Hands-On With The Division Resurgence – Preview

The Division felt like a game that had – but never met its full potential. The Division 2 (our review here) however, was absolutely fantastic and after playing the whole campaign through co-op with 3 friends, I couldn’t sing its praises enough.

With The Division: Resurgence, Ubisoft is essentially aiming to pull off a full Triple A console-level Division-2-like experience set in New York, but on mobile phones – complete with online, large environments, and uncompromised gameplay and graphics.

We were given some early access to bring you our impressions.

People are expected to play a free to play but full blown version of The Division… but on a mobile device with on-screen controls? Hmmm… how’s that supposed to work?

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Once you’re through character creation and early tutorials, you’re out in the open world and on your way. Trying to translate a game as complex as The Division to mobile controls is quite a task, and while it’s not without its issues – I found the mobile controls to actually work really well, with smart ways to fire and aim at the same time, take cover, use abilities and get around easily. It’s never gonna beat a controller or mouse and keyboard, but it’s really not bad.

Also, you can totally play it with a controller or mouse and keyboard.

So about those AAA console graphics… Well, I was playing on an iPhone 11, which is far from the latest in mobile technology, and I was pretty surprised with how good it looks – and sounds.

Sure, it’s not running at a million frames per second, but it was mostly set to high quality – and gave me very little problems, but I did try some variations and it still looked great even on the lowest settings.

I was also shocked at how incredibly quick the load times were. It did eat my phone’s battery for breakfast though, which still seems to be one of my biggest gripes with mobile gaming on a device that’s needed for other important day to day things. I hate it when my phone rings while I’m playing a game on it.

The easiest way to explain the gameplay is to say that it genuinely just feels like I’m playing The Division 2 again ––– but, on my phone. That’s not a bad thing at all, because The Division 2 plays great.

In fact, the game may feel a little too familiar to fans of the main games, and whether or not you find that comforting or disappointing is down to you. Resurgence leans harder into being an MMO shooter experience with deep RPG elements, and still has the things you might expect like co-op PvE and Dark Zone.

So… decent controls, impressive graphics, and a big open world… for free? It feels like there should be a catch.

While all of the elements discussed come together very well, there is no talking around the fact that this is going to be running on a free to play business model, and those come with some trade-offs.

What that’s going to be like is something I can’t speak to right now. With games like Diablo Immortal, Genshin Impact and Fortnite you get quite a range of different free to play experiences – so we will have to wait and see.

What I do know is that as a fan of The Division 2, I’m impressed and have had some good fun with Resurgence so far, but we’ll only really know what the full package and experience is truly going to be like once it launches.