere so much that you likely won't much care about the nothing narrative.

Most of the missions do generally come down to similar steps that are ultimately resolved in epic shootouts, but they're generally more varied and involved than in the first game, making that "mission complete" screen feel so damn satisfying.