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Editor's note: This is an early impressions piece based on our first two days playing The Division. We're looking to have our full review up early next week.A tourist can get more of a bead on a city in their first few hours than those who've lived there for years, Bill Burroughs once said while locked up in his Manhattan bunker on the Lower East Side. But after spending almost 10 hours in a virtual New York left deserted after a virus outbreak carried on dollar bills - a conceit that might have tickled old Bill - I'm not so sure. Your first couple of days with The Division are overwhelming, and deliciously so. This is an open world that feels expansive from the outset, and it's one that's dense with detail.
It's the city that emerges as the initial star of The Division: a generous slice of Manhattan that's full of distractions. Walk up from Chelsea to Hell's Kitchen and you'll find yourself getting lost in side-streets, tracking down lost agents, chancing across echoes of the disaster that play out in laser-pointillist reenactments, or finding an open door that takes you inside a beautifully realised apartment block, full of hauntingly accurate snapshots of life so suddenly abandoned.
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