Publisher: Titanbooks
Author: Alex Irvine
From the start, I was hooked playing The Division. The setting was exactly what I looking for. It starts with Black Friday, that’s when the dollar flu started, it spread very fast and it wasn’t too long before hospitals became full. As the bodies start to pile up, you come in to save the day. As a Division Agent, you have been trained for world-changing things like this. Once I had reached this point in the storyline of the game, and found out as much as I could about the characters in this world, I wanted more. This came in the guise of Alex Irvine’s New York Collapse, which was a supplement to The Division.
Ubisoft has made such a great world for us to play in and now also read. I was so happy to have the chance to read this book and find out what happens after the end sequence of the game. The book picks up seven months after the dollar bill flu. It is now spring and the chill of winter is beginning to lift, hope is on the rise. Opening Tom Clancy’s The Division: Broken Dawn (available in paperback and digital), the first chapter finds us following four children, you follow them as they seek out food for the camp they are a part of, this sets the tone of the book very well in this dangerous city, hope can be found anywhere. The children continue around the city looking for food. These children give us an on-the-ground look at the day-to-day life in Washington D.C. The pace of the book works really well, chapters flow nicely from one character to another which gives you an almost TV episode feel. Throughout the book, we follow four main story-archs; April Kelleher, whose story picks up directly where it finished at the end of New York Collapse. We are introduced to Agent Aurello Diaz, we find him looking over the Dark Zone as he stands guard, like a sentry. He is a well-trained agent and very capable of reading a situation, again a well written, realistic, gritty character. We also meet Ike Ronson, both of these characters have their views challenged within the book, however, both in very different ways.
The storyline is one of which you would expect if this downfall of society happened, and all the major powers in your country fell. Gangs are fighting for turf, doing what they want and how they want with no one to keep them in check. People are trying desperately to keep order and then there’s that grey area where the worst kind of evil occurs. As you continue deeper into the book, you see how both sides are manipulating the situation in which the world has found itself, and things go from bad to worse.
I really could not put this book down, it was such a great read. I’ve really had to dial it back for this review, as I could have gone on and on about this book but I didn’t want to give away too much of the storyline or the characters. What I can say is, Alex Irvine has done another amazing job bringing Ubisoft’s The Division to another media. It has the same feel as the first and second games. That bleak outlook and feeling of isolation, which I really enjoyed. His writing style is descriptive and gritty, the in-depth character involvements with the story-line will keep you hooked from beginning to end! He brings the apocalyptic world to life within the pages of the book, and picks up some of the framework laid down in the first game and carries it over to become the backstory for The Division 2, helping the player to gain some insight into what happened in-between the two games. If you are a fan of The Division franchise then this book is an absolute must for you, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have.
