This game was $2 on sale one day. As a fan of the Division 1, I bought it. Lets get that straight, that price tag is why this review is positive. This is a stellar $2 game. Plus, a lot of the cons I have are pretty much nitpicks.
Pros: Combat, movement, and graphics are all substantial upgrades over The Division 1 by far. Location is decently cool as well. Feels pretty modern and runs great on older-ish hardware. The new gadgets are pretty alright, and the synergy you can have with gear before late / end game is pretty neat. Make a proper build at like level 10 and onwards, and you can shoot your whole way through the game without really even needing gadgets.
Cons: Story and world was way less immersive than the first game and missions felt like they had no weight. Kinda just doing stuff with little explanation.
In D1 you learn what happened with the infection, each faction of enemy is introduced to you with progressive missions, and missions felt more impactful to the story. D2's story on the other hand is like "yo kill these dudes in DC and we'll talk about the infection again late game idk". I reached level 30 in 20 hours, which really didn't feel like a lot nor did the game feel very difficult overall. If I was going for it, I could've easily made it close to 14 or 15 I think. 30 is only late game and not end game in D2, so take that for what you will, but that's at least 85% of "Main" story missions done by that point. Once you take on the 3 big bad strongholds around level 28, they just introduce a new faction once you should've been done and make you play "new" missions in the same locations which feels like they're gameplay padding pretty hard. Never entered a dark zone once and never struggled with any of the missions in terms of gear or under leveling. Upgrade paths to improve the base of operations are also super vague and almost feel like they don't benefit you much which is a huge shift from D1.
If its on sale for like $10 or less, go for it. OG Division 1 fans might feel a little disappointed though but its still a decent time.
