Marathon review

The nice thing about letting a multiplayer shooter marinate for a few weeks before putting a score on it is that I've learned what being high and low on Marathon is like.

I've had triumphant nights of tens of thousands in valuables plundered, pried rare guns off the blue-stained corpses of rival squads, and enjoyed a vault resplendent with expensive attachments. I've also visited Marathon rock bottom: a cold, unyielding cycle of squad wipes that will almost convince you that Bungie is conspiring against your successful extraction. I've scraped together loadouts with my last 3,000 credits just to lose it all, and debased myself with Rook runs into hot zones to take home whatever scraps of Biomass were passed over by richer players.

Marathon is brutal. It's also a marvel.

Rampant fun

After respecting Destiny from a distance and gritting my teeth over storied FPS makers leaving old school multiplayer behind, I didn't anticipate that an extraction shooter would be the perfect container for the things Bungie has always done well. Where other competitive shooters squeeze storytelling into the margins, Marathon is drenched in lore.

I approach Marathon like most likely will: completely oblivious to the beloved '90s FPSes where Bungie honed its craft and established a mythology around AI, aliens, and cosmic mysticism that'd later inform the worlds of Halo and Destiny. The very first being in this game is an AI who breaks the news that I've left my mortal coil behind. Like other freelancers I've, uh, "evolved" into a digital consciousness uploaded to a server in a spaceship—unbound from a physical body and free to embody disposable "shells" in contracted runs on the planet Tau Ceti IV, the site of a human colony that vanished without explanation.

The work is hard, the pay is often crap, I've experienced death a hundred times, and I'm in debt—but hey, at least I make my own hours.

Marathon is right up there with Hunt: Showdown in its ability to distill the intensity of extraction shooter fights into repeatable, delectable chunks. And yet it also excels at an Escape From Tarkov brand of loot lust: compounding anxiety and adrenaline as my backpack fills up with stuff I'd sure like not to lose. The way it achieves that PvP focus while still emphasizing loot tells me that Bungie has thought a lot about extraction shooters: Instead of drawing players together with a singular target the whole lobby competes for, Marathon shrinks the average map size for this sort of game.

With just a handful of compounds on Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost (the endgame raid map, Cryo Archive, is its own beast), you're always bound to run into somebody even though nobody shares the same exact goals. The result is, as I wrote after launch, an extraction format where PvP gets to be the star, but itemized loot establishes the stakes:

"So now I see the vision. Because most contracts can be completed in just a few minutes, Marathon matches have this bouncy quality where a three-person squad hits up a handful of compounds so everyone can check off their task—and share in the XP—while having a very good chance of scrapping with other teams along the way. You can have a complete Marathon experience in like 15 minutes and then matchmake into another one in seconds."

It's really great, and what binds it all together is the specific choice to have a short time-to-kill. "Short" is somewhat relative here—Marathon doesn't share a universal one-shot-headshot rule like Hunt or Rainbow Six Siege, but it often takes less than a magazine of ammo to knock players. Even shields, which I feared might make everyone so tanky that fights become a slog, only buy a few extra bullets of health. There's little room for error, but that's why Marathon rewards squads that tread carefully.

House style

Rough nights have left me questioning if extraction shooters are really worth the trouble—if the inconsistency of an "all or nothing" format is a healthy use of gaming time when attempting to unwind after work. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's when I put Marathon back on the shelf, but the promise of the next standout gunfight reels me back in.

Bungie's first game in nine years has reminded me what it means for a studio to have a "house style". I'm not just talking about an eye for world building, gorgeous environments and skyboxes, or a dense codex that inspires main menu idling—I'm talking raw first-person shooting excellence.

A Bungie game really does hit different: Marathon's guns are rhythmic, rewarding instruments with simple recoil patterns that can comfortably fire from the hip. Amidst a genre that's trending toward high speed and "schmovement" techniques, Marathon's low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief's graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It's got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding—and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age.

Those qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It's fairly easy to track targets, but you're still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game? You decide, but as a freshly minted literal uncle, it does speak to me.

Space age

Despite the embarrassing, reputation-strangling art theft that rattled Bungie last year, Marathon has come out the other side one of the most original-looking games I've ever seen. Tau Ceti's intersection of nature and artifice immediately grabbed my eyeballs and refused to let go. It's a CMYK wonderland of rounded edges and soft lighting conceived with readability and beauty in mind—a balance that's increasingly rare in a genre that values competitive integrity above all else.

Especially as I dive into open-world RPG Crimson Desert in my downtime, Marathon strikes me as the best argument in ages that "photoreal" is grossly overrated. Tau Ceti's environments are fairly simple under a microscope, but they're carried by top-notch color choices, materials work, and some breathtaking weather effects that don't require 5080 to render. To play this game is to routinely happen across a room, a vista, a piece of graffiti, or an inscrutable treasure that grinds my run to a halt so I may appreciate its strangeness.

Bungie retains its adoration for bullpup rifles and irresponsibly large magnums, but I appreciate that not even a bog-standard assault rifle gets to look normal: weapons are inherently incongruent, colorful objects whose aesthetics straddle a line between 3D print and literal Legos. My favorites of the bunch might be the Volt guns: a lineup of energy weapons whose squared profiles are constructed around the long, flat battery cartridges that power them. The Punch pistol feels like I'm shooting an iPad, and it's a delight every time. I also grab the Brrt SMG whenever it's available simply because I adore the tiny cubic clip that ejects from its top intake with each reload.

But what I love most about Marathon's guns is that each one has a place in its Halo-shaped sandbox. I've lambasted every Call of Duty of the last decade (and Battlefield 6 by extension) for vomiting up a pile of 60 guns every year that have zero character and behave exactly the same. They only exist to facilitate grinding, lend the appearance of having more stuff, and to sell more skins. Marathon's 28 launch guns actually aspire to fill a niche and draw meaningful distinctions beyond archetypes: Volt guns drain shields faster than bullets and can recharge over time, but reloading early dumps its remaining energy. Heavy ammo guns hit harder at the cost of fire rate and recoil. Precision rifles have a higher native headshot multiplier to reward accuracy but ensure automatic guns are better up close.

That will all be familiar to Destiny fans, but Marathon also leverages mechanisms unique to extraction shooters to create counterbalance. Shotguns and snipers are dominant power weapons in every match, but they're harder to acquire, mods are rarer, and their MIPS ammo is expensive and only stacks 15 rounds. That's all before you factor in mods, which can totally transform a weapon's firing behavior, or just make the Volt Thrower supercombine like a Needler.

Foreign body

There's a real confidence in the way Marathon sees Tau Ceti IV not just as a venue for PvP, but a rabbit hole of scattered dramas to enjoy at my convenience. This game has a codex with hundreds of entires—thousands of words providing context for everything from the true purpose of that esoteric Data Wall splitting the Perimeter map in half to the NuCaloric drinkable cheeseburgers pilfered from lunch boxes.

I need to underline Marathon's optional text chats and audio logs, because they're a card that's been in Bungie's deck for decades, but it may work better here than it ever has before. I love that, instead of tucking away little side stories in terminals that interrupt the flow of the story already happening in front of me, Marathon's non-linear storytelling gets to be the main narrative thrust of this world. The absence of a traditional campaign lends greater credibility to logs I'd usually gloss over, and it's stuff that's actually fascinating to pick apart in breaks between matches or in those idle minutes waiting for friends to buy their gear.

Objects that are otherwise only impressive for their sell value unfold into layered anecdotes from the human settlers of Tau Ceti, chipping away at a larger story about corporate greed, AI hubris, and the pure intentions snuffed out by capitalism.

Runners are disposable, indebted pawns of a world with like five corporations left. The shells we inhabit as temporary bodies are printed by techno moths. Everything we accomplish, though personally satisfying, serves the whims of a humanity-barren executive speaking through a pane of frosted glass. One of these faction handlers sits atop a throne aside a digital lion. Another is a literal worm. It's pretty good sci-fi.

Zone clear

Much of Marathon's strengths could be considered great executions of stuff other games already do, but there's nothing quite like Marathon's maps. Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost are smaller than the average extraction playgrounds with a purpose: fewer compounds with dense, extravagant layouts make Marathon's maps easy to learn and satisfying to master.

Outpost, for all its brutality, may be Marathon's masterpiece: The first human settlement established on Tau Ceti IV, Outpost is the last base map unlocked at level 12. It's essentially one huge compound made up of factories, dormitories, and air hangars, but that's just the first layer of what's essentially two maps. Hovering in judgement over the entire zone is the Pinwheel, an imposing three-pronged megastructure that can only be accessed by finding security cards on the map and chewing through a bunch of robots.

There are something like five or six different ways to get into the Pinwheel, some less obvious than others. It's brilliant, and it's among the most unique and interactive spaces I've explored in a competitive shooter. If you get in, some of the best loot in the game is waiting for you, but so are other teams who've infiltrated from other wings.

Then there's Cryo Archive, the fourth "raid" map. In a handful of runs through the UESC Marathon over the weekend, I was smitten with the clever ways Bungie has married raid mechanics with a PvP environment. Cryo has special conditions to access areas like Outpost, but taken to the extreme: a unique Security Clearance rating determines where you can and can't go. Teams gain clearance by looting security tags, but you're not likely to find enough to reach the inner workings of the facility (or even find an extraction point) without stealing more from players. I've yet to solve vault puzzles or fight the Compiler, but I look forward to it.

Turnaround

If there's one major worry I have for Marathon (despite a general anxiety around how often great games get shut down), it's what happens after Season 1 is over. Come June, Marathon sees its first seasonal wipe. I've never played an extraction shooter with forced wipes—Hunt and Arc Raiders make it optional, and I've never felt motivated to reset all of my upgrades and purge my vault. When that day comes in Marathon, I wonder if I'll want to take another lap around its systems.

That will depend on the quality of new additions coming down the pipe. As remarkable as Marathon's four existing maps are, it could really use a few more to round out the package. Season 2 will have a new shell, guns, and enemies, but on the maps front, only a night variant of Dire Marsh.

Yes, the UI is imperfect. Yep, that first battle pass is a big dud. And we all agree(?) the double-barrel WSTR shotgun is a bit much. There's actually a long list of ways Marathon could be better, like copying Hunt's loadout system so jumping back into a kitted match takes seconds instead of minutes, or catering better to solo players so Assassin isn't the best choice in every single circumstance—but honestly, I'm having such a great time otherwise that these fall under little gripes. I'm happy so far with how quickly Bungie has addressed immediate issues.

If you're surprised Marathon turned out this well, I'm with ya. This time last year, I had all but written it off after trying that dreadful alpha with the cartoony art, no solo mode, and no prox chat. But Bungie made great changes and clearly knew what it had that other extraction shooters didn't: spectacular gunplay, second-to-none maps, and progression systems that turned me around on this loot-heavy format entirely. Marathon doesn't just join my FPS rotation, for the foreseeable future it is my FPS rotation.