You do have to give Ubisoft a bit of credit. A few years ago, it looked like Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 was destined for the same fate as most live service games; a gradual slowdown of new content, followed by a freeze, followed eventually by abandonment. But since 2025, The Division 2 has had something of a major comeback. In May last year, the game received its second major piece of paid DLC with Battle for Brooklyn, taking place in a new map zone of Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO. Seasons have continually rolled out throughout the game’s lifetime since 2019, but the last couple of years have seen the seasons introduce more temporary gameplay changes which can affect how you play.
Echoes of Central Park is the largest piece of DLC for The Division 2 since Warlords of New York in 2020, and the third major new map area. It’s once again set in New York, this time in the Upper West Side and approximately the lower third of Central Park. It overlaps with the map zone of The Division 1 at Columbus Circle, but like all other Division 2 maps is a 1-to-1 recreation of the area, and feels approximately the same size as lower Manhattan in Warlords of New York. Despite 7 years progressing in real life since release, the in-game timeline of The Division has only progressed less than a year from the timeline of the original game, with this expansion seemingly taking place parallel to The Division 2’s mid-summer.
Echoes of Central Park gives a very solid horror treatment to the usual Division 2 method. Your main mission is to rescue a woman named Miranda Veer from the middle of Central Park. However, the park itself has become completely overgrown by wildlife, and some kind of horrible monster lurks within it. Entering the park early will quickly result in your death. Therefore you need to undertake a number of missions beforehand to gather intel and equipment needed to survive. Uniquely, you’re accompanied on all missions by AI companions. This is something that was experimented with in a previous game season, giving you an AI buddy to act as an extra gun. Here the companions are more fleshed out into three characters: Brayleigh Callahan, Elwood Franklin, and Morse Feeney.
The companions each have unique abilities; Brayleigh is a sniper, Elwood a medic and so on. These can come in very handy when fighting bosses, as the overall difficulty of the missions seemed to have crept upwards, at least at my standard level. They will also appear in the open world when engaging in combat, before magically disappearing after things calm down. Once you finish the mission to enter Central Park, it transforms into a special, single player dark zone (where the main game’s PVP usually takes place). This time though there are a variety of high level enemies who will hunt you down while you’re inside the park, turning it into a cat-and-mouse experience.
The story is still so-so; a new narrator gives mission introductions and comments along the way, as though the story takes place in flashback. The characters in The Tower (the main new friendly base, built inside an old multiplex cinema) are all ok but as has always been the case with The Division, you don’t get enough time to properly talk to them or understand them as more than set dressing. The atmosphere however I think really works; the more sombre music combined with the wildly overgrown streets neighbouring the park reminded me quite a bit of STALKER in the vibes it was creating, and while it artificially gates your access to Central Park for a while, it does effectively make the monster seem like a major threat. Indeed The Division has always skirted along the lines of sci-fi but this seems to go the furthest so far, in terms of the inhuman abilities the monster possesses.
Unfortunately there are, as usual, bugs. There are various issues relating to performance at the moment and also some more minor things like street names all being wrong on the in-game map, but I also experienced a hard, computing-freezing crash; one that could only be fixed by completely powering off my PC. A lot of seasoned players are also complaining that this DLC negates their prototype gear (a concept recently introduced for ultra-rare equipment), which I guess should really be a toggle, allowing the player to choose whether they want the game “balanced” for their gear or not. I didn’t have issues with the companions getting in the way, but that’s been another major complaint.
While Warlords of New York was probably a more rounded expansion, I like what Echoes of Central Park was trying to do with its tone and atmosphere. I would have liked to see a bit more added to the Upper West Side since it’s populated with exactly the same open world activities as previously, and apart from mission-specific locations there’s sadly not that much to find while exploring. Hopefully future patches will iron out the most major bugs, and we’ve seen that future seasons tend to add more content or missions taking place within DLC zones. With The Division 3 still in development, it’s clear that there’s still life in The Division 2 left.
