Marathon review – a striking, punishing extraction shooter that’s hard to put down

Three bags of loot, flanked by the bio-synthetic corpses of their previous owners and pools of blue blood. The scene of my murderous victory. Their weapons, implants, heals, and salvage are all mine. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was helping random solo players take out giant robots and diplomatically sharing the spoils in Arc Raiders. However, this is Marathon, and I’ve left goodwill and friendliness at the door. When the atmosphere is this intense, the gunplay feels this good, and the combat sandbox is this broad, I’ve found it almost impossible not to squeeze the trigger on every other Runner I see.

I do not mean this as a slight to Embark’s take on the extraction shooter, but Marathon has pulled me out of the comfy comradery of Arc Raiders and turned me into a callous competitor, and I’m loving it. However, it does take a little while to warm up.

Marathon’s early hours feel like a scrambled sensory overload, which is both a good and bad thing. The striking UI and loading screens, the klaxons that blare through your headphones as a faction leaders ‘introduce’ themselves by hacking your AI companion, and the vibrant aesthetics of its Runners and maps all feel instantly fresh and invigorating. Marathon wastes no time proving that it looks and sounds unlike any other multiplayer FPS game out there.

However, this bespoke identity also holds Marathon back in some areas. The experience of switching items from the vault to my loadout, and equipping things like weapon attachments, is initially very bumpy and hard to understand. Some of that is down to poor UX choices, but some inherently comes with the visual style Bungie wants to apply to everything. Picking cores and implants for my Runner, for example, is a real chore due to their incredibly unhelpful, samey designs when glancing at them in menus. This means I’ve wasted a lot of time hovering over each one to read descriptions and determine what they actually are before socketing them into my build.

While I think Marathon’s three launch maps are great, I do have some layout qualms. Open, exterior areas of Perimeter and Dire Marsh, especially, are intersected with very deliberate walls, cliffs, and anomalous energy fields that stop you from running as-the-crow-flies to different places, which, as I’ll explain later when I talk about quests, can become burdensome. Of course, having some structure to a map is important, but these feel a bit too obvious, obstructive, and ugly to me. The actual POIs, however, are much more exciting places to be, with an excellent mixture of tight spaces, long sight lines, multiple levels for verticality, vents for sneaky flanks, and plenty of cover, making them great stages for battles.

When conflict arises – whether that be against the troops of the UESC or other players – Marathon rarely disappoints. As I expected, given Bungie’s past work on Destiny, the gunplay is exquisite. No matter the style of weapon I’ve used, the ammo type, or the attachments I’ve bolted on, I haven’t had a moment where I’ve felt like a gun is a complete dud or totally boring to use. Of course, there is an emerging meta, but aside from shotguns in close quarters, I’ve rarely found myself in a situation cursing something that feels totally, unfairly powerful. It’s also a relief to see that the hero shooter element of Marathon doesn’t compromise the gunplay and dominate the combat experience. Engagements rarely feel like an ability-spamming mess, but strategic use of a character’s kit can lead to some rewarding outplays.

I’m extremely glad to see that the PvE enemies aren’t just there as filler or a simple resource farm. No matter what spec of UESC I encounter, they feel like a genuine threat. Grenadiers lob fast-detonating explosives, Ghosts ambush you thanks to their invisibility, and in a hectic scenario, even a couple of rank-and-file grunts running at you head-on can cause a problem. I think Arc Raiders’ lineup of Arc robots are more visually exciting to look at and often more interesting to take down (UESC enemies mostly feel like bullet sponges), but Bungie’s still done a decent job with PvE foes.

In PvP battles, the time-to-kill is quicker than I expected. It’s not often you encounter players equipped with bulky, top-tier shields, so with the right amount of precision, firepower, and surprise, you can delete opponents fairly rapidly. I’m happy with how things are right now, but it certainly toes the line, and I think if the TTK got any faster, Marathon would slip into unbalanced, unrewarding territory.

Moments of environmental danger like deadly lightning strikes, toxic plants, and aggressive alien bugs also add to the peril during runs. In arguably my most embarrassing Marathon moment so far, I was downed during a solo run by the burning thrusters of a supply drop ship after rushing to get to the loot crates it was dropping off – I was low on health and out of heals, ok? Basically, you must have your wits about you at all times.

Bungie’s audio wizards have cooked in Marathon – once you get settled in with the visual style, you’ll start to appreciate its sounds even more. Whether it’s the gentle creaking of metal structures, terminals beeping and blipping, the clanking feet of UESC troops, or the deafening booms of a Lockdown event on Dire Marsh, everything helps wrap you even more tightly in the eerie sci-fi atmosphere the game’s going for. Weapons, abilities, and items all make distinct and satisfying noises, and the actual soundtrack is one of the most memorable and haunting I’ve heard in a long while.

The constant threats, the sensual bombardment, and the intense combat have done a great job at keeping me locked into Marathon – it’s what’s converted this cheery Arc Raiders player back into a more ruthless, calculated killer. However, those vibes are often interrupted by the faction quests you have to complete in order to unlock upgrades, earn rewards, expand the offerings from vendors, and get new snippets of lore. There is a real overreliance on fetch or upload quests – go to a POI, look around, and find whatever item or computer terminal it is that you need.

A lot of these quests are multi-step without much variety, and some even require visiting two or three POIs on different sides of the map and then extracting successfully from the match. If you spend 20-odd minutes doing these monotonous tasks, only to die on your way to the extraction point, or skirmishes prevent you from completing everything in the allotted time, it can be incredibly frustrating. A couple of quests for the MIDA and Arachne factions spice things up a bit, requiring you to smash some windows or perform finisher moves on other Runners, but for the most part, you’ll be sprinting from POI to POI.

That’s a real shame, because I’m seriously impressed by the quality of the faction cutscenes and lore snippets locked behind these quests. Bungie has created some of the most striking characters and gorgeous themes that I’ve seen in a videogame for a very long time, and the voice acting from a surprisingly stacked cast is superb as well. It’s a good thing these story beats are of such a good quality (and that the faction reward tracks are so enticing), as I’d struggle to find motivation to complete quests otherwise.

There’s a lot to celebrate in Marathon, but everything it excels at combines into a truly special FPS experience in its weekend-only endgame map, Cryo Archive. There were predictions before launch that this hardcore zone aboard the Marathon ship itself would take cues from Bungie’s dungeons and raids in Destiny, and those predictions were absolutely right. Environmental conundrums to solve with little hand-holding; relentless groups of tough PvE enemies; desirable and secret items to loot; a layout that sees limbs of tight corridors and vents feed into a massive, frosty, intimidating central torso – it definitely has a raid-like feel. But when you lace that with time pressures, gear fear, and other teams packing powerful loadouts, I’d say it actually feels more exciting than even some of Destiny’s very best activities. 

While a lack of clarity and guidance is a positive for Cryo Archive, on the whole, its more complicated and unclear extraction process does lead to some initial frustration. I don’t for a minute believe it should be easy to get out with your loot, but the lack of explanation about its slightly different extraction method created a real heartbreaking moment. After a few unsuccessful cracks at Cryo, my squad finally felt like we’d come out on top – we wiped out multiple squads, had backpacks groaning with amazing loot, and had navigated our way to an ‘extraction terminal’ with just a minute to spare. My teammate interacts with it, and we appear to be home and dry. However, despite a lot of visual indicators suggesting that this was our way out, all three of us perished once the timer hit zero. It turns out these terminals merely reveal the actual location of an extraction point on your map and give you a short window to sprint there. 

To have done all the hard work and lose everything we had because of that misunderstanding was properly painful. Nevertheless, Cryo Archive feels special, and if it can continue to hook and mesmerize me for many weekends to come, it could go down as one of the all-time great FPS battlegrounds. 

Given my nervousness and lack of optimism about Marathon last year, I’m pleasantly surprised by how deeply it’s sunk its claws into me. As someone who has played competitive shooter games for years, the intensity and difficulty of Marathon doesn’t intimidate me, however Bungie’s approach (and those aforementioned issues around its first few hours) may alienate those expecting something a bit more casual. Emergent, cooperative moments can happen – all the necessary ingredients like public events, tough PvE bosses, and proximity chat are here – but they’re a rarity, which again is fine by me. More often than not, the highs of Marathon come when you’re surrounded by loot boxes, blue blood, and corpses, rather than extracting with half a chummy lobby.

While it’s not perfect, Marathon is making it very hard for me to play any other shooter right now. With some UI and UX improvements, and some more novel quests, it could certainly be a long-term staple. Cryo Archive has proven that Bungie can bring Destiny raid levels of mystery and challenge to an extraction shooter, which is an incredibly promising sign – now the question is if it can recreate the same magic of Marathon’s first few weeks every season to give it a long and healthy future.