The Division Resurgence hits smartphones this fall

The Division is coming to your smartphone later this year. At its Ubisoft Forward event, the company confirmed that The Division Resurgence, a mobile spinoff of the near-future shooter series, will be launching in fall 2023.

As with the previous games in the series, Resurgence is set in a “mid-crisis” version of New York, one thrown into a crisis following an outbreak of a genetically engineered virus known as the “dollar flu.” And like those games, the mobile version is a cross between an open world game, where you can explore the city and take on missions, and a multiplayer experience where you can squad up with friends. Ubisoft describes it as a “true MMO experience.”

I had the chance to check out an early version of the game, and while I couldn’t test much of the social experience, what I played felt very much like, well, The Division on your phone. The graphics were great; I especially loved being able to get up close to my character during the creation process. The parts of Manhattan that I saw were both dense and large, with lots of cover strewn about — which is good since this is a cover-based shooter where you need to get out of the line of fire often.

That said, while it looks the part of a big-budget Ubisoft game, the touchscreen controls took some getting used to. I played on an iPhone and the screen had a lot of information on it, and I often found myself accidentally getting out of cover instead of shooting. Resurgence is also a free-to-play game, and it wasn’t clear from my time yet how pervasive the paid elements of the experience will be, which is an important thing to know about a loot-focused shooter.

Resurgence has been in the works for some time. It was first announced in 2021, and was only given a name last year. It’s also not the only expansion of the franchise in the works: a free console and PC spinoff called Heartland is also in development.