Tom Clancy's The Division 2: Echoes of Central Park Review

Since its release, Tom Clancy's The Division 2 has continued to expand its world with additional campaigns, seasonal content, and new locations that give players more reasons to return. Ubisoft developed and published Tom Clancy's The Division 2: Echoes of Central Park, building on the original The Division and taking players to a version of Washington, D.C., struggling to recover from a devastating outbreak.

Over the years, the franchise has returned to New York, letting players visit old locations and explore new parts of the city. This also lets developers revisit familiar locations while expanding the story and giving players new reasons to explore New York. It also helps maintain a connection between the different entries while keeping the setting fresh.

But one place has remained especially fascinating to the community.

Central Park has been mentioned and discussed throughout the franchise, with players wondering what Ubisoft could eventually do with such an iconic part of New York. Now, Echoes of Central Park finally lets you explore it properly. Rather than simply introducing another collection of missions, the expansion builds its campaign around the mysteries surrounding the park and the dangerous forces that have taken control of the surrounding Upper West Side. 

Echoes of Central Park introduces a new campaign, three main missions, three additional world missions, a final mission, and a new settlement called The Tower. You also get three companions to accompany you on missions, plus a new gear set, an exotic weapon, and six skill variants. Plenty of content to work through, and the new setting immediately gives the expansion a different identity.

However, while the environments and storytelling make a strong impression, familiar mission structures and endgame decisions hold it back. It all starts when the Division picks up an odd distress call from deep within Central Park. Agents are dispatched to locate Miranda Veer, CEO of the Veer Corporation, who has become a target for both the Division and the Black Tusk. What starts as a simple extraction proves far more dangerous.

Central Park is cut off from the outside world; hostile forces have taken control of the surrounding areas, and strange disappearances suggest that something far more dangerous is happening beneath the surface.

After arriving at your new settlement, The Tower, you start working with three companions: Brayleigh, Elwood, and Morse.

Each character has their own background and personal struggles, and helping them becomes an important part of the campaign. The settlement is within a cinema and has an identity of its own, well worth a visit. Its community also helps link the different missions to the people you are fighting with. One of the more interesting storytelling choices is the use of retrospective narrative.

Instead of relying solely on mission conversations, a narrator provides additional context as you play through the campaign. This differs from what you might expect from The Division, but it works well with the mysterious setting. The expansion also sets up its climactic Central Park mission. Clues and references dotted throughout the campaign slowly lead you to the truth.

The finale has some surprises, but it doesn't lose the atmosphere that was built up during the initial missions. Echoes of Central Park follows the familiar third-person looter-shooter formula of The Division 2, but adds new locations and activities to explore. 

From there, you have three main missions and three world missions you can complete in any order. Once you complete the required objectives, you can move on to the final mission in Central Park itself. This structure gives you a little freedom to explore, rather than just shoving you from one mission to the next.

New neighborhoods include Lincoln Center, One Columbus Circle, the Natural History Museum, Matthew May College of Criminal Justice, The Majestic, and The Apthorp. Objectives and environmental issues are site-specific. For example, at Lincoln Center, you fight the Cleaners while trying to take out their pumps and prevent them from releasing a settlement destroyer.

Electrically charged water adds more hazards in combat, as you have to watch your back instead of concentrating fully on enemies.

Other missions have you running through burning buildings, smoky apartments, underground tunnels, els, and Black Tusk-controlled areas. Although all the objectives are identical, the different settings keep the missions from feeling entirely the same. Exploration is another big part of the expansion. The Upper West Side and Central Park provide streets, buildings, subways, and alternate routes that change how you move through the world. Sometimes the most direct route to your goalisn'tt possible. 

This makes you want to explore abandoned buildings and narrow back alleys, rather than just run toward the next mission marker. Collectibles, hidden details, and secrets are scattered throughout the environment, giving you more reason to explore between objectives. The new settlement, The Tower, gives players another place to hang out with the community and interact with campaign-tied characters.

The expansion's biggest addition is the companion system. You can recruit three different characters, each having a certain combat ability. Brayleigh is a sniper. She handles a powerful .50-caliber rifle that can take out regular enemies with one shot on lower difficulties. Her long-range attacks make her especially useful against distant enemies.

Elwood's defense is dropping a support station that heals you, with more damage reduction available with the right perk. Morse focuses on offensive support, using a grenade launcher to hit enemies. You can activate their abilities through a dedicated button, bringing their help into combat when you need them. 

However, companions' usefulness depends on how you handle combat and what equipment you have.

They can be noticeable support, especially if your gear isn't particularly strong, but their impact becomes less obvious as your character grows more powerful. You also have to manually steer them towards enemies, which makes the system feel less natural than having another agent react to threats on their own.

Their character growth, animations, and personalities are welcome additions, but their actual contribution to combat could have been more meaningful. But having different abilities to experiment with adds another level of flexibility, especially when playing alone. Fighting is still about shooting, positioning, managing your armor, and using your skills to deal with different enemy encounters.

Most missions follow the usual pattern: clearing rooms, moving through buildings, defending objectives, and beating a boss at the end. However, a few encounters introduce mechanics that make you think about your approach instead of just focusing fire on one target. Columbus Circle is a great example.

During this mission, you enter an area controlled by the Black Tusk, where the faction appears to have turned against itself. The boss fight is one of the expansion's more interesting encounters because the war hounds actively heal him. Instead of focusing entirely on the main target, you need to disable the dogs before you can properly damage the boss. Even if you take them down, you can't ignore them completely, because they can come back and keep supporting him.

This gives you a simple but effective mechanic to change how you approach the fight. It's especially fun because so many of The Division 2's bosses focus on simple damage trades. The fight also shows how environmental mechanics and enemy abilities can make familiar combat feel more engaging.

Other missions introduce hazards and objectives such as electrically charged water, explosive traps, laser security systems, and enemies with area-of-effect attacks.

The additions add some variety; that said, the overall mission design still relies heavily on set objectives. Some encounters are also relatively short, and enemy placement can make repeated runs feel slower than expected. The One Columbus Circle mission, for example, can take around 20 minutes on Story difficulty, but its spread-out encounters could make farming it less appealing on greater difficulties. 

Progression follows The Division 2's familiar equipment-focused structure, with new gear and rewards that give you reasons to complete missions and check out the available activities. Echoes of Central Park adds a new gear set, a new exotic weapon, and six skill variants. These additions also give you more options when building your preferred loadout.

These additions offer more options to try different builds and find combinations that suit your preferred playstyle. The final Central Park mission also gives you the Howl skill variant, a pulse ability that marks enemies, shocks them, and damages their armor. The expansion is also accessible if you are starting with weaker equipment. Playing through the missions with lower-level gear makes collecting new equipment more rewarding because many of the items you find can immediately improve your character.

However, enemies can feel somewhat bullet-spongy when your equipment is underpowered. Players returning with established builds will have a different experience, as they can focus more on experimenting with the new equipment and completing the available objectives.

Collectibles, commendations, secrets, and additional rewards also extend how long you can spend in the expansion.

Completing the main campaign and unlocking the new skill variants and exotic weapons can take around six to seven hours, depending on how quickly you move through the missions and how much time you spend exploring. Going after everything, including the collectibles and remaining secrets, can potentially extend that experience to around 20 hours or more. 

The environmental design is easily one of the strongest parts of Echoes of Central Park. Central Park and the surrounding Upper West Side feel noticeably different from the locations you've explored throughout The Division 2. The city is empty, and vegetation is growing over streets, sidewalks, and buildings.

Entire sections have been left to rot, and nature seems to be slowly taking back the area. The darker atmosphere, persistent rain, heavy fog, and overgrown environs give the expansion a more unsettling identity. Even the first mission, which takes you through a mass grave in the park, sets the mood that something terrible happened here.

The environment is well used, and so is the level design. Collapsed buildings block direct routes, and you have to thread your way through narrow alleyways, underground tunnels, and abandoned buildings.

Each world mission, from the Natural History Museum to Lincoln Center to the burning buildings, has its own visual identity. Central Park stands out for its dense foliage and more somber atmosphere, a unique contrast to the New York settings the franchise has seen so far. 

The sound design and narration also add to the overall experience.

The narrator adds context to the campaign, connecting the events and giving the story a more consistent direction. The voice acting is so good you want to stop and listen, although sometimes the dialogue is hard to hear when the surrounding sound effects are too loud. Turning up the dialogue volume helps, but the balance between the narration and the other audio could be better. You also won't hear the narration as often as some players might expect.

Echoes of Central Park is a welcome addition to The Division 2, especially since it finally lets players visit a location that has mattered to the franchise for years. The campaign is worth experiencing for the new environments, darker atmosphere, and environmental storytelling. But the expansion doesn't offer equally great improvements. Many missions stick to the usual objectives, and the return of the Black Tusk and Cleanersdoesn'tt add enough variety to make each encounter feel new. 

The Hunt is the biggest disappointment because Central Park feels like the perfect setting for something more ambitious. It would have been much better for the environment to offer a Dark Zone-style PvE experience where players could explore with other agents, fight dangerous enemies, and compete for valuable rewards.

Rather, The Hunt is about raising your threat level, fighting enemy factions, and eventually becoming noticed by predators.

It offers two modes: the standard Hunt lets you build progress across multiple sessions. Containment, meanwhile, offers a more challenging experience by bringing all the predators into a single run. Rewards are there, but the emphasis on standard high-end gear and targeted loot doesn't offer enough incentive for veteran players who have already spent hundreds or thousands of hours optimizing their builds.

Ultimately, Echoes of Central Park is a fun setting and a fun campaign, but it doesn't move The Division 2 forward as much as it might. There is a lot to like, especially if you are returning for new content, but veteran players might want more significant changes to the gameplay and endgame progression.