Review: Bungie is all-in on Marathon, was it worth it?

Extraction Shooters are my main genre of multiplayer games. I’ve been playing Hunt: Showdown for years, and recent months had me diving into the dungeons of Dark and Darker. You would think I’d be excited for the launch of Marathon, but after watching the trailers, I was on the fence. Season Two of Marathon kicked off with Bungie announcing Destiny 2’s end of life, a controversial move within the gaming community. Perhaps to help ease this decision, Marathon was free to play until 11 June at the time of writing. I dived in to see if the game could compete with my mainstay titles.

Out of the gate, I could say I wasn’t a fan of the art style. The main menu UI could be frustrating and felt poorly optimised. The loading screen of the moth eating the worms was gross and I wished there was a way to disable it. This was personal preference, as the stylisation of the game had been given high praise among players. For me, it just didn’t click, and there was an adjustment period as I became desensitised to it.

Let’s talk about the game itself. I played the first two hours solo, and this was where I disliked the game the most. I found it deeply frustrating and almost threw in the towel. Between the poor pre-match menus and the steep learning curve, I found myself frustrated with the experience. The artstyle was abrasive, the atmosphere of games like Hunt: Showdown or Dark and Darker appealing to me much more. My first couple of hours in Marathon, in the solo lobby, felt sterile and lifeless. It took me over six hours of playing, with some growing pains along the way, until I asked my friend if she’d join me to help me give the game a fair review.

This was when the game clicked for me.

I had another new player by my side, and we were on comms together. We learned the systems and mechanics as a team rather than taking on this daunting task alone. Encounters became engaging because I had a reliable partner backing me up. It reminded me of a mixture of Escape from Tarkov’s difficulty ceiling and the momentum of Apex Legends’ gunplay. The first year of Apex Legends was likely my favourite time playing a battle royale game. The gunplay, the movement, the intensity. I loved it. Marathon was very different from both of those games, but it had taken good aspects from them.

The big question we asked ourselves was: would we buy this game? It was difficult to answer. I had enjoyed it, and I was only several hours into playing. I saw the potential, and I liked some of the game design choices. The aesthetics didn’t bother me as much as they did in my first couple of hours, and I could grow to like them. I thought the real question was: would I play this game alone? Absolutely not. Without my friends, I doubted I would enjoy it. I could easily play Hunt: Showdown or Dark and Darker with a pick-up group, and had done so for hundreds of hours. Marathon needed a functioning team to get the most out of it. The hero-shooter aspect of the characters, with their abilities and supporting tools, leaned more into the Apex Legends style of team fights. Other Extraction Shooters could let an individual’s performance do a lot of the heavy lifting. My desire to play the game would rely on my friends’ availability and interest in it. That was a tough sell for $45. If it had been a free-to-play title, it might have had more success retaining my group’s attention.

Marathon’s a solid Extraction Shooter that has excellent mechanics and gunplay but fell short on menu optimisation. It is a niche game in a niche genre, but demonstrates excellent gameplay underneath the presentation. This was a gamble for Bungie now that Destiny 2 had received its final update. Was Marathon the game for their core audience? I’ve made my mind up, now it’s up to both me and my friends to decide if we will invest in Marathon.*

*Two days after writing this article, I bought Marathon.

- Nicholas Christensen-Secker